My Baby Died. :( My New Baby is an Air. How Do You Like Air & Snow Leopard? Browser ?

Amie

Amie

Mac Convert for Life
Wow it's been ages since I've been here! I hope you are all doing well. My baby (2004 iBook G4 passed away 3 days ago - motherboard failure). After using it pretty much nonstop for almost 8 years it was the BEST computer I ever had. The motherboard died without warning, very fast (well at least it didn't suffer LOL) and it performed flawlessly right up to that point. (sigh)

Anyway...... I am now the proud "parent" of a new MacBook Air and I love it. Just wondering what you guys think of the Air? I love the the flash storage hard drive concept! It's GENIUS, IMO. I bought the 11 incher and I absolutely love the portability and the light weight of it. It's amazing! At first I thought nah it's too small and it's probably not powerful. Boy was I WRONG!

So I am curious to hear your opinions about the MacBook Air and what you all think of Snow Leopard (I was running Panther on my old iBook) so I am new to the Leopard family and I totally skipped Tiger altogether.

One last question.......... browsers. I have been a longtime user of Firefox and I never really liked Safari (not because it doesn't work well - it does - but it just UGLY, sorry LOL), so I installed Chrome yesterday because I have been hearing great things about it. So far I like it. Which browser do you think runs faster/better on a Mac? Safari, Firefox or Chrome?

Sorry for the long post, I will summarize, basically 3 questions...........
1. Thoughts on MacBook Air
2. Thoughts on Snow Leopard
3. Thoughts on Safari, Firefox and Chrome

Thanks a bunch everyone!
 
What? 48 views and 0 replies. Aawwww guys, I'm disappointed.
Just kidding, I will be patient. :)
 
Hi Amie,
Sorry about the loss of the previous Mac, and congrats on the new Air baby.
1. I think I'll need to get one of those 11" ones too as my next Mac. My hubby's using the 11" one (and a 15" MBP) for work, and the Air is just.. so much more portable.
First I considered it to be expensive, when compared to all the netbooks BUT its features set it aside. The features are for a full laptop, and, well, at least compared to the ancient iBooks they are still cheaper (ok, the prices of the computers in general have come down but still. 2000+ euros for a 12" 700 MHz 20 GB 128 MB Combo iBook one day...)
Well, I want one and will try to get one before Xmas
2. Faster than the previous. But if one's about to get a new Mac now, and can wait a few more months, why not wait for Lion?
3. The browsers I use, in order of usage: Safari, Firefox, Camino.
No Chrome. Firefox I use with a lot of addons (add blockers, flash blockers, scripts disabled etc), and some sites I prefer seen on FF or Camino, the rest in Safari.
Why not try all the browsers, and see which one you like the most? There's no right or wrong answer, whichever will work for you best. And no harm in keeping more than a few in stock too, as some sites work better on some browser than some other.
 
First off, Chrome because I can keep the bookmarks synced between 3 different machines no problem. Firefox,just because and Safari although I still have some sites that don't like it. Going to be giving Camino a good workout here shortly and it just might give FF the boot !
 
Oh wow, hey Amie! Sure has been a long time. I've also been rather scarce here, but am making the effort to visit every once in a while. Shame about the iBook, especially knowing how much you loved that Mac, but happy to hear that you found a suitable successor.

As for the browser, I've been using Chrome on Windows and Mac as well as Chromium on Linux (Chromium is the open source version of Chrome also provided by Google). I had moved to it after my frustrations with Firefox 3.x. However, I have been very impressed with Firefox 4.x, so much so that it has drawn my attention away from Google's browser. And given Firefox's robust add-on features, I'm very close to moving back to Firefox. All that said, I'd imagine that the latest Safari would be vastly improved from the version you were using in the past so I wouldn't rule it out until you give the latest version a try.
 
Good to see you back, Amie!

I've never used a MacBook air myself. I've never found myself thinking "darn, this 13" MacBook Pro is just TOO BIG", and I like my ports, SD slot and speed, so I wouldn't be motivated to switch. But for what it is, I think it's a nice system. Much more appealing than the first generation Airs.

I've been playing around with a lot of browsers lately. I use Safari primarily, but I also use Firefox nearly every day (partly from paranoia; I don't like using the same browser for Gmail and Facebook and all that jazz for everything else too). I've also experimented with Chrome. My personal findings:

1. Every modern browser is a memory hog, and is full of memory leaks. Firefox 4 is the worst offender here. In a day of browsing it will bloat up to over 500MB memory usage, so I quit+reload it frequently. Safari bloats up over time, too, but not as dramatically. Firefox 3.5 wasn't as bad as 4 in this regard.

2. All modern browsers are pretty fast. Speed was once a deciding factor in my browser choice, but not anymore.

3. Chrome is a bit buggy on Mac. For example, it will rarely quit gracefully. When I try to close it, it will freeze up and I need to force-quit it. It's also uses more memory than, say, Safari, due to the way it splits every page into its own process. This improves responsiveness and (in theory) stability, but it comes at a cost. Eventually I stopped using Chrome because I found it too unreliable. Of course, YMMV.
 
I have a hot-rodded (maxed out) 11" Air as well.

It performs better than most of my other computers -- mainly due to the speed of the SSD. The 1.6GHz processor isn't a bottleneck in anything I do (mainly coding, web development, and light image processing).

So, here goes:

1) The Air is the bomb. Hands-down. Debating between an 11" and a 13"? Flip a coin -- you can't go wrong.
2) Snow Leopard is the shiznit, but I can't wait for Lion.
3) Safari all the way. Firefox with the Web Developer toolbar installed for debugging and pixel-perfect placements.
 
Hey, thanks everyone for your replies! It's nice to see some old faces here! It's like a welcome home party with my fellow Mac-ies. :)

I am looooooovin' my new MacBook Air! This is my third day using Chrome...... so far, so good. It's really fast and I haven't experienced any crashes or bugginess. AND....... I didn't know this but Chrome has add-ons and themes and extensions like Firefox, which is one of the reasons I always liked FF. But I think Chrome is just as awesome - if not faster. In fact, I have been doing some research since my last post and I found a few techie benchmark tests between Chrome, FF, Safari, Camino, Opera and a few others...... and Chrome came in top place in almost EVERY category. Safari and FF were close runners up.

Thanks again for your replies. I am off to read and post some more. I look forward to hearing from you! :)

MAC ON! (Instead of rock on! hahahaa) ;)
- Amie
 
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