Hello,

I've always used Skritter with Safari and a Bamboo on Mac OS X with flawless performance and fluidity, however, since the latest Safari (/OSX?) update, the framerate has decreased significantly to the point that every few seconds it doesn't register a portion of a stroke or typed pinyin. I've tried reinstalling Safari, the Flash player, and the Wacom plugin (as well as disabling the plugin) all to no avail. I've also tried switching over to Chrome, only to find that it is also pretty unresponsive. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

To test this out, I just updated Safari to 5.1 and I'm seeing the same pauses as you mention. It feels like a garbage collection stutter issue, although I can't be sure. I don't see other mentions of this happening with Safari 5.1 after some searching.

Chrome on Mac has been slower than Safari in the past in a different way, which is disappointing because it was super fast around Chrome 4, but they must have changed something that makes Skritter run much more slowly after that. I've slightly improved its performance recently, but it's still not as smooth as it should be.

It's frustrating that now Safari is also giving performance problems on Mac! Safari 5.1 is pretty new, so I hope that this issue won't persist into its next version. Until then, I would recommend trying Firefox for Skritter on Mac if the Chrome version isn't doing it for you.

Hey Nick,

Thanks so much for the quick response. Perhaps due to a bad experience using Skritter with a previous release of Firefox (I should have figured that performance waxes and wanes with each successive version of every browser) , I hadn't thought to give it another chance, but aside from not recognizing the Wacom plugin (admittedly pretty unimportant), it's working wonderfully. Thanks again for your help!

Good to hear. It still boggles my mind how perfectly fast browsers can suddenly "improve" their garbage collection and mess things up.

Is that on Lion or on (Snow) Leopard? I'm planning on upgrading my system tomorrow and would like to know what to expect.

I saw the problem on Snow Leopard, whereas Evan saw it on Lion. So it's not OS-dependent, but rather a problem with Safari 5.1.

Sorry, I was a little ambiguous. I'm still on Snow Leopard, which had a general update in addition to some application-specific ones (including Safari) around the Lion release date.

Yeah, I just got a new mac with Lion. The Safari was lagging, so I downloaded Firefox and it works fine. On the PC i was using before i got this mac, it worked fine on Chrome. My work computer has Microsoft internet explorer and it also works great on that.