Put simply, Safari chokes on this little plan. For some reason, opening tabs in Safari windows seems particularly resource intensive, and after I've got about 6 windows open, each with 5-7 tabs, it starts to crawl so much so that I'm waiting for mouse clicks, then I'm waiting for Expose to kick in and so on.
With Camino, I've had no trouble surfing multiple pages with multiple tabs and then switching, say, to a live online game of Texas Hold 'Em. Camino isn't bullet-proof -- it will slow down, too -- but no where near as quickly as Safari. It's also not as buggy as Firefox, in my experience, which tends to go down once every 18 hours or so.
Camino is Mozilla technology based on the Gecko engine, but it's Mac-only, meaning, perhaps, a better product if only because they're more focused than the Firefox team. True, it doesn't sport as many fun features as Safari (for instance, it appears to do nothing native with RSS), but it's sprightly, slim and it gives you that designed-for-a-Mac-and-therefore-just works kinda feeling.
I actually got my author copies a few weeks ago, but haven't had much time to blog about the book I was working on for a good part of the spring -- the book is out, and it looks great. The Sybex team has done a great job on it, as has Kirk McElhearn, my co-author, who shouldered even more of the burden this time. This is a fun project -- it's only the second book that I've ever had go four editions, and I'm proud of its breadth -- I also hope it's a fun and useful read for those who buy it. Please feel free to ask me any questions about it on the thread.