I’m going to say it. I’m a little bit fed up with Firefox.

I guess like all relationships that start out hot and heavy, the passion just can’t be sustained. I started noticing my waning infatuation a few months ago, while still using my 2002 PowerBook 1GHz G4 as my main work computer. As a web designer (and a Digg devotee), I spend most of my day with at least one browser open. And in that one browser, usually 5-10 tabs are open. Firefox really seemed to be putting a hurting on my system, requiring frequent force quits and generally just bogging down under moderate use. I chalked it up to using my 5-year-old laptop as a pro machine, and learned to live with it.

But about a month ago, I got a brand-spanking-new Quad Core 2.66GHz MacPro. Literally 10.5x faster in processor speed than my PowerBook, and with 3GB of RAM as opposed to 1GB. I’m absolutely in love with this machine, and in awe of what it can do. I’ve also gotten in the habit of keeping Activity Monitor open all the time, keeping an eye on what strains it and where the bottlenecks are. And I noticed that Firefox was putting a hurting on this massive aluminum box. It wasn’t nearly as bad as on the PowerBook, but I would see spikes of 50, 60, even 70% of the CPU being used by Firefox. That was above what PhotoShop CS2, still running under Rosetta on my new Intel processor, was doing.

It seems that Firefox is beginning to succumb to the same bloat that IE is often accused of, and that the Mozilla folks claim to be against. There’s still tons of add-ons that I can get with Firefox (like the inimitable Web Developer’s Toolbar) that I can’t get anywhere else, but I decided to explore other browser options for general web browsing. First stop Safari.

I tried using Safari almost exclusively for a couple weeks. Safari is MUCH less processor intensive, rarely spiking over 10% CPU usage. Good start. But I began to notice an even worse problem 2 columns over in Activity Monitor. Safari is a ridiculous RAM hog. At one point, Safari was laying claim to over 600MB (!) of my precious RAM. That’s double what PhotoShop CS2 was hoarding. It wasn’t always that high, but it was consistently hovered around 350-400MB after even moderate browsing. Until I get some more RAM (notoriously expensive for MacPros), Safari was going to be relegated to testing purposes only.

Since yesterday I’ve been test-driving Camino—Mozilla power, Mac style, according to their tagline. Well, I guess Mozilla power also means Mozilla CPU beatdown, as I’m seeing the same 50-60% spikes. It does seem snappier than Firefox, but that might just be due to the add-ons I had installed in Firefox. Onthe plus side, it generally runs at about 50-100MB of RAM usage, which is infinitely more reasonable than Safari and inline with Firefox.

I’m not entirely sold, and I think I’ll be giving Opera a thorough try in a week or so. My fear, though, is that web browsers have gone the way of cellphone carriers—they all suck now. Anyone have any suggestions?

UPDATE: Tried opera for a couple days. It’s another RAM hog, though not quite as bad as Safari, and it always releases it when you quit (which Safari doesn’t for some reason). It’s also pretty taxing on the processor, though not as bad as Firefox and Camino. My opinion is it’s the worst of both worlds, and the fact that the number of sites that don’t work on it is higher than the others made me stop using it fairly quickly. It did have some really nice features, though. Hitting “1” and “2” will tab between open tabs—I’ve been looking for some way to do that for a long time. And hitting the spacebar at the end of a page with a “Next” link will automatically take you there, though sometimes it’s less than intuitive. I’ve now settled on Camino for regular browsing and Firefox for development until something better comes along.