There are three things that have really been bugging me lately:

1. Safari takes about two minutes from the time I click its icon in the dock to the time my my.yahoo.com page is completely loaded. Yes, two minutes. About thirty seconds are taken by the main window just sitting there blankly. Another thirty seconds or so while "connecting to my.yahoo.com" is displayed (i.e., it's looking up the server), and then another minute to actually load the page. Additional websites also require an unusually long "connecting to..." period. Trashing the app and redownloading from Apple hasn't helped. Trashing preferences and icon folders and reseting Safari hasn't helped.

UPDATE 2/25/05: Aaaaand, this one seems to have been fixed by the 10.3.8 system update. I noticed the slowdown had also begun to affect iTunes as well (both in accessing the CDDB and the Store), but after updating, both Safari and iTunes are much more responsive when going out into the network. Damn... Two down, one to go.

2. Firefox takes about 30 seconds to open. It started sometime after I downloaded the 1.0 release. Then, a few days ago, I was installing some extensions (the reason I like Firefox) and had to restart the browser for the extensions to take effect. Unfortunately, Firefox simply stopped working after that. It wouldn't launch at all. Several complete erases and reinstalls later and the problem hasn't really cleared up. Firefox will launch now (after the 30 second delay) but only if it feels like it. In other words, sometimes it doesn't launch and just sits there with "Firefox" in the menu bar and nothing else. The dock icon says "Application not responding," and sometimes relaunching after force quitting will work, but sometimes not. Again, really strange and really annoying. And I can't think of any preference-type file to trash. I love Firefox though. You should too. Do us all a favor and take responsibility for your computer while on the Internet: download Firefox.

UPDATE 2/23/05: Bored briefly yesterday, I downloaded FireFix, the nightly build manager/downloader for Firefox (based on CaminoKnight, the excellent nightly build manager for Camino). Wouldn'tcha know it? The launch delay seems to have been fixed since 1.0 and Firefox now opens in a jiffy. Yeah nightly builds! (Until I discover a devastating, system destroying bug, that is).

3. Something's mucking up my QuickTime player: navigating to movies in the Open and Save dialogs is excruciatingly slow. Things are fine while I'm going through the directories leading up to any movie files, but once I get to the files' directory things slow to a crawl and many sightings of the spinning beach ball are encountered. Again, redownloaded the app, but no fix. And it's just QT player with the problem. Baaah.

Any good news to report on the computer front? Um... Hmm... Nothing leaps to mind, which means all else is good I suppose.