But Brave isn’t half-bad.

Aesop’s comment prompts me to mention that nowadays, when I save anything at all, I try to include the URL in the file-name. What with some combination of this wonderful Mavericks OS X (which I hate; I still run OS X 10.6.8 on the MacBook Pros) on the AirBook (a.k.a. MacBook Air for short) with or without the Cruzer flash-drives I use, it’s impossible to save the URL reliably in the Comments box of the Information box for the file.

(I don’t include the internet-calling designation ‘ https:// ‘ part in the URL, as a rule. The OS doesn’t approve of colons in the filename. Sometimes it tells me I can’t do that, and sometimes it substitutes a dash+space for the colon. I do leave 2 spaces at both ends of the URL, for ease of getting the right character-string should I wish to copy the URL, but of course leave the final dot just before the file-type. Thus, ___ .htm or ___ .mp4 or ___ .xls etc., where the ___ is the URL.)

. . .

For those of you who use Time Machine, is it possible to use the TM backup as you start-up disk without further ado such as Carbon Copy Cloner?

Even if it isn’t, will restoring directly from the TM backup put everything back precisely where it was, i.e. with the same machine addresses and so pointers?

And that prompts me to ask whether, when restoring from TM B/U, I should somehow erase the internal HD? (A very scary thought. I should think that wouldn’t even be possible unless you can start up from the TM external B/U.)

Thanks very much to anyone who feels moved to enlighten me. I try to make sense of the various “help” sites (Apple, Mozilla, MacRumors, anything else I can find including videos), but they all seem to disagree and also seem to need a lot of reading between the lines. I know I’ve gotten some useless or downright bad advice from the good ol’ Genius Bar folks and the Apple techs over the phone.

And, it’s true. If it ain’t broke don’t fix it. (Applies also to the Constitution, she noted with a bit of a snarl.)

–J.

“a voice crying in the wilderness” has the right idea.
One good piece of advice I read years ago was to never update an OS, outside of the few security patches that come in from time to time; better to just buy a new machine if you wanted any of the new features, or needed to be connected to other upper-dated machines.

Keep using the one you like as well, until it dies, but be sure to update everything that you can, as amply detailed by our resident techies.

Which reminds me….

I’m using Opera which has a light footprint compared to the others.

I’ve been meaning to try Brave, but it didn’t support the EverNote extension which is now essential to my browsing. I can see that it does now.

neo: You got that right. When I was young and innocent, I always upgraded to the latest, greatest rev, eager as a child on Christmas morn.

Now I won’t upgrade unless there is a gun to my head or I’m just feeling devil-may-care.

Having worked in the biz, I know how it works. The latest rev might fix a bug or two, but mostly marketing demands new features for the sake of checkbox lists, or worse, adding spyware or copy-protection schemes.

That was absolutely NOT the problem. It ran especially slowly when I would first use it after turning the computer on.