Outfoxed By Flash Fires: I’m Off Safari
March 27, 2008
Just hours after posting my article recommending the latest Safari browser I started hearing about problems with Flash sites and possibly others, so I created a fresh, default install of 3.1 for XP/Vista (without Quicktime) and I went looking for trouble.
Where to? Well, the Flash website seemed a good place to start. At the Macromedia page I was told, “You have version 9,0,115,0 installed”. Ok, good to know, but there wasn’t any flash on the page and the Macromedia.com default page just forwarded me to adobe.com.
But voila, the adobe site has a flash banner promoting Acrobat Reader. The presentation ran fine, though I wondered if I had noticed a (very slight) jitter, so I opened the same page in Firefox and ran them side by side.
While the Firefox media ran at normal speed and ran smoothly, the Safari version ran about half speed, or worse. I had to close the Firefox page to get Safari back to speed. The Safari load/reload times for the Flash were none too impressive either.
So, it certainly didn’t take long to find a problem, though it helps to know what you’re looking for. I could have gone on and looked for more, but there seems little point.
Either way, there is a problem with the Flash addin and several issues have been reported by others such as Alec Saunders and Paul McDougall, so I must withdraw my original recommendation of Safari.
Meanwhile, I CAN recommend Firefox with absolute confidence. I have been using Firefox almost exclusively for several years and it works like a dream. It is free, is truly standards compliant and has captured a growing share of the world market.
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