Firefox on Intel Mac

Hi - This is my first post.

I bought a an iBook for my wife only yesterday. 1.83ghz Core Duo, 1 gig of Ram etc. Anyway, yesterday we finished setting it up and she wanted to carry on using Firefox as she'd used that both on my Windows laptop and her previous G3 Mac.

I initially downloaded the latest full release of FF for Mac, version 1.5.0.2 I believe (which is supposed to be a Universal Binary). Whilst it worked fine, I noticed the scrolling was very slow and jerky, a lot slower than on my 2 and a half year old Windows machine, running an ageing A64.

So then I downloaded FF 2.0b which, although very slightly improved, was still luggish for such a fast machine.

Everythink else works perfectly, the machine is stupidly fast - but FF seems to crawl. Safari doesn't seem nearly as bad, but neither her nor I really like it.

If I was to jump to the dark side (Apple :spook: ) this scrolling issue would annoy me.

Is this something FF users just have to live with, or is there a workaround?

PS - As a Windows user, I am very impressed with OS X...

Well, if your not reliant on FF for all the plugins and ways to change the appearance, I would suggest trying Camino. I like it very much and use it for all my web browsing, it's nice and simple and seems faster than Safari for me. I use FF when I'm on a windows PC and I now use Camino on my Macs :mac:

todd51 said:

Well, if your not reliant on FF for all the plugins and ways to change the appearance, I would suggest trying Camino. I like it very much and use it for all my web browsing, it's nice and simple and seems faster than Safari for me. I use FF when I'm on a windows PC and I now use Camino on my Macs :mac:

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Are there plugin issues with Camino? She listens to BBC radio on the internet (we're Brits living in New York) so Realplayer embedded i a must. Obviously QT will be ok.

I have to say, I've heard bad things about Camino, bugs etc, but I might check it out.

FF can slow down due to certain extensions. I am using FF 1.5 on my Intel Mac and don't have any problem. Having said the, I would suggest you to try Camino if you want a simple but fast alternative for FF. There won't be any problem watching BBC on Camino. All you have to do is, install Real Player.

There are some plugins available for Camino but not as much as for FF. You can download them at PimpMyCamino.

Firefox isn't really a native mac (i.e. cocoa) application, I believe it's currently implemented in java somehow, similar to neooffice/j. (though I'm probably waaay off there I just know it isn't an optimal mac version yet).

They're planning a more mac native version for the future though, but for the time being Camino is a nice mozilla alternative.

FireFox is smooth on my iMac G5 iSight. Very smooth page scrolling. I will try it on my Core Duo Mini in the morning and report back.

never had a problem with firefox, its much faster then safari in alot of aspects! and the awsome tabbing is the shiznit

Zoolook said:

Are there plugin issues with Camino? She listens to BBC radio on the internet (we're Brits living in New York) so Realplayer embedded i a must. Obviously QT will be ok.

I have to say, I've heard bad things about Camino, bugs etc, but I might check it out.

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I've never had any problems with FireFox on my macbook, but I opt to use Camino anyway. BBC streams work fine with realplayer

I use Firefox 2.0b2 on my 1.66GHz core duo, 512MB ram mac mini with no problems at all. It is fast and smooth. I think your problem must lie elsewhere?

redmelons said:

I use Firefox 2.0b2 on my 1.66GHz core duo, 512MB ram mac mini with no problems at all. It is fast and smooth. I think your problem must lie elsewhere?

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Ditto and it's smooth as can be. I normally use Safari on that machine, but tried Firefox Latest non beta version and it's smooth.

Firefox has always done that for me - on my new macbook and old iBook. I think it's just the way it is, with/without skins, plugins etc. I just accepted it, as it didn't bother me. I don't use Firefox all that much, only for deviantart browsing and message management.

Try Safari.

its fine on my intel powerbook

I use Opera as the main browser on my PC, although I use FireFox too.

Opera works fine on my MacBook - although I have not tried FireFox on it yet.

Firefox funs fine for me. Do you have alot of stuff or plugin going at the same time?