I think I finally tracked down the memory leak in Firefox. I’m still waiting to see if anything goes completely haywire, and I do need to double-check it on my PC at home to be sure, but I think the problem may have been the Firebug addon. While it _is_ a very useful tool for web development, when it’s looking at every single one of your tabs to check for errors and such, it does have a way of making Firefox very, very big. It’s a much better policy to just disable the entire thing and then enable on a site-by-site basis, and then for only as long as it takes to troubleshoot any code you’re working on.
In the meantime before I figured this out, I popped open Safari for Windows again this morning. I really, really like that browser. In a lot of ways, it makes most websites look a lot better. Safari seems to render websites with a cleaner, sharper look overall. Plus, the browser just fired right up and responded instantly to every command I gave it. It seems to be pretty lightweight, much the way Firefox was in its earlier days. The only trouble with Safari is that it doesn’t have the addon and plugin support yet that Firefox does, which still makes Safari my second choice for a browser. If it ever gets the kind of open source addon support that Firefox has, it will certainly give Firefox a run for its money.
I did run a brief Google search this morning for websites that have plugins for Safari. I didn’t really find much, aside from Safari’s version of Adblock and a couple of developer tools. I’m kind of hoping that more plugins will open up, but I don’t even know if Safari’s API is open. It’d certainly be good if it was, but Apple might be playing things close to the vest.
If anyone knows anything about good plugins and addons for Safari, do please let me know. I think there’s a lot of potential for Safari yet, and probably most of it is still untapped as yet. I’d like to see that change.
