Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with web and mac

Web Browser Woes

mahoganyslide — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 11:39:23 -0800

What is the best Web Browser for an intel Mac in terms of low CPU and RAM usage? I currently have a Macbook Pro (2009 unibody) with 2GB of RAM. Everything runs fine otherwise, but I'm having trouble with the web browser.

I tend to open and close a lot of tabs in the course of a day (research, recreation, school, etc) and do not regularly restart my browser/computer. After a few days, the activity monitor will show that both Firefox and Safari have 40-50% CPU and 500-600MB of RAM usage. This of course slows my computer down considerably. Once I exit the browser and both the CPU and RAM are freed up, my computer starts to behave once again.

Are there other functional browsers out there that do not strain my computer as much? Or should I simply restart my browser/computer at the end of every day and recover all of my tabs?

Have a Macbook and a burning desire to learn web development. Tell me where to begin.

capitalist.pig — Wed, 27 May 2009 12:47:35 -0800

I have a Macbook and a burning desire to learn web development. Tell me where to begin. Apart from being very comfortable in OS X, I know very little about web development. What are some helpful books or websites for the beginner. There's just so much, I don't know where to start. Thanks.

How do I justify the purchase of a Mac for web development?

Awkward Turtle — Thu, 08 May 2008 13:36:14 -0800

Is there a definitive source I can point to or glean knowledge from in order to justify the purchase of a Mac for web development and design? I'm trying to put together a request for the purchase of a MacBook Pro. I have already included its ability to enable my working from the road. I've also thrown in the increasing number of Safari/MacOS users accessing our site. I'm in search of arguments in favor of the Mac (for development and design) which don't dwell on stability and security, but rather how the Mac is a better platform for development.

Color me rather uneducated, but at a recent technology conference I was surprised to find most of the developers in attendance claimed to use Macs for all their coding work. As a web developer by trade (and designer by necessity as our organization is small) I have worked with varying flavours of Windows and Linux/Unix over the years. While I previously coded mostly by hand, I switched to DreamWeaver when my org moved to ColdFusion. A kind person recently pointed me to CFEclipse which has me rather excited (I do love code snippets).

I work for a large state university, in case that makes a difference. I've found a few articles that are not quite what I'm looking for (but are close).

Will switching to a mac make developing awesome?

Why Mac? 37signals can tell you
The video on this one doesn't seem to be there anymore.

Almost half of Princeton computer purchases are Macs

Turn of dates in iWeb 08

wavejumper — Sun, 04 May 2008 21:54:44 -0800

How do I get rid of the date showing up in iWeb 08 blogs? In iWeb 06 you could easily turn them off, I remember, allowing you to use the "blog" template for all sorts of other kinds of non-dated subdirectory webpages. What I'm talking about just to clarify is that under the title of each blog entry on your main blog page in the '08 version will show up the date or time in some form. You can choose different versions of it (i.e. March 4th, 2008 as opposed to 3/4/08) but I can't seem to turn it off! Any hints or hacks?

Where can I find recommendations for my new server?

media_itoku — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 16:46:24 -0800

I've been offered funding to buy a shiny new web server. Now the Chair wants me to give her some specs/costs. How do I go about giving her a ballpark figure? This machine will be serving an online academic journal with a lot of multimedia content; it needs to be super-stable and not burn out in a hurry since this is a one-time grant. Now, obviously given my druthers I'd go nuts and get a Mac Pro and OSX Server. But, short of that, where's the best place to look for advice? Must be Mac or LAMP; no Windows.

& of course the Dean did not give me a budget amount.. we're playing Budget Chicken!

How can I become a really effective web developer using Windows?

Deathalicious — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 21:45:57 -0800

What are some tips/resources for someone very familiar with web development on mostly Mac/Linux who now needs to do web development on Windows? I'm looking for tips on applications, techniques, useful websites. This really is web development, not design, so I'm more interested in development tools, resources/books on Microsoft technologies and how they work. etc.

Aquify Safari 3 form elements?

tepidmonkey — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 18:32:56 -0800

What should I put in a custom browser stylesheet to override and Aquify all web form element styles (buttons, text fields, etc.) in Safari 3.0.4? I'd like to undo custom properties like colors, fonts, and borders, and make all form elements display natively, using Aqua, like Safari used to do in previous versions. I'm essentially looking for the opposite answer to this question, using a custom userContent.css-esque stylesheet. (Thanks for your help.)

My Mac is starting up so s-l-o-w-l-y

pman78 — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 22:25:44 -0800

My Mac PB takes about 10 minutes to start up and then another 5 to load mac mail or safari. Am I about to crash? Here's the scoop...I'm not a techie so I'll do the best I can. I have an Intel PB about 2 years old. OS 10.4.10. About a month ago I realized that my HD was almost full and began to get rid of stuff to free up space. I've emptied my trash. I now have 13 GB free; 97 GB used. When I start up my mac it takes f-o-r-e-v-e-r (10-15 minutes?) to load up and get me to the desktop. And then it takes about 5 minutes more to load any program. Once it's up and going it seems to be fine with the exception of loading any web pages which seem to take about 30-45 seconds for Safari to even recognize the web address and then it's slow to load the pages. I'm pretty sure the two things (slow start up and slow loading web pages) are connected as they both started happening around the same time. I've run disk utilities, I've run Onyx, I've zapped my pram, I've backed up, I've removed most files and projects from my desktop....nothing seems to help. To my best recolection all of this trouble seemed to start when I started throwing stuff in the trash to free up space. Before that it was fine. Does this make any sense? Is my Mac about to die a painful death? Should I re install the OS? Or is it something else? Any help is very much appreciated....

Mac or Firefox solution to download local copies of web sites?

dripdripdrop — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 12:12:10 -0800

I'm looking for Mac OSX software or a Firefox plug-in that will allow me to create local copies of web sites to be viewed later. I will be without web access for about a week and I want to do some work on few php and css projects. To do so, I will need to have tutorials handy. I'd like something for the Mac that will allow me to download a page including all graphics and download all the pages it links to (1 to 2 links deep).

What easy to use (and free) text editor and ftp clients exist for the Mac?

handee — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 04:32:21 -0800

Can anyone recommend some easy HTML editing and uploading tools for a mac? (ftp, text editor) I'm going to be teaching a friend basic HTML - he's in a different city though, so this will be remote. He's also a mac user (I'm linux). I'm therefore not sure what software to recommend - a graphical FTP client and a text editor which does syntax highlighting are the basics. Free is good - I know of BBedit, but that (I think) costs money. What should he get?

timed screen grabs of web page image

sharksandwich — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 12:49:44 -0800

Is there a Mac application out there that will take a screen shot of a web page graphic that changes frequently? Something that will run in the background (grabbing then adding to a folder) once I set the URL?

Mac right-click problems with firefox 2.0

BigBrownBear — Mon, 25 Dec 2006 11:53:10 -0800

Mac right-click problems with firefox 2.0 I used to be able to open links in a new tab by holding down the mouse button on my mac mini. Since i upgraded this feature seems to have disappeared. is there a way to make it come back?

the best way in install and run Windows Vista on a Mac

eustacescrubb — Mon, 11 Dec 2006 13:42:04 -0800

I want to take advantage of mf my new MacBook Pro's Intel chip: what's the best way in install and run Windows Vista on it? I'm a web designer, and my primary reason for running Windows is to test for Windows browsers. I'd like Windows to have as little impact on my machine as possible. On the other hand, It'd be nice if I could run Windows like I use to run Classic -- as an application running while I run other OSX apps, instead of having reboot the computer to switch back and forst between OSX and Vista. Is this possible? Are there security risks? If so, how can I minimize/prevent them?

Website maintenance.

10ch — Thu, 21 Sep 2006 18:23:18 -0800

How do you keep your websites properly maintained? I'm what you might call a Typical Webmaster.

I manage a big, big site (a school site for a university), five big sites (different departments within the school) and then a couple handfuls of event-based, research-based or student-org-based websites. There are probably 20 in total.

It's just me doing the design, code and maintenance for these sites. This means that they get created (or upgraded) and then all too quickly outdated because I have zero time to spend working on them post launch.

If people notify me of updates or corrections, I make them. But I am unable to be proactive with that end of things because we're either busy creating new sites or upgrading outdated ones.

We're employing content management systems where they make sense and are doing what we can to keep content fresh and up-to-date, but that plan is only as good as the folks who create the content are at creating it.

What I'm looking for is some sort of system to remind me to bug various "owners" of information on a sometimes random/sometimes routine basis.

There probably isn't an easy answer for this, but if you've got an electronic or hipster-variety tickler/reminder system that works well for you -- or have had any success in managing higher ed websites (or just a random slew) -- I'd appreciate hearing about your strategies and/or successes.

I'll be happy to chime in if I've left any details out that need further explanation or elaboration.

Dreamweaver= Evil?

miss tea — Tue, 30 May 2006 15:01:40 -0800

Why does Dreamweaver 8 (mac) show my cursor insertion point in the wrong spot in design view? I use Dreamweaver 8, and do a lot of hand coding, but when I am editing copy I like to use the design view. However, when I click on a word, Dreamweaver 8 shows the insertion point 1 to 2 letters over to the left from where it actually is. Needless to say, this is frustrating and has completely confounded my google-fu (disturbingly, searching for "dreamweaver insertion point" comes up with porn). I've tried changing the font preferences, no dice at all. Any advice?

Why won't my web pages load on the first try?

TedW — Tue, 11 Apr 2006 19:31:00 -0800

Why won't web pages load the first time I ask for them? I recently got a new computer and ever since I gave my ISP the MAC address of the new computer, my internet connection has become spotty. I have bundled cable/internet/phone with Knology and a tech has come out and insured I have a good signal, so the problem seems like it is on my end. The symptoms are as follows: the browser will often give me a time-out error when loading a page (even something as reliable as Google); hitting "try again" or "refresh" will often result in the page loading instantaneously, as if it were in the browser's cache. Why didn't it just load the first time?

Technical details: Webstar cable modem (from ISP) connected via ethernet to a Netgear WGR614 wireless router (with the latest firmware); Mac G5 running OSX 10.4 and Dell Running Windows XP connecting via wifi. Using Firefox on the Dell, and Firefox and Safari on the Mac, the behavior described above happens. I have confirmed that the router is sending the correct MAC address to the ISP. What is going on?

Linux for a web designer! Need advice of what versions to use.

spinko — Tue, 21 Feb 2006 08:05:28 -0800

Linux for a web designer! Need advice of what versions to use. I have just bought a brand new Dell laptop and I thought it would be good to learn other OS's like OsX (x86), Windows XP Media Centre and also Linux. Regarding Linux is where I stumble if you can help that would be great.

1) 12gb for Windows, 10gb for MacOSx and 5gb for Linux, 25gb for software, files to work. Do you think I need more for Linux or would 5gb be enough?

2) The files partition will have 25gb, What standard should I use (fat32, ntfs, etc) so that all of the 3 OS's would be able to see my music and work files.

3) What version Linux (e.g Red Hat, Lindows, etc) should I use. I have never used Linux before, however I was brought up on Dos. I would like a great platform which is easy to use, good looking UI like OSx, able to install Photoshop (through emulator), and be able to run a local host to test out php with apache. I have heard that you can run some windows applications on some versions of Linux.

4) Multiboot menu, what can I use for a multiboot startup? So I can choose which OS to load.

5) Is there any got to have applications that you recommend for both Linux or OsX?

My laptop specs are 1.86ghz centrino, 1gb ram, 60gb hdd and 128mb Radeon videocard. Basically Dell Inspiron 6000.

Thanks for your time

Mac visual web editors

40 Watt — Sun, 08 Jan 2006 10:06:07 -0800

Any Mac web designers used Rapidweaver or Freeway Pro? I know how to write valid (X)HTML and CSS, but I'm always looking for ways to save time and I was wondering if these tools actually produce valid, clean, and accessible code as advertised.

Mac browser stats?

jca — Wed, 17 Aug 2005 09:54:16 -0800

Where can I find updated statistics on Mac browser usage? I'd really like to know the precentage of users of Safari versus IE versus Firefox on the Mac platform. It would be nice to know when I can start ignoring Mac IE when developing sites. ;)

Display/Render problem with IE5 on a Mac

signal — Tue, 07 Dec 2004 15:21:12 -0800

IE5 Mac bug (I think): A site I am working on looks fine on all platforms except IE 5.2 Mac. Basically, it adds space around [p] elements and inside [td] elements which shouldn't be there, and misinterprets selectors in baffling ways.
Is there a well known way to fix this kind of behavior other than saying 'to hell with it'?

Camino runs much more slowly on my G4 667 TiBook than on the Lombard 333 Mhz Powerbook. I need a good browser.

weston — Sun, 22 Aug 2004 21:55:46 -0800

MacBrowserHell: I just updgraded from a Lombard 333 Mhz Powerbook to a G4 667 TiBook with 1GB RAM. Camino now seems to run dog-slow. And the others have their troubles... Firefox .9 has the same problems it had with .8 -- namely that periodically, it just decides to stop responding to typed urls and/or dialog boxes become permanent fixtures -- and also seems a little less responsive. IE is, well, IE, and Safari, while nice, still has its CSS and Javascript bugs. Also, I can't run it when I have to boot into 10.2.8 instead of Jaguar to do some compatibility checking.

I'm particularly grumpy because the waits have all the signs of being a rendering-related: the progress bar fills up, but then the page doesn't appear for another 30 seconds or so, and in the meanwhile keystrokes slow down, and occasionally the spinning beachball of death appears. Yet I can't imagine this is due to the change in hardware -- I've upgraded processor, processor speed, and memory.

So I'm wondering: does anyone else see this? Does anyone else recall Chimera and Firefox being truly zippy amazements, and now find them burdensome and clunky? Did I just forget to check some box appeasing the cocoa/quartz demidieties? In short, what is going on here?

Recommendations for learning web design basics using Mac tools?

elwoodwiles — Thu, 05 Aug 2004 10:07:44 -0800

Any good online tutorials or books to teach web design basics? I need to know things about tables, layout and inserting/formating text. I'd prefer advice that deals with composer or some other free, mac friendly application. Thanks!