David and Katherine Goodwin

At home, I use MacOSX on what is now an aging iBook G4. For browsing the web, I've been using Firefox for ages - it works quite well most of the time - although it has a bad habit of crashing (e.g. if viewing http://framework.zend.com). So, finally I got fed up and thought I'd use a different browser. Sam uses Opera, so I thought I'd give it a go. All went well, until it decided to crash when I visited Facebook - repeatedly. Hmm. Opera seems quite nice - although I didn't bother learning mouse gestures etc - it has similar key bindings, and had some more friendly defaults (e.g. font size).

Due to me using MacOSX, Safari is sort-of-the-native browser. But for some unknown reason I don't like it. Firefox is what I'm familiar with - yet I've probably submitted more than 50 'crash reports' for Firefox on this iBook. (On all other platforms I use it on, it's rock solid).

So - this leads to the question - why do Opera and Firefox crash on this iBook - do they receive insufficient testing on what's a dying platform (PowerPC)? Or is there some weird oddity about my laptop that causes them to crash randomly (but not, seemingly, safari).

Technorati Tags: safari opera firefox macosx