I've tried to understand Safari's shortcomings and have even defended it on/., but I think my cup just leaked over. Following the crash I wrote this to the crash report I sent to Apple:
Please describe the circumstances leading to the crash and any other relevant information:
Running browser SECURITY TEST at http://bcheck.scanit.be/bcheck/ is what crashed Safari this time - in addition to the n+1 other situations where it normally crashes (generally involving ridiculous memory consumption indicating huge memory leaks).
Now, if Mac OS X Panther as a whole would be so badly programmed as Safari is, I'd probably gladly switch to some crap from Redmond. See, Internet Explorer for Windows, even while being hugely insecure without virus scanner and continuous patching and having horrible CSS support, has much, much greater stability than the newest version of Safari.
Luckily, though, real alternatives exist - alternatives like Camino, Firefox, Opera and Omniweb. They all do not take advantage of all the fine features (those like Keychain) of Mac OS X and Cocoa API as well as Safari, but they really do have much greater stability comparing to Safari.
So shame on Apple's Safari & WebKit team. Safari has been like this for a really long time, and does not seem to get better at all. If you just can't figure out anything better, you should drop Camino altogether and move to back Camino, which, despite it's shortcomings on feature side, at least runs very smoothly, and besides uses much more widely supported rendering engine than Safari, which is a plus too.
I do wonder, though, whether someone at Apple actually reads these crash reports I'm sending to you? Perhaps I should send them directly to Mr. Jobs' mailbox instead?
Well, anyway, if you want to argue with me about all this, please don't hesitate to mail me at [address here] But I really think the best thing you could do would be just start fixing those bugs instead - and designing them out completely, for that matter.
Yeah, but at least the people would have been warned then, so it's more like everyone's personal fault to hesitate and make a fatal attempt to take his/hers "precious" stuff with, and not like that the gov't didn't warn them to leave immediately and do it quickly, and not take along any non-vital-property (and oh yes, people usually only realise how little is truly vital when it's way too late).
Besides, I really, really doubt the abilities of an average American -- whose BMI is far off anything reasonable -- to walk 20 km straight away. Well, an average New Yorker perhaps still, though.
Or maybe's it's because Apple's QA people know that best way to have software designed to be easy to use is to not encourage them to use right-click kludges.
This is true, but they could still include a scrolling wheel to the mouse (place it to the middle of the button, for example). Scrolling using scroll bars is always a real PITA once you've got used to the wheel.
Another problem are laptops. Since switching to Mac at June 2003, for a long time I was really struggling with the internal mouse of my PowerBook; It was not so much about the buttons (I use context-menus, but I'm perfectly fine with ctrl-click), but rather the lack of scolling areas on trackpad edges, and especially the insane mac-style cursor acceleration curve. Then I finally found this godsent little piece of software, which unleashes the full potential of Synaptics trackpads used by Apple.
It is just really unfortunate that it is by no means supported by Apple; I really hope they'd not forget the power users.
Should open much faster, I'd hope...rendering a large graphic like that is CPU-limited.
I almost forgot to reply, but I actually tested this at Friday; It did open, but was only a second or two faster than yours. Anyway, it seems that the actual problem is in my box. No clue though, what could possibly be the actual problem.
Intresting. Did it open instantly, like most PDFs do, or did it choke at first?
I've G4/867 and 640 MB RAM, so a little less ram... but I don't think that's the problem; if I open the file in Acrobat, it's memory consumption stays at pretty normal level. But there is apparently something wrong in my system, if that's the only one that chokes.
Well, I've got a brand new 1,8 GHz / 512 MB G5 box at work, which is not yet moved into production. I think I'll have to try open it on that, just to see what happens.
I don't know if even being an Adobe implementation helps in all cases: AFAIK Apple's Quartz PDF implementation is licensed from Adobe, but Apple's Preview.app still fails miserably to show the ad - it hangs swapping like hell, eating well over one gigabyte of virtual memory and never showing the ad. The only way to open it on OS X (10.3.7) I found was to fire up Adobe Acrobat.
And for F/OSS advocates: the only thing that has probably mattered anything in making this PDF has been it's re-usability on NYT's publishing desk. Press optimised PDFs are quite another world comparing to normal ones, and I've seen maker-up guys being really pissed when people keep sending them low-resolution PDFs having images embedded in them in RGB (instead of CMYK) and using non-postscript fonts.
If you ever get your hands to Adobe Acrobat Pro, launch it and check out the "Document/Preflight" menu. It's quite interesting how huge the difference between a PDF and a PDF can be.
Why? I thought it would be a great engine upgrade to this.
But more seriously, even if you'd fly Gripen afterburner on at it's maximum speed (mach 2), the speed would still be too low to ignite the scramjet engine. And even if you'd somehow manage to ignite it, the Gripen's airframe would then be utterly and completely shattered at once...
Right now Safari is taking up about 116 MB of real memory, the most of any app by far.
Interesting. My Safari currently uses almost 200 MB of real memory, and right now it also uses over 60 % of CPU time, but the latter is only due to a stupid flash ad on top of this page.
So yes, it is a memory hog, although I've seen instances of Firefox using quite a lot of memory too. But I don't expect it to crash anyway. Last time Safari used to occasionally crash with me was probably before OS 10.3.2 or something like that. Both it and Firefox actually feel very stable nowadays.
WHAT?!? What is the last version of Safari you have tried out??
I agree that it has a bad habit to eat shitloads of memory, but I don't even remember the last time Safari has crashed for me, and I often keep it running for days! My current uptime is over six days, and I've had Safari open all the time. I have a 867 MHz G4 with 640 MBytes of RAM. Currently running OS 10.3.6. - that means Safari 1.2.4.
If the whole system crashes it is probably a bug in the mouse driver, or in display driver. Firefox only runs in userspace, and shouldn't be able to crash the whole OS - well, at least not unless you still run the Win 98/Me -line OSes, where the kernel memory is not completely protected from userspace violations.
No "friendly" interface for doing this yet though I don't think (or maybe I just missed it).
I think that it should never even have such. The NTLM auth is only relevant in intranets, where sysadmins can customise this sort of stuff for end users before spreading Firefox in their internal packages.
I also found that somewhat odd, as Ireland uses the euro -- I mean, Sweden and Denmark wanted to "keep their independence" and opted out of monetary union, so at first I supposed that no non-Euro EU country (except the UK) got the iTMS. But the exclusion of Ireland does not follow this logic.
Then among the non-€ countries are also the new eastern states of the Union (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Hungary, Cyprus, Malta), but most of them still have so little purchasing power that opening iTMS in them wouldn't make much sense for Apple anyway. Besides, Apple is relatively unknown company in most of these countries (there are no Apple webstores, for example).
NT's underlying kernel and architecture is considered one of the most advanced and stable out there.
I'm aware. But do you seriously think MS would have licensed them the kernel without forcing the w32 sybsystem crap down their throats too?
If you hate the crap on top of it, fine.
Yeah, that's what I meant.
But VMS and its descendent NT are arguably better kernels than Linux has turned out to be (so far).
I don't argue on this - both NT and Linux kernels have been stable enough for me. But kernel is just one part of the system.
But I guess whatever it takes to get you karma on Slashdot.
Well, that was just a first thought thrown to the air after reading the story. I don't know who modded it as insightful (it wasn't) nor who modded it as offtopic (it wasn't). If you think it's unfunny instead, feel free to M2 it as such... oh wait, you're an AC, so no M2. Your bad. But funny mods do not improve anyone's karma anyway, as stated in Slashdot's FAQ.
It is LGPL, but as far as I know redistribution in binary form still requires a patent license, if you're located in a country where software is patentable; source is covered by free speech. For more information, see About LAME.
My *personal* preference is, if you are quitting development on a piece of software, and have no plans of going back to it, that companies would GPL is.
Umm, I think the Panic guys would have a rather hard time in doing that for Audion, as the thingy has a built-in Fraunhofer-licensed MP3 encoder...
Personally, I don't see any real reason for this. But there may be some.
* No option to clear cache when done?
Sure there is. Firefox --> Preferences --> Privacy --> Cache --> Clear (I'm on a Mac right now -- on Windows "Firefox --> preferences" is probably found as "Tools --> Options")
* Inability to prompt me if I want scripts to run?
You can turn the scripts off if you want. More fine-tuned controls would easily get rather confusing. Besides, you can control what window handling options you want to allow to be done by Javascript. You can't do that in IE.
* Prompted cookie setting control?
You can deny all cookies and make an exceptions list. An option for asking for every cookie isn't truly useful anyway, they're simply too plenty.
* Inline images are either on or off. Eg, no ability to prevent animations (gif or otherwise) from running.
(This is frustrating. I want to see the original images, but I absolutely hate animations of any sort.)
Does IE truly have such an option? Can you point me to that -- I wasn't aware of it, and most GIF animations are annoying anyway. If IE truly has that, I hope that Firefox developers will put it to their TODO.
* No Zones feature so that I can configure certain security options for certain sites.
There are good reasons for this -- large number of IE security holes have been cross-zone scripting related; such a system is fundamentally insecure. You can make exceptions for cookies, popups and images, though.
* Installed security is to save passwords,
I don't think that this is any worse than people writing passwords to post-it stickers stored under keyboard.
allow web sites to install software,
It is allowed per default for trusted sites -- BUT the list of trusted sites is empty!
save form information,
This does not sound a real security risk. Many forms are sent over unencrypted connections anyway. Forms sent over encrypted connections, on the other hand, are usually behind a login prompt.
and Java is enabled?
Java has a security system of its own. The security reputation of Sun's JRE is much higher than Microsoft's JVM.
* Many other configuration options are missing that would allow me to be prompted if I want to execute or do something.
Too hard to comment without more specific information. But one of the problems of IE is, that the various basically important prompts presented by it are too plenty. If you have to click "yes" to 9 prompts out of ten, it's hard to realise the 1/10 of boxes that absolutely require "no".
I notice that tabbed browsing ends up using even more desktop real estate. I've never needed tabbed browsing before, all my windows appear on my Explorer task bar...just like tabs. I suppose tabs would be useful for people whos operating systems don't have a taskbar enabled shell.
This is a valid point. I have a friend who uses Firefox under Windows, but hardly ever uses tabs at all. I can do pretty well without myself too. On the other hand, I couldn't live without tabs on a Mac.
But the stupid thing in IE is, that every time I open a new window, it:
a) opens it on top of other windows b) opens my homepage on it, which is absolutely stupid, because I only want that page when I'm opening the first window of the browser.
So actually the greatest failures of IE on this matter are it's uncustomizeable window handling options, not the lack of tabbed browsing itself.
It won't help; your parent got wrong yet another thing that needs to be addressed once and for all: most large OS X apps are linked against Carbon, not Cocoa -- for more information, read this document about OS X application environments. This is mostly because they are ported either from Mac OS 9 or are Win/OSX cross-platform apps, or both (like Adobe Creative Suite apps).
Cocoa is more suited for a rapid development of all-new applications on OS X than for any large-scale cross-platform stuff.
But the really funny thing here is, that the ad I got when I just entered the page was "Euro-OSTG Tech Jobs", with a HUGE EU flag under the actual ad text.
Somehow I wonder, what that does next to the story about U.S. presidential elections.
Or perhaps it is for those liberals who would totally freak out if Bush would get re-elected and would instantly plan immigrating somewhere else...
Bullshit. MSFT once owned some preferred stock of AAPL. But the sold them away few years ago, and preferred stocks do not count anyway. More information about the motives of that deal in this thread.
Slashdot Mirror
I've tried to understand Safari's shortcomings and have even defended it on /., but I think my cup just leaked over. Following the crash I wrote this to the crash report I sent to Apple:
Please describe the circumstances leading to the crash and any other relevant information:
Running browser SECURITY TEST at http://bcheck.scanit.be/bcheck/ is what crashed Safari this time - in addition to the n+1 other situations where it normally crashes (generally involving ridiculous memory consumption indicating huge memory leaks).
Now, if Mac OS X Panther as a whole would be so badly programmed as Safari is, I'd probably gladly switch to some crap from Redmond. See, Internet Explorer for Windows, even while being hugely insecure without virus scanner and continuous patching and having horrible CSS support, has much, much greater stability than the newest version of Safari.
Luckily, though, real alternatives exist - alternatives like Camino, Firefox, Opera and Omniweb. They all do not take advantage of all the fine features (those like Keychain) of Mac OS X and Cocoa API as well as Safari, but they really do have much greater stability comparing to Safari.
So shame on Apple's Safari & WebKit team. Safari has been like this for a really long time, and does not seem to get better at all. If you just can't figure out anything better, you should drop Camino altogether and move to back Camino, which, despite it's shortcomings on feature side, at least runs very smoothly, and besides uses much more widely supported rendering engine than Safari, which is a plus too.
I do wonder, though, whether someone at Apple actually reads these crash reports I'm sending to you? Perhaps I should send them directly to Mr. Jobs' mailbox instead?
Well, anyway, if you want to argue with me about all this, please don't hesitate to mail me at [address here] But I really think the best thing you could do would be just start fixing those bugs instead - and designing them out completely, for that matter.
Yours sincerely,
Only if you leave everything behind and _go_.
Yeah, but at least the people would have been warned then, so it's more like everyone's personal fault to hesitate and make a fatal attempt to take his/hers "precious" stuff with, and not like that the gov't didn't warn them to leave immediately and do it quickly, and not take along any non-vital-property (and oh yes, people usually only realise how little is truly vital when it's way too late).
Besides, I really, really doubt the abilities of an average American -- whose BMI is far off anything reasonable -- to walk 20 km straight away. Well, an average New Yorker perhaps still, though.
Or maybe's it's because Apple's QA people know that best way to have software designed to be easy to use is to not encourage them to use right-click kludges.
This is true, but they could still include a scrolling wheel to the mouse (place it to the middle of the button, for example). Scrolling using scroll bars is always a real PITA once you've got used to the wheel.
Another problem are laptops. Since switching to Mac at June 2003, for a long time I was really struggling with the internal mouse of my PowerBook; It was not so much about the buttons (I use context-menus, but I'm perfectly fine with ctrl-click), but rather the lack of scolling areas on trackpad edges, and especially the insane mac-style cursor acceleration curve. Then I finally found this godsent little piece of software, which unleashes the full potential of Synaptics trackpads used by Apple.
It is just really unfortunate that it is by no means supported by Apple; I really hope they'd not forget the power users.
I'd call that logrotate, not backup.
Should open much faster, I'd hope...rendering a large graphic like that is CPU-limited.
I almost forgot to reply, but I actually tested this at Friday; It did open, but was only a second or two faster than yours. Anyway, it seems that the actual problem is in my box. No clue though, what could possibly be the actual problem.
Intresting. Did it open instantly, like most PDFs do, or did it choke at first?
I've G4/867 and 640 MB RAM, so a little less ram... but I don't think that's the problem; if I open the file in Acrobat, it's memory consumption stays at pretty normal level. But there is apparently something wrong in my system, if that's the only one that chokes.
Well, I've got a brand new 1,8 GHz / 512 MB G5 box at work, which is not yet moved into production. I think I'll have to try open it on that, just to see what happens.
I don't know if even being an Adobe implementation helps in all cases: AFAIK Apple's Quartz PDF implementation is licensed from Adobe, but Apple's Preview.app still fails miserably to show the ad - it hangs swapping like hell, eating well over one gigabyte of virtual memory and never showing the ad. The only way to open it on OS X (10.3.7) I found was to fire up Adobe Acrobat.
And for F/OSS advocates: the only thing that has probably mattered anything in making this PDF has been it's re-usability on NYT's publishing desk. Press optimised PDFs are quite another world comparing to normal ones, and I've seen maker-up guys being really pissed when people keep sending them low-resolution PDFs having images embedded in them in RGB (instead of CMYK) and using non-postscript fonts.
If you ever get your hands to Adobe Acrobat Pro, launch it and check out the "Document/Preflight" menu. It's quite interesting how huge the difference between a PDF and a PDF can be.
A little clarification for us non-Norwegians may be useful here: EØS means EEA in English.
Why? I thought it would be a great engine upgrade to this.
But more seriously, even if you'd fly Gripen afterburner on at it's maximum speed (mach 2), the speed would still be too low to ignite the scramjet engine. And even if you'd somehow manage to ignite it, the Gripen's airframe would then be utterly and completely shattered at once...
Right now Safari is taking up about 116 MB of real memory, the most of any app by far.
Interesting. My Safari currently uses almost 200 MB of real memory, and right now it also uses over 60 % of CPU time, but the latter is only due to a stupid flash ad on top of this page.
So yes, it is a memory hog, although I've seen instances of Firefox using quite a lot of memory too. But I don't expect it to crash anyway. Last time Safari used to occasionally crash with me was probably before OS 10.3.2 or something like that. Both it and Firefox actually feel very stable nowadays.
Safari crashes a lot -- at least once a day
WHAT?!? What is the last version of Safari you have tried out??
I agree that it has a bad habit to eat shitloads of memory, but I don't even remember the last time Safari has crashed for me, and I often keep it running for days! My current uptime is over six days, and I've had Safari open all the time. I have a 867 MHz G4 with 640 MBytes of RAM. Currently running OS 10.3.6. - that means Safari 1.2.4.
If the whole system crashes it is probably a bug in the mouse driver, or in display driver. Firefox only runs in userspace, and shouldn't be able to crash the whole OS - well, at least not unless you still run the Win 98/Me -line OSes, where the kernel memory is not completely protected from userspace violations.
No "friendly" interface for doing this yet though I don't think (or maybe I just missed it).
I think that it should never even have such. The NTLM auth is only relevant in intranets, where sysadmins can customise this sort of stuff for end users before spreading Firefox in their internal packages.
I also found that somewhat odd, as Ireland uses the euro -- I mean, Sweden and Denmark wanted to "keep their independence" and opted out of monetary union, so at first I supposed that no non-Euro EU country (except the UK) got the iTMS. But the exclusion of Ireland does not follow this logic.
Then among the non-€ countries are also the new eastern states of the Union (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Hungary, Cyprus, Malta), but most of them still have so little purchasing power that opening iTMS in them wouldn't make much sense for Apple anyway. Besides, Apple is relatively unknown company in most of these countries (there are no Apple webstores, for example).
...the sole existence of this kind of company a proof good enough that the current patent system rots?
NT's underlying kernel and architecture is considered one of the most advanced and stable out there.
I'm aware. But do you seriously think MS would have licensed them the kernel without forcing the w32 sybsystem crap down their throats too?
If you hate the crap on top of it, fine.
Yeah, that's what I meant.
But VMS and its descendent NT are arguably better kernels than Linux has turned out to be (so far).
I don't argue on this - both NT and Linux kernels have been stable enough for me. But kernel is just one part of the system.
But I guess whatever it takes to get you karma on Slashdot.
Well, that was just a first thought thrown to the air after reading the story. I don't know who modded it as insightful (it wasn't) nor who modded it as offtopic (it wasn't). If you think it's unfunny instead, feel free to M2 it as such... oh wait, you're an AC, so no M2. Your bad. But funny mods do not improve anyone's karma anyway, as stated in Slashdot's FAQ.
Amongst Apple's other options were to license (-- --) NT from Microsoft
Ouch. The thought alone makes me vomit...
Isn't LAME GPL?
It is LGPL, but as far as I know redistribution in binary form still requires a patent license, if you're located in a country where software is patentable; source is covered by free speech. For more information, see About LAME.
My *personal* preference is, if you are quitting development on a piece of software, and have no plans of going back to it, that companies would GPL is.
Umm, I think the Panic guys would have a rather hard time in doing that for Audion, as the thingy has a built-in Fraunhofer-licensed MP3 encoder...
* Changing the temporary cache path?
Personally, I don't see any real reason for this. But there may be some.
* No option to clear cache when done?
Sure there is. Firefox --> Preferences --> Privacy --> Cache --> Clear
(I'm on a Mac right now -- on Windows "Firefox --> preferences" is probably found as "Tools --> Options")
* Inability to prompt me if I want scripts to run?
You can turn the scripts off if you want. More fine-tuned controls would easily get rather confusing. Besides, you can control what window handling options you want to allow to be done by Javascript. You can't do that in IE.
* Prompted cookie setting control?
You can deny all cookies and make an exceptions list. An option for asking for every cookie isn't truly useful anyway, they're simply too plenty.
* Inline images are either on or off. Eg, no ability to prevent animations (gif or otherwise) from running.
(This is frustrating. I want to see the original images, but I absolutely hate animations of any sort.)
Does IE truly have such an option? Can you point me to that -- I wasn't aware of it, and most GIF animations are annoying anyway. If IE truly has that, I hope that Firefox developers will put it to their TODO.
* No Zones feature so that I can configure certain security options for certain sites.
There are good reasons for this -- large number of IE security holes have been cross-zone scripting related; such a system is fundamentally insecure. You can make exceptions for cookies, popups and images, though.
* Installed security is to save passwords,
I don't think that this is any worse than people writing passwords to post-it stickers stored under keyboard.
allow web sites to install software,
It is allowed per default for trusted sites -- BUT the list of trusted sites is empty!
save form information,
This does not sound a real security risk. Many forms are sent over unencrypted connections anyway. Forms sent over encrypted connections, on the other hand, are usually behind a login prompt.
and Java is enabled?
Java has a security system of its own. The security reputation of Sun's JRE is much higher than Microsoft's JVM.
* Many other configuration options are missing that would allow me to be prompted if I want to execute or do something.
Too hard to comment without more specific information. But one of the problems of IE is, that the various basically important prompts presented by it are too plenty. If you have to click "yes" to 9 prompts out of ten, it's hard to realise the 1/10 of boxes that absolutely require "no".
I notice that tabbed browsing ends up using even more desktop real estate. I've never needed tabbed browsing before, all my windows appear on my Explorer task bar...just like tabs. I suppose tabs would be useful for people whos operating systems don't have a taskbar enabled shell.
This is a valid point. I have a friend who uses Firefox under Windows, but hardly ever uses tabs at all. I can do pretty well without myself too. On the other hand, I couldn't live without tabs on a Mac.
But the stupid thing in IE is, that every time I open a new window, it:
a) opens it on top of other windows
b) opens my homepage on it, which is absolutely stupid, because I only want that page when I'm opening the first window of the browser.
So actually the greatest failures of IE on this matter are it's uncustomizeable window handling options, not the lack of tabbed browsing itself.
I think they should have used Twin Ion Engines to get a little better acceleration...
It won't help; your parent got wrong yet another thing that needs to be addressed once and for all: most large OS X apps are linked against Carbon, not Cocoa -- for more information, read this document about OS X application environments. This is mostly because they are ported either from Mac OS 9 or are Win/OSX cross-platform apps, or both (like Adobe Creative Suite apps).
Cocoa is more suited for a rapid development of all-new applications on OS X than for any large-scale cross-platform stuff.
But the really funny thing here is, that the ad I got when I just entered the page was "Euro-OSTG Tech Jobs", with a HUGE EU flag under the actual ad text.
Somehow I wonder, what that does next to the story about U.S. presidential elections.
Or perhaps it is for those liberals who would totally freak out if Bush would get re-elected and would instantly plan immigrating somewhere else...
Yeah, but although many Macs have ATI GPUs like the XBox2, Mac OS X still lacks DirectX.
I guess it's not that trivial task to overcome that.
Bullshit. MSFT once owned some preferred stock of AAPL. But the sold them away few years ago, and preferred stocks do not count anyway. More information about the motives of that deal in this thread.