jonathanchong.com

We all love Firefox. I certainly do, and I use it everyday. However, I am finding myself leaning towards Safari / Webkit when I am using my Mac, simply because Firefox on the Mac is so sluggish. Not only that, the browser is now moving towards version 3, and a fix for the infamous Firefox memory leak is nowhere in sight (certainly not in version 2).

On the Mac, when I start-up Firefox and Safari / Webkit, both apps take up about 100MB of RAM. But after the CPU usage for Firefox always hovers around 20% even when idle, whilst Safari is using virtually no CPU. On a website with 3 standard rich-media ads, CPU usage on Firefox jumps up to 90% whilst on Safari it’s still not high, under the 10% mark.

That is a massive, significant difference and is one of the reasons why I’m finding Safari / Webkit to be slicker and faster although not as extensible as Firefox, which has thousands of add-ons for it.

After about half an hour of usage, Firefox starts to consume about 400MB of RAM, whilst Webkit at the moment is still just under 200MB of RAM.

Is the reason why Firefox is so sluggish is because it re-writes the broken HTML on a page? For some reason, it rewrites all the XHTML-correct < br /> to < br >, rewrites all the < img /> tags, and adds < tbody > tags to tables. Why? It’s going down the route of Internet Explorer where the browser is correcting incorrect HTML and not breaking the page visually, which will actually force the designers to correct the flaws in their markup.

Mozilla, please sort these issues out. I love your browser, but the issues I’ve highlighted above are making me feeling more and more disillusioned about my Firefox experience each day.

Hello and welcome everyone. I’ll try and write as often as I can, even if it is just inane ramblings and short posts about what’s going on with my life.

At the moment I’m just sitting at my desk, listening to last.fm and trying to get a few things sorted, like a nice short holiday to Paris for some time in April.

And it’s also dawned on me that I will need a decent camera to take photos with. See, I currently have a Sony Ericsson K800i as a phone and the camera on that is pretty decent for the photos I take. But I realised that if I want to take some decent photos in the City of Romance, I’ll need a better camera and plus, it’s long overdue that I get a dedicated digital cam anyway.

So, one of the things I’m looking for in a camera is for it to have Wi-Fi capabilities, so that I can transfer stuff from the camera to the Mac over Wi-Fi. I’ve grown out of wires and I’m even looking at wireless speakers to replace my current setup.

The Nikon S7C fits the bill, and it’s nice and sleek as well, but I haven’t been impressed by the sample photos posted all over the Internet and at £225, it’s kinda steep for me. It’s a nice-looking camera and all but it’s kinda important that it takes decent photos and I’m a bit surprised at the lack of “Wow” picture quality from a Nikon camera.

So if anyone has any camera recommendations, let me know!

Right, I’m off to play with this a bit more. See you all later.