Slashdot Mirror
Mozilla-Based Browser Sports Cocoa Front End
Aqua OS X writes: "Looks like there is a new project over at mozdev.org. The guys are working on a new gecko-powered Mac OS X browser, Chimera (not to be confused with the X11 browser which bears the same name), built using Mac OS X's Cocoa API. It renders well, and scraps the bulky Mozilla/Netscape UI. Supposedly, version 0.2 should support Quartz rendering." Most excellent. XPFE (cross-platform front-end) has been my biggest problem with Mozilla on Mac OS, and perhaps my biggest obstacle to long-term adoption of Mozilla as my primary browser.
OmniWeb. It isn't open source like Mozilla (or presumably Chimera), but it runs quickly, is relatively small and EXTREMELY fast, and (even better) fully uses the Aqua interface rather than its own, like Mozilla (?).
My two personal favorite features, though, are image filtering and JavaScript checking. Blocks ads and popups almost perfectly, in my experience.
TANSTAAFI: There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free iPod.
Chimera is definitely beta, though. I've noticed three bugs already.(I'm using it right now to make this post, so they're not major bugs)
All in all, it is really nice, though. It is already much snappier than Mozilla. I'll be following this one.
--
The internet is the greatest source of biased information in the history of mankind.
very nice so far - beats the current mozilla for looks and function. this is for precision and speed where I thought mozilla woulw be by now - i still dl it and delete it regularly - no release has made me want to stick thus far. this one'a a keeper even in beta.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
After moving to Mac OS X, I was becoming frustrated with iCab. It's the best on OS 9, but on OS X, it seemed to have issues with event-locking (all of the windows in iCab would be unresonsive while page was in it's last stage of rendering). I used to use OmniWeb in my NeXTSTEP/OpenStep/Rhapsody days, so gave that a try. After running it for a few weeks, there seemed to be some sort of rotting going on, and getting progressively slower. OmniWeb displays pages absolutely beautifully, and initially did so at a satisfactory speed.
:)
So, I thought I'd try Mozilla. This was after 0.9.8. I tried both that release, and a bunch of nightly builds, including ones that people said were "fast and stable." Man, Mozilla still blows. Under Slowaris and OS X, it still uses a huge amount of RAM and CPU time. I very disapointed.
Then I found Opera for OS X. It was great on all fronts except stability. At least a few times a day, Opera just crashes out of nowhere. Not surprising, considering it is a beta version. But this was getting annoying- everytime it'd crash, I'd loose any new bookmarks I made in the session.
Then a friend pointed me to OmniWeb's SneakyPeek releases, which are more or less weekly builds. Compared to OW 4.0.6, the last two SPs I've been running have been really great- faster and more stable than all previous OmniWeb versions I've run. I'll be sticking with it, even.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
Ok, I admit it. Maybe I'm not a part of the most average type of web-user. But I like to have a lot of tabs/windows open, not just 1-3 like a lot of people seem to have. We're talking about at least 5, and often around 15. iCab under OS 9 never had a problem with this. OmniWeb 4.0.6 got pretty slow with a lot of windows open, but the newer sneaky peaks haven't been. Opera kept it's pace with 15 windows being used, but it increased the probabilty that it would crash.
Mozilla though, is an entirely another story. On my iBook500 with 320 MB RAM, or a 500 MHz UltraSparc II w/ 256 MB RAM, it crawls as soon as I've got either a few tabs or a few windows open. By the time I've got 8-9 tabs or windows open, it's unusably slow, often taking 1-5 *seconds* just to open a new window!
One of my biggest complaints with Mozilla in the past was that it took so damn long for new windows or tabs to open. As a person who is always cmd-clicking to open links in new windows (so I can continue reading things in the last page, I read many pages at the same time, non-linearily), Mozilla is a pain in the ass to use.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
One of the best things I've seen in a browser is the scrapbook in IE for MacOS. This isn't even in the Windows version of IE and I really have no idea why.
I'd love to see this in Mozilla, or any of the front-end browsers. It's very convient when you order something, to just toss the reciept page in the scrapbook so you can refrence the tracking number without hassle. Or when I'm looking at a professor's website for his notes, just scrapbook what I have to read and read it offline(i'm on an ibook)
Tabs are great for browsing porn and warez sites, this is going to be my favourite, I really miss my Galeon
funny how much the comments on this thread have nothing to do with chimera.
"have you tried opera?"
"how about omniweb?"
who cares? this is about chimera. and, though it is currently in pre-pre-beta probably alpha stage (hell, a good many of the basic features aren't even there yet), it is waaay faster than any browser out there - probably for any platform. check out the speed tests at chimera.mozdev.org. wow. and when you try it, you can see that it's true.
funny that the person raving about omniweb was saying how fast it is.. their benchmarks nail it as the slowest of the bunch (and i'd agree). omniweb looks great, but it ain't no speed demon. ie is much faster.
anyway, i check the development site every day to see if there are new versions released. each new release has been leaps and bounds better than the last. i'd say that this will be hands down best browser in a couple months if they keep pushing it forward at the current pace.
no one has commented on the sidebar yet - very cool. when they finish it, it will even have google search in the sidebar pull-out. hell yeah.. that's one of the few things i really like about opera (and the google toolbar for IE on windoze).
big round of applause for the fine folks developing this browser!
I like it a lot already. As much as I love mozilla's composer, I do not need another mail and news reader, and as far as that goes, I don't need an integrated IRC client either.
I will certainly follow this one closely. I'm using it now, and except for some minor MINOR bugs, it seems pretty good. Muche better than a 0.1 version would indicate.
Is it just me, or is Mac OS X really starting to get some pretty cool open-source apps? (I mean besides the ports of the linux stuff)
My father is a blogger.
I don't "rip on" XPFE just because I don't use it. I "rip on" it because it doesn't look like a Mac app. Mac apps should look like Mac apps. Mozilla doesn't look like a Mac app. Therefore it's bad (for those of us who value the concistency HIG principle, anyway). MSIE, on the other hand, is a fantastic app as far as looking and acting like a Mac app. However, it is crash-happy and from Microsoft. :-)
... bah!
In addition to looking wrong, it also doesn't act properly. At least it does drag and drop to the Desktop, but it lacks Keychain support, AppleScript support
I dig Mozilla, but not as a Mac app.
In Chimera, we plan to support a separate location bar. The only reason we didn't is an engineering restriction: Cocoa windows only support 1 toolbar by default. If you want to have any additional toolbars, you have to roll your own. In order to get something up fast that people could use, we opted for the easy way out.
We plan to support a separate location bar by default (with the URL bar being an optional component that you can put on the main toolbar should you prefer it there).
Dave
(hyatt@netscape.com)
I'm almost ready to switch to X. I'm really Really REALLY sick of Nutscrape 4.7.9 taking a big fat dump 5-6 times a day on my classic installation. I'm old school Mac & Linux and X is just too damned funky to please me right off the bat. I think I can force myself to suffer through it until whatever major changes Apple's bound to make to X in the future (too many people are having trouble and this is such a new GUI implementation to not make some major changes soon, maybe 10.5 or something). On X I can't justify using Mozilla. It's lack of decent javascript support is what's holding me back. I have to have that support. The web interface to my Packeteer won't work right without it. I do like Opera. I don't think I've tested the JS support in it yet though. Mozilla developers, if you're listening, fix the JS issues and you've scored at least one more user.