Safari on a Mac as bad as on a Touch?

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WRC Slippy

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Ok, I gotta ask. Is Safari on a Mac as bad an experience as it is on the Touch? It crashes for me 3 or 4 times a day at least and when opening a new page, the existing page does not close (which it shouldn't) but the data on the page disappears, having to reload. Kinda defeats the purpose of opening a new page....
 

hexonxonx

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Safari on my MacBook Pro has only crashed maybe 4 times in 7 months. I think Safari on my iPhone has only crashed about 10 times in that same time. Pretty stable browser if you ask me.

I can't tell you how many times IE would crash before I quit using PCs.
 

kornchild2002

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Just keep in mind that the two are very different. The Mac/Windows version is made for full blown PC's running at least 256MB of RAM and have processors running at a minimum of 1.5GHz with some type of graphics chip/memory. Safari on the iPod touch is pretty stable for a portable browser running on hardware that is painfully slow, doesn't have a powerful GPU (I am not sure if the iPod touch even has a dedicated GPU), and so on. I have had the crappy browser on my cellphone crash more times than Safari on my iPod touch. Even Internet Explorer for my Pocket PC has crashed more times due to memory limitations.
 

daihard

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kornchild2002 said:
Even Internet Explorer for my Pocket PC has crashed more times due to memory limitations.
What do you mean "even"? IE is meant to crash, no matter where it runs. Sorry, I just couldn't resist the temptation... :D
 

smiduri

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WRC Slippy said:
Ok, I gotta ask. Is Safari on a Mac as bad an experience as it is on the Touch? It crashes for me 3 or 4 times a day at least and when opening a new page, the existing page does not close (which it shouldn't) but the data on the page disappears, having to reload. Kinda defeats the purpose of opening a new page....
I agree with the defect when safari on touch opens a new page, it's annoying that only the page that is "on focus" gets loaded and when you switch to the other opened page it has to reload it; hopefully this will be fixed in future firmware versions.

Havong said that, I have to say that so far Safari on my touch has never crashed, I mainly access to webs optimiaed for iPhone/touch but even when I access normal web pages it never crashed. Based on my experience Safari is not that bad on a touch.
 

DerekVOF

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I'm not sure if I should laugh or cry at that question. I know most people don't realize this but the iPod Touch (although it has 16GB of storage) only has 120MB or so of RAM. Think back to those halcyon days of yore when you ran a full operating system (like XP) and web browser using only 128MB of RAM. Remember how many crashes you had? And how many times you had to quit and restart your browser because it bogged down because you were out of memory? Ah the memories... brings a tear to my eye... And don't forget that web pages nowadays are a LOT more detailed (using CSS, Javascript, etc.) than the pages that we used to surf on those 128MB platforms.

Oh, and I wouldn't consider it a "defect" with regards to opening a new page - it's a limitation of the memory that's available. I doubt it will be fixed until Apple ups the internal RAM which won't be just a firmware fix.

Safari on the Mac is a good, solid browser. I've really no complaints with it crashing or being unresponsive. Now in terms of full disclosure, I'm definitely looking to Firefox 3 (currently beta) on my Mac, but not because of performance/crashes. I'm looking at Firefox because Foxmarks lets me sync bookmarks between Firefox on all three of my platforms (Windows XP, Ubuntu and Mac).
 
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smiduri

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DerekVOF said:
I'm not sure if I should laugh or cry at that question. I know most people don't realize this but the iPod Touch (although it has 16GB of storage) only has 120MB or so of RAM. Think back to those halcyon days of yore when you ran a full operating system (like XP) and web browser using only 128MB of RAM. Remember how many crashes you had? And how many times you had to quit and restart your browser because it bogged down because you were out of memory? Ah the memories... brings a tear to my eye... And don't forget that web pages nowadays are a LOT more detailed (using CSS, Javascript, etc.) than the pages that we used to surf on those 128MB platforms.
Man!!! you tend to forget those old times....no tears but it was good to remember those times when Web was just simple straight HTML and we looked at those web like they were miracles of technology.... :D

DerekVOF said:
Oh, and I wouldn't consider it a "defect" with regards to opening a new page - it's a limitation of the memory that's available. I doubt it will be fixed until Apple ups the internal RAM which won't be just a firmware fix.
I honestly didn´t think about it, so in a way I think you´re right; Still my opinion is that it could be improved in some way. For example if I have a web fully loaded on my touch (example iLounge) and open a new safari page on my touch when I switch to the previously loaded page (i.e. iLounge) it download it again......at least could use the cached page, so loading would be quicker.

Might be wrong but I think that there are still possibilities to improve how it works.

Ciao
 

DerekVOF

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There certainly may be room for improvement, but have to be realistic.

Firefox 2 on my Ubuntu platform is right now toping 155MB with 3 tabs open.
Firefox 2 on Windows XP box right now is at 175MB. Time to quit & restart - better only 60MB now with nothing open.
Firefox 3 on my Mac is taking 70MB (version 3 beta is NICE).
Safari on my Mac is running 112MB with NO windows open (of course it's been running for 20 hours straight, but that's beside the point).

It's hard to keep web browsers using little space - they balloon up VERY quickly. And don't forget that 120MB for the iPod Touch needs to include its full operating system too...
 
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