Safari: Worst Web Browser Ever?
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Since I work as a systems/network admin, Web Developer much of my day is spent either building new systems, designing site from the ground up or doing maintenance on existing ones. Like most places, we rely on different types of monitoring software to keep us apprised of system performance.
One such system is Cacti, which we have implemented recently and really like. It uses Apache, PHP, MySQL and RRDTool, generates performance graphs for lots of networks and systems, and is so dead easy to use compared to our previous system using MRTG and RRDTool, that I don’t know how we worked without it.
Consequently, I’ve spent a lot of time in the last two months with a web browser window open in Cacti, either passively monitoring a graph, or adding new ones. We’re bringing on lots of new DSL customers so I have been adding new graphs on a daily basis.
What I’ve discovered is that Safari is a horribly written browser, and that it is totally unusable for the simple function of opening a page, displaying it, and letting me click from page to page inside Cacti.
The first problem I encountered was with Safari 1.2 and 1.3 under Mac OS X 10.3. Safari 10.2 would take forever to open a page with lots of data in Cacti. For example, when you add a new device to Cacti, it does an SNMP query and shows you all of the available interfaces it can graph. On our router that terminates DSL customers, this is several hundred interfaces. Safari 1.2 totally choked on this page. I’d get the spinning beach ball of death, and would eventually have to kill the browser entirely.
Safari 1.3 that came with OS X 10.3.9 was even worse. This data-intensive page would simply cause the browser to crash totally after about 30 seconds. Also Safari 1.3 would crash if I had more than two SSL pages open.
Safari 2.0 in Tiger doesn’t have the crashing problems described above, but it still takes the browser somewhere on the order of 5 minutes to display the page with hundreds of interfaces. During that time the browser is unusable with the spinning beach ball.
The killer problem that I just noticed today is that Safari positively EATS memory. I was working in Cacti, and noticed that my system had really slowed to a crawl. The browser window took forever to update, and I had a lot of disk activity. I fired up top and WHOA! I only have 2M of free RAM and the system is swapping like mad.
Safari was taking up 216M of RSIZE memory in top. That’s half of my system total! Again, this is a single web site. I have a single window open, at this time displaying a list of 25 graphs which I was editing one at a time.
216M of RAM! What on earth are you doing to me, Apple?
I started up Firefox. Worked for a while on the same page, same tasks, about the same amount of time. Opened more tabs. Watched top in the background, and Firefox slowly went from 32M after opening, to fluctuating between 36 and 40M depending on how many windows I had open.
I’m sorry, Apple, but your browser is pish.