I recently got tired of how firefox constantly pauses web videos, even though I changed the interval timer for the tab saves. Even with no tabs open it continued to do it.
So right now I use:
Google chrome for videos and email
firefox for general web browsing, email, image hosting, forums, school, social networking, banking
Internet Explorer for an email I use for craigslist.
If you have found that certain web browsers that are good for specific tasks share em!
So far I’m pretty happy with this set-up. I love firefox apps for improving web-browsing, and google seems to work perfect for videos.
I use Firefox mostly. My bookmarks and such are managed in Firefox. Firefox is also one of the few browsers to do color management. Color management is quite nice when browsing photos and artwork, especially photos and artwork that has embedded color profiles. But Firefox has turned into a memory pig. A big memory pig that slows way down when it gorges on too much memory. I don’t know if Firefox 4 gets less resource hungry, I haven’t tried it yet.
I keep Seamonkey around with no plugins (well hardly any). I use it to check sites that may be acting weird in Firefox. If the site is fine in Seamonkey then it’s probably an addon in Firefox that is messing things up.
I try Chrome for some things just to see what it does. It’s missing color management. It would be neat if Chrome could somehow make Gmail act a bit like a standard desktop email app. Something so you could click on an email link in an app and have the email body/attachment open in Gmail ready to go. I think Google Gears could allow that, but I’m not sure.
IE9 has color management, but I’ve not been able to try it yet (The RC isn’t stable with one of my favorite apps). I’ll have to wait for the release version and hope it’s stable before I get to try it. I use IE8 for whatever whenever things that get opened in IE.
Chromium for searching and web development. Chromium is the fully open source version of Chrome, and is actually slightly nicer. Chromium has the best searching interface, so it is nice when wading through documentation and papers. Chromium seems to be the fastest browser.
Firefox for connecting to my test server with a fake DNS, and for the now rare non-WebKit-friendly sites. Firefox was my favorite back in the day before I moved to Galleon then Safari, but now the webkit browsers are much faster.
Epiphany (formerly Galleon) on Linux computers. It used to have the best bookmark manager, but I haven’t used a Linux desktop in a while.
Opera has a bunch of nice features that other browsers don’t, so I try it every now and then, but end up going back unless I need one of the cool features. Opera is usually the most standards compliant browser.
Chrome for Flash videos, since some people still insist on using that antiquated program. I have a Safari extension setup so I can play most Flash videos without actually having Flash installed, but it doesn’t always work. Chrome has its own internal copy of Flash, so I use Chrome when I can’t get around using Flash. I have a keyboard shortcut that automatically loads the active page from another browser in Chrome. Now that I don’t have Flash installed on my computer, I have a good bit of free memory and everything runs much faster; but with Chrome, I have access when I really need it.
Internet Explorer (almost always referred to as Exploder, always running on someone else’s computer or a virtual machine) to laugh at how it messes up websites. After finishing a new site, I’ll check it in Exploder and add some Exploder bug workarounds to make the site tolerable. There is a cool program that lets you have every version of IE installed at the same time, to check what sites look like for people who still use the default Windows setup.
The Windows color management takes care of adjusting the color for color managed applications.
I use a Datacolor Spyder to profile and calibrate my monitor. The Spyder creates a custom monitor display profile. Color managed applications (like Firefox) know how to load that monitor profile and properly adjust the colors. Color managed applications also know how to properly adjust the colors for images that have a different embedded profile (like sRGB, Adobe RGB, Apple RGB, and others).
If you do any image editing that adjusts for color you need to be calibrated, profiled, and use a color managed app. If you want to properly view professionally (or semi-pro) created images you need to be color managed. Otherwise how can you make any kind of determination about color?
A big reason why I like Firefox (and Seamonkey) is because they’re color managed. Browsing a site like AlbumArtExchange needs a color managed browser because some of the images have embedded profiles, and for the images that don’t have an embedded profile you can mostly assume sRGB.
I sometimes refer to Linux as Linsux. So I guess we’re both immature.
(Linux really does suck as a desktop OS. Server and specific utility use is more its thing.)
shittyRGB is the most common among web images, other than that you really only see adobe rgb 1998. I have never had any issues with other sites rendering color incorrectly over my calibration. I use colormunki and xrite, usually at d50-65 since I analyze prints here as well. If I’m looking at images to be judged for their color, then they are usually quality images, and if they’re quality images you would hope that the image holder has adjusted the color to their taste anyways. Maybe it is just because I have used “mainstream” popular web-browsers so I have not run into this problem. But if a web browser is adjusting color independently then that makes me nervous, because that leaves a lot of room for inaccuracy.
IE7,8,9 won’t open links in Google emails to unicyclist.com for me. Just get a blank page. So I don’t use IE. Every few months I search the web for a fix but nothing has worked.
I had used to Firefox, but it has started to pause and run slower and slower as I surf. So I don’t use FireFox.
I use Chrome. Works great.
Have Safari but don’t use it, saving that for when Chrome stops working.
Yeah, it isn’t very good, but at least it is UNIX like so I can get work done. I think it is still better as a desktop OS than on servers, but I use it for virtual servers because it is more convenient (programs I use are updated sooner) than BSD.
We do our web development for WebKit based browsers (Safari, Chromium/Chrome, Epiphany, …) because that is fastest. Then we go through and add support for Firefox, then Opera; then finally make sure it looks OK in IE7+. (We’ll probably drop IE7 soon though…)
And for those of you who use Chrome, give Chromium a try. I think it is slightly better…
It’s almost the same, just slightly nicer. I wouldn’t say Chrome or Chromium are dumbed down, they just don’t force the rarely used features on you if you don’t want them. And they have the best search interface, so when I’m searching documentation, it is much faster to find what I’m looking for. Even with the browsers that have lots of buttons and whatnot by default, my first step is to remove everything but the address bar and status bar because I just use keyboard shortcuts anyway.
Oh, I forgot to mention the classic browser Lynx, which I still occasionally use.
Since you’ve got a ColorMunki you’ve got a proper monitor profile and the profile should be set properly as the default profile for your monitor. When things are set right the color management will just work in Firefox. The current version of Firefox defaults to doing color management for tagged images. There’s a setting in about:config that will do untagged images as sRGB and also color manage browser rendered colors like CSS elements.
Open a tagged jpeg in both Firefox and Chrome and you should notice that the image is different in each browser.
Firefox isn’t adjusting the image color independently. It’s adjusting for color profiles the same way Photoshop or any other color managed application does. A jpeg with an embedded color profile should look the same in Photoshop as it does in Firefox (assuming you’ve got the working space in Photoshop set to sRGB since Firefox does sRGB as its working space).
I like the idea of a browser doing color management. It’s the right thing to do when displaying images and has some benefit also for browser generated elements as well. But color management has the possibility to be yet another headache for web designers. There will be new challenges like getting a color manged JPEG to exactly match a CSS rendered background color. The color of the JPEG will be different depending on whether the user has color management enabled or not. Ha ha. More good times for web developers. But that’s what you get when you design for a wild west environment like the web.
Despite the potential problems and how confusing color management can be, I would prefer to use a browser that is color managed. For now that means Firefox and Seamonkey. And IE9 when it hits general release.
There are a couple of Firefox add-ons that will allow you to restart Firefox and restore your tabs. Restart Firefox when it starts running slowly. When it reopens it will be off to a fresh start. Really sucks though that you even need to do that. The once lean and mean Firefox has turned into a pig.
Memory Restart The default is to alert you when memory reaches 500 Mb. You can change that in the config. Something around 400 Mb may be more suitable.
One of my biggest peeves about color in relation to computers is that no matter how perfect it is according to the numbers and my calibrated monitor, if someone with an uncalibrated monitor or a monitor that is cheap and only projects sRGB looks at my work, then it will look like crap. I don’t run out of printable gamut TOO often, but I’ve seen my website on sRGB monitors and it makes me want to throw up.
But you would hope that anyone that is analyzing your work to the extent of precise color would also have a calibrated monitor.
Just another reason why I like prints so much better. A perfect print is a perfect print, I can hand it to someone and they can look at it and it’s still perfect. I also like being able to physically hold my work, 1’s and 0’s just don’t feel the same. Hopefully in the future (near please) there will be better systems for color in relation to monitors.