To add insult to injury, the white flashing still occurs and with even more frequency. I presume some of this might be attributed to the fact that I’m still on Snow Leopard and that most of these problems have been addressed with Safari 5.1.2 running under Lion. I say “most” because I don’t think I’ve encountered the page flashing yet on my MacBook Pro (which is currently on the 10.7.3 seed). The excessive memory usage is still there though since it quickly ballooned the swap file to 2GB even though I had just 3 tabs opened and was barely doing any heavy web browsing at the time. When I quit Safari, the swap file(s) eventually went back down to one 256MB file.
So I decided to try and import my Safari settings (this was a full import including bookmarks, cookies, history, passwords) into the latest version of Firefox (8.0.1 as of this writing) and loaded up the same tabs that I have opened in Safari. Memory usage (which includes my usual staple of NoScript, Greasemonkey, DownloadThemAll, and a few other addon’s) has Firefox sitting at around 680MB of memory. After an hours worth of browsing, memory usage hovers near 700MB and there is no noticeable sluggishness in the UI (something which was a pet peeve I previously had with Firefox (the last version I had installed was the 3.6.x series) — which is why I only used it occasionally for just a few sites where NoScript was a must or I made use of Greasemonkey scripts.
There are still some things that I do not like about Firefox when comparing it to Safari. For example, this post is being performed with Firefox, and there are times when the cursor has a mind of its own. Another is when copying a webpage and pasting it into a TextEdit document where it does not retain styles and formatting. Then there are the minor UI things where it still does not look and feel like a native Mac application. But these are minor quirks now compared to the craptacularness that Safari is turning into, where it alone has the ability to transform this 3.3GHz 6-core Mac Pro into a flailing slug. Maybe this also explains why mobile Safari in the current version of iOS (5.0.1) is such a big steaming turd as well where it is constantly crashing on my iPad (the crash logs attribute it to a lack of memory — no shit sherlock). The previous “windowed” version was rather reliable; this tabbed one is crap.
