Our regular topic of conservation is looking a little slow today, so I’ve been catching up on my tech blogs. Looks like Google will be making a version of Chrome for iOS, though I’m skeptical Apple is going to open up its walled garden to allow Google to cut them out as a middleman on ad search revenue. With the introduction of Lion, Apple turned Safari into an unmitigated pile of garbage. On Mac OS, there is Chrome, though it does not do reading list or tab synchronization with Safari on iOS devices. If Chrome does indeed come to iOS, I could kiss Safari goodbye for good entirely. I recently tried the 5.1.7 update to Safari, and believe it is a step backwards, after some minor improvement since the launch of Lion. It’s now as unstable, once again, as it was when Apple pooped Lion unto the world. Many of the other initial issues with Lion have been fixed, but Safari is still an unstable piece of crap. All they’ve essentially done is separate the user interface from the actual rendering engine, so if the rendering engine takes a dump, all you notice is that all your tabs refresh. This is great until this happens when you’re in the middle of a post, and suddenly you’re back to the last autosave, and it’s demanding you log in again. In addition, like iOS, Safari starts purging out pages when it runs low on memory, regardless of how much RAM you have free on the box. This is understandable on iOS devices, which are limited in RAM, but on a machine with 8GB RAM, it shouldn’t manage memory this way.
I heard someone characterize Lion as Apple’s Vista. Based on my experience that’s an entirely accurate description. Mountain Lion better be a real improvement or I’m going to seriously consider going back to Linux, despite the fact that I found the Gnome 3 Desktop to be about as unstable as Safari.
Opera browser already has a version on iOS so I don’t foresee Chrome having problems. As an iPhone developer, I will say that this “great wall” that people complain about is more the complaints of a very vocal minority of developers. Most of it is “waaah I didn’t bother to read the rules and did all this work and it turns out my app violates the rules waaaah”. Oddly enough, Google has started to implement the same rules for Android, I might add.
There are other Linux desktop environments besides Gnome. I’ve gotten to be a big fan of XFCE and LXDE as desktop environments, since they get the job done without all the eyecandy that bloats Gnome and KDE.
I’m an Apple guy too, but I’ve resisted the upgrade to Lion. 10.6 has been very stable and works well for me, so I’m going to skip 10.7 and see how 10.8 looks. If it’s stable, then I may go for it. If it’s not, I’ll be teaching the wife how to do stuff in Linux.
Apple did take a step back with Safari in Lion, but I still prefer it over any other browser. I found the 5.1.7 update did improve things compared to when it first came out in Lion.
I would hesitate to call Lion Apple’s Vista. Vista sucked. Lion doesn’t. It may have been some steps back in some areas, but it was no where near as bad as Vista.
I’m not having any issues with Safari on Lion, and I haven’t had any problems with Safari on any of the prerelease versions of Mountain Lion either. Chrome works nicely also, as does Opera, but I prefer Safari.
As I type this on my iPad, I’m experimenting with a browser app called Perfect Browser. I like so far, but I’m not sure that I’ll switch over completely from Safari.
What is this Lion you speak of? I pretty much need to be reminded every now and again that I’m still running Snow Leopard and that there is an upgrade available…which is a HUGE change from being a bleeding-edge adopter. I was underwhelmed by Apple’s direction with Lion and I still haven’t heard any good reasons to upgrade…and with no plans to introduce an iPad or iPhone to the mix (love my Android phone) the syncing benefits don’t apply. Since I depend on a bunch of older applications, I have pretty much decided to sit this one out and see how Mountain Lion looks.
With the introduction of Lion, Apple turned Safari into an unmitigated pile of garbage.
Odd, never noticed any.
(And on Vista, I always liked it; all the complaints I saw were either “my ancient hardware didn’t get a new driver from the vendor that hadn’t updated it since Windows 2k or 95, so Microsoft sucks” or “UAC making my machine secure sucks because I have to click a thing, I should just be Admin all the time!”.
Neither one got a lot of traction on my personal evaluation of the OS, as both were actually vast stability and security improvements.)
To be fair, I tend to abuse browsers. I may have six windows open with 10 tabs each on any given day. Each window is a different subject area. Three might be work, two blog, and one Facebook, etc. A lot of it I might not notice if I wasn’t constantly triggering tab reloads.
My only complaint about Vista was that it suffers horribly in comparison to Win7. I thought it was an improvement in most areas from XP; and welcomed UAC. I agree with Sigivald’s comment about drivers, though I already went through one round of having to abandon hardware due to lack of drivers when I went to XP.
Xfce for the win!