Whatever was screwing up Safari’s ability to load many websites seems largely abated. Viv was noting it too on her machine, but she largely uses IE still, so it’s possible that there was something affecting my ISP’s pipes. At any rate, even while the slowdown was in effect, Firefox was able to successfully load even the most problematic web pages.

Following Tom’s suggestion, I downloaded the G4-optimized version of Firefox, and don’t regret it. It’s clearly faster and more reliable at page renders than Safari, and thus far I haven’t experienced the teeth-gnashing large-cache slowdown problem that happens when Safari is used for more than about 8 hours.

However, an oddity in the application is driving me batty – although no extensions are reported as being installed, and I have been unable to find comprehensive documentation, it appears that mouse gestures are built in to the version of the browser I’m using. This is interesting and nice and all, but

• I’m using a laptop with Sidetrack experimentally installed
• the apparent lack of documentation makes the gestures undiscoverable

Taken together that means that as I attempt to use the trackpad to do one thing or another, in resposnse to apparently random input, the browser jumps back one or two pages in the cache or forward to uncertainly trageted pages. It’s easy enough to correct, but when you’re filling out a text-form field and you leap back a page or two it’s highly disconcerting.

I will likely disable Sidetrack for a day or so to see if that enables me to isolate the gestures. Additionally, I really need to read the developer notes on the G4 builds.