[PIC] Safari: A fat browser ain't a fast browser!

raides Jun 12, 2007

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200mb of ram usage ? It is officially exactly like Firefox now. Run firefox with more than 5 tabs open and one of the tabs streaming music off pandora.com or video off of youtube.com and it will reach the same within 10 minutes. Safari takes long to load up but runs just as smooth in windows.

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lcarsdeveloper Jun 12, 2007

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I can't even get the damn thing to work properly!<a class="user" href="http://bbhosts.net/files/safari3.jpg">http://bbhosts.net/files/safari3.jpg</a>Something seriously wrong with the fonts here. I tried updating the fonts config file but that didn't work. I tried installing the 2 fonts that come with Safari, that didn't work either. I also tried going to Edit->Preferences->Fonts, but that screen caused the whole browser to lock up.I'm running XP Pro, 1 gig RAM, 3 gig processor, 1.2TB of HDD space. Firefox runs perfectly even with 11 plugins installed (Web Developer and Firebug), Safari runs painfully slow.I always thought "beta" meant "more stable than alpha but there's a few bugs left before we release it to everyone". I don't see this as being a viable option for Windows users just yet, which is a shame because I put a lot of effort into making my websites Mac compatible, and it would be really cool to be able to test my sites in Safari. At the moment I have to load up VMWare, I have a heavily patched version of OS X installed on it, and run Safari from there to make sure things are all working.And there's no way in hell I could ever use this as my main browser. I'd use Firefox for 99% of my browsing, IE for 0.9% (and only because of Windows Update and MSN Messenger both forcing me to use IE), and 0.1% split between Opera and Safari for testing purposes.Keep working on it Apple, I'm no fanboi but I've got an open mind, and if you can give me something cool I may convert :P

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glide256 Jun 12, 2007

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Ram is there to be used. If programs don't use your ram why would you even need so much ram? Also, minimize safari and see what happens to it's ram usage. It plummets to single digits of ram. Does FF do that? Does IE do that? No they don't.I can open up 500+ comment article on FF at work and it's really slow. It's not rendering because at work I'm connected on at least a T1. On safari massive digg pages load much faster. That's the difference to me.This is like the biggest non-story ever. It's not like half of you don't have 2+ gigs of ram.

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donsmith Jun 12, 2007

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So I did a similar test and found that how much memory will depend on how many sites you've visited and what sites you've visited, so really hard to tell. If I sent both FF and Safari to load www.apple.com as a home page and only have that open Safari is using less memory. I just want to know a fair way to compare them.Still, like thripper says, gotta have those extensions!!

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donsmith Jun 12, 2007

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TRY LEVELING THE PLAYING FIELD BY DOING THIS:FirefoxLaunch FF in safe mode (all your extensions will be diabled). [Start -> Program Files -> Mozilla Firefox -> Mozilla Firefox (Safe Mode)]IELaunch IE w/o 3rd party extensions:1. Click Start, right-click Internet Explorer, and then click Internet Properties. 2. Click the Advanced tab. 3. Click to clear the Enable third-party browser extensions (requires restart) check box. 4. Click Apply, and then click OK. 5. Start Internet Explorer. SafariSafari doesn't have any extensions that I know of for Windows.Set all of them on the same home page, quit and restart all of them. I used <a class="user" href="http://www.digg.com/apple/PIC_Safari_A_fat_browser_ain_t_a_fast_browser">http://www.digg.com/apple/PIC_Safari_A_fat_browser_ain_t_a_fast_browser</a>All pretty low memoryHere's what I got:iexplorer.exe: 11,118firefox.exe: 8,156safari.exe: 6,701.Everyone is going to come up with a different number. I noticed that FF application seems to load the fastest, but once they are all loaded the render about the same.I'd really like to know more about the tests apple used (ibrowser?) to compare these.

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nilp Jun 12, 2007

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Ok, I decided to do an experiment.I created an XP VM with 192MB RAM (how did we ever live with so little RAM?). I installed Safari 3 and Firefox on it and opened up 10 tabs in Safari, going to such standard sites as apple.com, google news, cnn etc. I was able to push Safari usage up to more than 120MB, and total committed memory was 230MB.Then I opened up Firefox, and the memory assigned to Safari dropped to 40MB.You can try this yourself.Safari appears to be doing some kind of aggressive caching in memory, but frees up much of the memory if another process needs it.In the *nix world (and I believe in Vista - can anyone confirm that?), the memory management means that processes will use as much memory as they can get (run top in Linux and look at the wired and active memory to see the real memory usage), but they will release the inactive memory assigned to them if the OS needs it for another process. This means in *nix OSs like Linux and OS X, free memory is wasted memory since it's not doing any work. It also means that *nix users don't spend the same amount of time obsessing over individual application memory usage. Rather we look at the big picture, checking our page outs for excessive memory usage.It looks like Safari manages its memory like this in XP.In other words, be like a *nix user ... don't worry about Safari using up memory. It's not going to take it from processes that need it.The only thing is, I might be talking crap since I don't know anything about memory management in XP or Vista.

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jamesburton1 Jun 13, 2007

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Stop using Windows, easy solution.

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medhead Jun 25, 2007

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Maxthon is Internet Explorer. Internet Explorer is part of the Windows operating system. The CPU/Mem usage won't be accurate, because the rest of the operating system is shouldering the load.