M Mac OS X

© February 2003 Tony Lawrence

This was my original 2003 iBook - things have changed since then!

Although I generally really love my Mac, one thing I do NOT like is how easily some programs go off into never-never land.

Example: this morning, I accidentally typed what I intended to be a Google search with Safari into the Mail.app search box. An easy mistake to make because the box is the same size, in the same place. - I just wasn't paying attention to what app I was in.

Mail.app immediately started searching my mailboxes..unfortunately, I have a LOT of mailboxes, and the search is so intensively single minded that there is no way to stop it. In fact, having switched away to Safari to do the actual search I wanted, I couldn't even switch back: Mail.app was too busy hunting down what it thought I wanted. Top showed it constantly gaining cpu time, 10 threads, and lots of memory in use too.

The only way to stop it is to Force Quit. That's annoying.

Speaking of top and cpu time: what's with IE and Safari? Just sitting there, doing nothing, they both constantly use the cpu. IE is much worse than Safari, but exactly what is it that these programs need to do when I'm switched away? I could see if they were sitting on a page with an automatic refresh or something like that, but even that shouldn't be sucking down the cpu like these two do. Mozilla does the same thing, so it's obviously something about browser design in general.

Got something to add? Send me email.

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