Mac browser switch
I switched browsers this weekend, from Safari (1.3.1) to Firefox (1.0.6). More and more I find that Safari fails to load images on web pages. All the other browsers I tried load the same pages without any problems. Searching the web, I didn't find anyone else reporting this problem, but Safari on anniemal's iBook chokes on the same pages. It's a very odd problem, because when I reload the pages, Safari will usually drop different images, often getting some that it missed before, but dropping some that it had before. (You'd expect that if random pieces of the page are failing, some bits would be in cache and they would keep loading consistently while other bits were added.) Some of the problem pages are from my own website, and they load fine from the development directories of my local disk, but not from my ISP's web server.
I've been happy enough with Firefox, and it's the browser I use at work (running on Solaris). There's some debate as to which browser is faster, but speed doesn't do any good if much of the content is dropped. I used Ellipsis Productions' Safari Bookmark Exporter (1.1) to load my Safari bookmarks into Firefox. Maybe I can eventually merge my home and office bookmarks and keep them in sync.
If anyone out there with Safari and a fast connection wants to see whether they have the same problems, try these pages:
blog images (583 images -- most of them small) The number at the left of each line is how many images there should be. (Lines may wrap.)
same images (should load from cache) w/ copy+paste HTML for blogging
my LJ friends' icons (377 images)
These pages fail reliably with Safari on our iBooks (OS X 10.3; 10.2 also had the problem). If anyone has suggestions on the cause, I'm open to experimenting. (I am using an ad-blocking proxy server Privoxy, but Safari fails with/without the proxy, and the other browsers work fine through the proxy. And if it came to that, I would ditch Safari to keep Privoxy -- speed and sanity benefits.)