Monday, January 3

Browser Wars

tech***Update:
My friend Shane Anderson helped me to lessen the grinding halts in Safari. The Autofill option was causing it. Turn that off and there is no reason to switch away!***


I've gotten a little annoyed when Safari grinds to a temporary halt, usually when dealing with net applications like amazon.com, store.apple.com, blogger.com etc. But I keep running into problems when I want to switch browsers.

Cookies

I can't find a way to import cookies out of Safari and into a new browser. There aren't a lot of cookies that I want to keep, but there are enough.

Keychain

There are many sites that I have forgotten my username and password. I could look up each one in keychain and paste it across, but I'm way to lazy to do that.

Bookmarks

I just want my bookmark bar to be identical to my Safari bar. I think I got it in firefox, but it keeps adding it's own 3 links in front which I don't want to use. Also, I can't figure out how to make a group open together without a contextual menu.

Ad Blocking

Not originally part of Safari, but I have PithHelmet installed and it just works. I found a way to get firefox to block ads, but it required creating a file in my user preferences, buried deep inside my home folder. I haven't tried it yet, but I guess it will work. The nice thing about PithHelmet is I can easily temporarily disable it (if it is blocking something accidently,) and it also filters other content besides ads.

Tabs

I like being able to close the tab with a button that is on the tab. In firefox (and others, I'm just picking on firefox because I just tried switching to it, Camino and OmniWeb may not exhibit this behavior anymore) you have to right click and select close tab from a contextual menu, or click the close button al the way over on the right.

AutoFill

I will have to re-enter my auto fill info If I ever get around to switching, and that is just annoying.

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Two things I would like to see in a browser that writing this all up has brought back to mind are:

The ability to overwrite the expiration date for a cookie. I'd like to set all cookies to expire after one year if the cookie is set to expire in a longer time. (I think OmniWeb lets you do stuff like this)

Never open a new window unless I purposefully open a new one. Right now I have to use a contextual menu to open new links in a new tab, and sometimes (e.g. when there is a picture that has a link attached to it, but there are others) the menu lacks the option to open the link in a new tab. I'd rather all links open in new tabs, I could close the old window if I didn't want it. (I may get tired of this, because I am used to having some links open in the same window/tab, but I'd like to have to option to open all links in new tabs in the same window.)

I hope that someone will prove me wrong on these points, I'd love it.