• the_infernal_optimist said on Nov 08, 2007....

  Ugh, I understand how that might happen (though I use Firefox 'cause it's 4tw ;-p).
  
  I also keep trying to type emoticons like :rofl (or my favorite elsewhere, :voodoo :-D).
  
  ~Infernal
  

• silverwhisper said on Nov 08, 2007....

  firefox is a memory pig, though, plus it renders slower. :>
  
  btw: one of my other online haunts actually has a trout-smack smiley. :D
  
  ed

• bloc said on Nov 08, 2007....

  :p

• the_infernal_optimist said on Nov 08, 2007....

  Aww, man, point re: memory. A real trout-smack emoticon? I'd love to see that! I'll have to upload my favorites from all over to flickr and share 'em sometime.
  
  I like Opera, but I can do more w/Firefox. Plus, it has a...fire fox. That's just cool. :-D
  
  ~Infernal
  

• silverwhisper said on Nov 08, 2007....

  bloc: :D
  
  infernal: yeah, i love the concept of firefox, but it just doesn't perform as well for my needs, you know? btw...i'll have to show you re: the emoticon. :>
  
  ed

• skald said on Nov 08, 2007....

  Is Opera a good browser?

• silverwhisper said on Nov 08, 2007....

  i think it kicks butt. however, you cannot use compose mode in opera.
  
  ed

• Alyss said on Nov 08, 2007....

  I like Firefox and haven't found it do be a memory issue on either machine I regularly use.
  
  Besides, I have a very cute little Firefox sketch that ET did for me one day so that makes it a winner for me!
  
  Infernal the trout smilie is worth watching out for. :P
  

• CreativeWoman said on Nov 08, 2007....

  I use Firefox too.  All the different formatting you mentioned is pretty much a foreign language to me.  :-)   I happily exist in "compose" mode everywhere I go.  I've never really taken the time to learn the others.
  
  CW
  

• PassionTraveler said on Nov 08, 2007....

  I HATE MS Internet Explorer. I'm a huge Mozilla/FireFox fan. I also like Safari (Mac person & PC user). Never had memory probs with Firefox and that's with opening like 30 tabs at once.
  
  PT
  

• Antimatter said on Nov 08, 2007....

  I use Safari on my Mac. It’s significantly faster than Firefox, but I’m not sure about memory consumption. (I have so much RAM it doesn’t matter.) Here on SoulCast, the composer works like a charm in Safari, though I usually write straight HTML anyway. The only time it glitches is whenever I edit a comment. The comment disappears until I refresh the page, but that prevents further editing! So you can only edit a comment once in Safari.

• bloc said on Nov 08, 2007....

  compose mode sucks in safari. It's so much better in firefox because safari adds a ton of convaluted spans and divs that make it nearly impossible to read in 'edit html' mode.
  
  
  Yet, I still use safari most of the time because it's much faster than FF and smoother in most other aspects.

• TinSoldier said on Nov 08, 2007....

  I do bbcode by hand, usually, but for HTML I usually use compose mode. I think -- that's where this text window has the little buttons over it right? I thought that was a function of the page not the browser.
  
  But I still find that I have to hand-edit the HTML if I am doing anything complicated.
  
  One forum that I'm on allows both bbcode and HTML, which is nice for pasting quiz results.
  
  For the record, I use Firefox. But I've had a lot of crashes recently. I've removed almost all of my extensions and it has decreased but not gone away completely. It may be related to the forum I mentioned above.
  

• the_infernal_optimist said on Nov 08, 2007....

  I just had to comment again and say that I found it.
  
  I found :ed, and it is hilarious. :-D
  
  ~Infernal
  

• bloc said on Nov 08, 2007....

  "I thought that was a function of the page not the browser"
  
  The wysiwyg feature is proprietary browser crap that isn't part of any standard. Each browser does it differently and web developers have no control over it. Open up two different browsers and make some text bold and give it a few newlines within the wysiwyg (i.e. compose mode). Then look at it in 'edit html' mode and you'll see that the different browsers produce drastically different html.

• TinSoldier said on Nov 08, 2007....

  Thanks, bloc. I'll have to try that experiment sometime. I thought that it was either an OS function or a Javascript feature or something. 

• bloc said on Nov 08, 2007....

  Read the first answer at this link if you're curious. This info is out of date and not completely accurate, but it gives you an idea of how these crappy wysiwyg editors work.

• silverwhisper said on Nov 09, 2007....

  alyss: like i said, i dig firefox and think it's pretty spiffy, but for me, it just doesn't perform the way i'd like. and thanks for the vote of confidence re: the smiley. :>
  
  CW: hey, that's fair--most folks just aren't interested in spending that time and believe me, i get it. :>
  
  PT: really? that's unusual--many firefox users i've encountered have. i guess this is a good thing that you haven't. :>
  
  antimatter: i have the same problem w/ edit mode in opera, but i find that if you know more or less where the edit link is formatted, you can find it again pretty easily.
  
  bloc: i don't know why but i keep forgetting you're a mac user. that's useful to know re: the editors for each browser, thank you.
  
  TS: that's odd, sorry about firefox crashing on you. are you running the most recent version? i don't think i've ever had a stability issue w/ ff--or opera, for that matter... :>
  
  infernal: heh...i'm glad you found it. :D
  
  ed

• inspiration2jms said on Nov 09, 2007....

  PT: really? that's unusual--many firefox users i've encountered have. i guess this is a good thing that you haven't. :>
  
  Ed, I have never encountered the memory problems or crashes with Fire Fox either.  I hated Internet Explorer.  The darn thing was forever shutting down on me.  I disabled it. 
  
  I am one of those people that does a lot of online research though and often have up to 45 tabs open at once. 
  
  I do my composing in NetScape Composer, click on the format button, select the form that I want the document or article in and transfer it to where I want it.  I can do the html and all but I am not nearly as efficient with it.  Not a second nature to me type of thing.
  
  janet
  

• silverwhisper said on Nov 09, 2007....

  how peculiar--i wonder what explains that!
  
  ah, netscape...i'll be honest, i dislike it, i'm afraid.
  
  ed

• bloc said on Nov 09, 2007....

  firefox 2 is less stable than FF 1. It crashed a lot on me, but I push it a lot more than an average person. It does use gobs of memory, but all browsers do these days. Web pages are becoming very heavy.
  
  
  For example, i've been browsing in safari for about an hour and it's using 216 MB (real not virtual) right now. I just opened FF and it's only using 47MB. The point, all browsers eat memory over time as you browse more and more pages. 

• Antimatter said on Nov 09, 2007....

  Yeah, I've gotten both Safari and Firefox over a gig in real RAM after watching large videos and heavy browsing with many tabs.

• silverwhisper said on Nov 10, 2007....

  bloc: i'm aware that ff2 had a memory leak bug. any relationship to RAM footprint?
  
  antimatter: holy crap, i grouse when i've got opera at a quarter gig!
  
  ed

• TinSoldier said on Nov 10, 2007....

  I'm still going to blog about using Opera, but right now... With six tabs open it's using about 180 Megs of RAM and at some points 99% of CPU. I've had some slowdowns, but they seem to have gone away. For now.

• bloc said on Nov 10, 2007....

  @ed
  i thought the memory leak was fixed a while back. 

• silverwhisper said on Nov 11, 2007....

  TS: hm...i rarely have that many tags open myself. interesting...
  
  bloc: well, you would likely know better than me. :>
  
  ed

• bloc said on Nov 12, 2007....

  a memory leak would certainly cause your ram to be eaten up, but I think it was fixed a while back.

• bloc said on Nov 12, 2007....

  Here is a good read on the subject.

• TinSoldier said on Nov 12, 2007....

  Yup, memory allocation is yet another one of those "black arts" of operating system design, or if you write your own malloc() implementation.

• silverwhisper said on Nov 12, 2007....

  [is utterly lost]

• bloc said on Nov 12, 2007....

  @tin
  what do you do? 

• TinSoldier said on Nov 12, 2007....

  Electronics technician, with a strong hobby of reading about programming languages and operating systems.
  
  Plus I just like to sound smart ;-) !
  
  I have a copy at home of Tannenbaum's Modern Operating Systems, but I'm afraid that I haven't actually read it yet.
  
  I really just dabble -- I've never been able to handle a large project.
  

• TinSoldier said on Nov 12, 2007....

  ed -- it's just fitting different sized items into different sized bins in the most efficient way possible. That's all. You discard whatever is in the bin when it is no longer needed, and when a new item comes along you have to search through your empty bins to find one that is the closest fit. Sometimes you either run out of bins, end up with bins that are too large for your items (which isn't a problem until you run out of bins), or you end up with a lot of small bins but none that fit larger items.
  
  It's just like hard disk fragmentation.
  
  A memory leak happens when you don't empty a bin after you no longer need its contents.
  
  Okay, I don't think I'm very good at explaining it.
  

• bloc said on Nov 12, 2007....

  have you read the classic exchange between tannenbaum and linus?
  
  
  btw, if you like to learn about programming you should become a programmer. It pays well and there is a shortage of good coders :)

• TinSoldier said on Nov 12, 2007....

  have you read the classic exchange between tannenbaum and linus?
  
  But of course! That is one of the all-time classic flame fests.
  
  Part of me would love to be a programmer, but figuring out how to get my foot in the door is difficult without all the training and experience. It would be easier if I was self-motivated enough to write more code on my own.
  

• bloc said on Nov 12, 2007....

  "figuring out how to get my foot in the door is difficult without all the training and experience."
  
  I did it before I finished my degree and during the dot com bust ... Now that I'm in a position where I hire programmers I can tell you that its not nearly as hard as you think. Most resumes I get are absolutely terrible. All you have to do is make something and talk about it in a cover letter. It's a lot easier to get in the door with web programming because so many people need websites and most don't want to pay an experienced programmer who will charge them a lot. If you're into web programming it's really easy to get in the door, you'll just have to take a lower salary for a couple years.
  
  Trust me when I say that the pool of programmers looking for jobs is very shallow. reading all these great blogs on the internet makes it seem like there are a ton of great programmers, but keep in mind these are all the programmers in the entire world. 99% of them aren't looking for jobs and even if they were they aren't looking in your area and aren't looking for entry level stuff. Believe me, you can do it.

• TinSoldier said on Nov 12, 2007....

  Thanks, bloc. I'll consider it.
  
  But as I said, I have more book knowledge than I do practical experience.

• bloc said on Nov 12, 2007....

  that's easy to solve :)

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