Apple Nag

Just noticed that my Twitter feed is not showing up in the sidebar of this site when I’m using Safari 4. It works fine in Safari 3 and Firefox 3.

If you’re viewing this site with Safari 4, you’ll notice in the sidebar that between the Donate button and the calendar it has “Twitter updates” followed immediately by “Nag me on Twitter.” Between those two lines is some JavaScript that is supposed to fetch and display the last few tweets.

Now I know why Safari 4′s JavaScript engine is 42 times faster than Internet Explorer 7. It doesn’t execute the script!

Say, isn’t “42” kinda suspicious?

Update: Oh that’s just great! As soon as I report the bug to Apple, I can see the last tweet I did. No other ones, mind you. Well, at least it’s still partially broken as Safari 3 and Firefox 3 both show the last 5 tweets, not just one.

Update: This is too funny, Ha, ha, ha, snort. As soon as I posted the above update, the tweets are not showing again. Ah, I get it, a random JavaScript generator. Very clever.

I’m a little late to the party, but I thought I’d take a look at Safari 4 in hopes of providing feedback before some horrors are inflicted upon us. Not that I really think you put much stock in customer feedback; you’ll do whatever you want anyway.

It’s a bit disconcerting when a web browser needs to force a system restart [there you go with your deliberate outages again — stop that!]. Why is an application getting its fingers down into the kernel? This sounds like what everyone nags poor Microsoft about; integrating Internet Explorer into Windows.

My comments on Safari 4 will come later. I did find it rather amusing that after I did the restart that OS X hung on startup with a blue screen of death. Except this BSoD was even less informative than the Windows’ one we like to kid about. There was nothing on this screen at all. Well, the colour was nicer than Windows’.

I powered off the Mac and rebooted again. This time it fired up normally.

When is Snow Leopard going to be released? I don’t think I can wait for it to come to me. I think it’s time for a little hunting Safari, if you’ll pardon the pun.

I’m writing this post using Firefox having given up on Safari for the moment. My 2 GB PowerMac G5 was just thrashing the disk to death. While I’m waiting for my additional 2 GB of RAM to arrive, I’m going to stop using that hippo called Safari.

I suspect you have a memory leak in Safari. Why you haven’t corrected it after all this time is curious. Do all your developers test on 32 GB machines?

So I used Activity Monitor to view the System Memory. Holy flying hippos, Batman! Safari was using more memory than anything else in the system, including OS X Leopard’s bloated kernel_task. It’s bad enough that an operating system kernel occupies 263 MB of RAM, but Safari beat it hands down at 295 MB RSIZE and — wait for it — 2.5 GB of virtual memory (VM).

Safari only had a couple of windows open, with nothing fancy on the pages. When I restart Safari, its memory consumption is a fraction of what it was when I quit. Even closing all windows in Safari doesn’t free up memory. That’s a classic (not classy) memory leak.

Perhaps I’ll go back to using Safari when it’s no longer incontinent.

You can read all kinds of product reviews of your new announcements on other sites, but I’ll let you know why I won’t be buying your Mac Mini and why I might buy your Mac Pro.

I was multitasking last night by watching a movie and working through my RSS feeds using Google Reader on my iPod Touch. That was the first time that I heard about your new hardware releases. Even without a keynote, you generated enough interest for me to pause the movie at strategic points so that I could concentrate on the specs. And you know how much I love my movies.
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