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Mac OS X Slow for Web Browsing?
Atryn writes "Wired News has reportedly confirmed user performance complaints in their own tests. From the article: 'That was a conscious decision Apple made,' Mac MSIE project manager Jimmy Grewal said. 'They optimized for user experience rather than raw performance.'" My hunch is that you can take care of many Mac OS X performance issues by logging in as user ">console" ...
Painfully slow on a G3, usable on a G4.
Really, Windows 2000 is oh-so-much faster. Even XP is faster!
They've made OSX faster with each revision, but the interface is still nowhere near what you'd expect. It does have *NIX behind it though, that might explain it
MSIE is very slow. Table parsing in particular is dog slow. I have to read Slashdot on a PC; stories with 150+ comments take forever on the Mac. Other browsers are reported to be faster, but the default browser is crap. I know I could replace it, but does the typical iMac user who just wants it to work out of the box?
Why exactly does it run slow? Is it the OS itself or the browser?
Asking the guy who makes the browser, and works for a competitor of Apple's...Surprising he put the blame on Apple...Shocking!
I run OS X, and I don't have any issues with browsing the internet.
My other sig is extremely clever...
Looking at just web browsing speed on an OS is not a great reason to choose one over an another.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
the iMac's default Internet Explorer browser took an average of 10 seconds per page to render several popular sites
Did anybody try another browser? The problem may be with how it interacts with IEMy Aurora : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o91ZsGwJYyg
FB : https://www.facebook.com/TanveersPhotography
I noticed a link to Slashdot in that Wired article. Wouldn't it be ironic if a bunch of Wired readers brought Slashdot to its knees?
Since IE is already slow on Windows, the native system it comes from, it was to be expected that it will be even slower on a mac, since as far as i know there is only a compability layer to make the IE work with the mac instead of a truly MAC - Designed IE. to summarize - just patchwork to make it run...
cheers,
jl
---
In those days spirits were brave, the stakes were high, men were real men, women were real women and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri.
".Sig Stealer" was here
Their Virtual Memory probably sux.
Maybe they should have hired Andrea Arcangeli...
At least it shouldnt be a big problem for most users.. the internet isn't exactly the fastest thing unless you are hooked up through a T1 or better - Modem or ADSL users shouldnt really be able to notice a huge difference.
"Ah nuts.. dropping an equivilant 0.01k/sec off my overall download speed because I wanted the animated dock and hi color icons!"
"Hey! Unless this is a nude love-in, get the hell off my property!!"
They optimized for user experience rather than raw performance.
Let's see...considering the fact that the average user's experience on a computer involves little more than email, Instant Messenger, and browsing the Web, I think they made a grave mistake.
- Eric
Founder, monolinux
If you celebrate Xmas, befriend me (538
Mac OS X is pretty much useless on my G3. It is very sluggish. Not only launching applications but day to day browsing can be very painful. I don't know why rendering is so painfully slow. Unfortunately, I can not afford a hardware upgrade. My computer is only bit over a year old. I am planning on going back to OS9 as soon as I get the time time to do a full backup.
Chimera is, according to these tests, the fastest MacOS Web browser by a factor of 2.
Chimera is, of course, based on Gecko, the Mozilla rendering engine. It's mainly the work of Mozilla uber-hacker Dave Hyatt.
Gerv
In my experience you optimize for performance and sacrifice optimization for user experience.
Who uses IE in Mac OS X anyway? Both Opera and Mozilla are truly great browsers which run fast and smoothly in Mac OS X.
Here's something interesting though:
IE in Mac OS X follows the standards a lot better than IE in Windows.
When we constructed our new company webpage we had to customize it for both IE/windows and IE/Mac.
Ciryon
Granted OSX is sluggish on G3's, but on a G4 MSIE plays a large roll in browsing speed.
Both Opera (beta) and Chimera (also beta) are tremendously fast browsers under X!
On my Win2K machine at work, a /. article with 200 replies render within seconds. On my G4/400 at home, the same page could take 30 seconds or more to render. What's worse, I get the "spinning CD cursor of doom" while it renders, so I can't even click on Stop or Back.
This looks like the opensource motto `release early, release often'.
the real interface behind macosX.
honestly i switched to it from kde, and am really happy. the filemanager r0x0rs, the way minimised windows get iconified to icons, is really neat, you can drag them around, and handle them like desktop icons.
for example icon view of directory "devel" for example.
desktop menu is great, that lets you minimize all windows at once etc.
it even supports antialiasing if you want to. and is no resource hog. xfce is the working environment, that gtk is built for, not gnome.
i say working environment because i mean it, you can really get work done, whereas the desktop environments i know mostly try to mimic commercial gui's like apples macosX and windows.
fighting the eyecandy
OmniWeb is about 50X better, about 20X faster, and not a M$ product.
It tells you the answer...
My mom wants one of those new iMacs, and I don't think she'll consider OS X web browsers to be slow. Because right now she's using a 6100 with AOL 4.0. Now that's slow.
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
A friends G3 with OS 9, a friends G4 with OS9/OSX, My old 604 with OS8....
Maybe its the multitasking, or lack thereof?
The main reason that people are complaining about the speed, is the fact that OS X uses Post Script to store and draw pretty much everything. This Post Script Engine is what gives the GUI its beauty and its lack of speed. The GUI, as it stands now, has no support for 2D hardware acceleration. This is mostly due to the fact that todays graphics cards were not intended to support 2D Post Script Acceleration directly. This is the problem that needs to be fixed.
Alot of the issues surrounding OS X's percieved speed will hopefully be resolved with the 10.2 upgrade. There should be some components that will have hardware acceleration support. So, as already stated in the article, apple wanted the user experience first and the speed second. As we have seen each revision of the os has provided better performance. The good news is it can only get better.
Fear trumps hope and ignorance trumps both
I really don't notice a speed difference in page loading.
Now my room mate has a 1.6 GHZ AMD with XP on it. That is faster but it crashes at least twice a day. I'll take the extra 10 seconds (more like 2-4) over a crash or a two a day.
I am going to hell and I am going to take all of you with me.
Here's an example.
The mac zealots (not unlike linux zealots) get all defensive about such issues, as you can see.
Why Does Web Browsing STILL S*ck On the Mac?
S
----------
I sig, therefore I was.
Exactly how does a video card or DirectX accellerate page rendering--minus video and 3D plugins, of course? I've heard of accelleration in the form of OpenGL/Direct3D, DirectDraw/XVideo, and Motion Compensation. This sounds like bs to me.
I suspect maturity of the code is the big culprit as well as the trend of inefficient UI skins ala WinXP and Aqua. I noticed a considerable performance penalty upgrading to WinXP on even a dual Athlon XP 1600.
You'd have a hard case arguing that OSX doesn't have room for improvement speedwise, but it's this horrible thing that some people like to pretend that it is. Some of the blame goes to Apple, some goes to the application writers. Mac IE renders some stuff painfully slow. I don't know why. Like the article said, things like slashdot comments feel like they're taking all day. In reality, it's only 5 seconds, but we all know what sort of attention spans people have nowadays. There's a pretty new browser called Chimera that is early in development, and still has a limited feature set, but it renders things almost instantly, including slashdot comments. So there isn't some inherent problem within the OS that makes it impossible for your applications to function reasonably.
Not to sound too much like an apple apologist, but they've done quite a bit to get OSX to where it is so far, and the more I use it, the more I appreciate where it's advanced over OS9. I don't mind waiting a bit for things to improve. Just like I don't really mind anymore waiting 5 seconds for IE to throw together the comment threads. Most of us could benefit from learning a little patience.
Although I would surmize that it's apple's fault that they get judged so harshly. Seeing as steve jobs claims that every time someone in their company makes a sketch on a post-it note, they've created a new revolution in the world, people are justified in being extremely critical.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
I use OmniWeb. Primarily. It's render outclasses anything else on the platform. It's very fast too in comparaison to IE.
Blaming Apple for IE's sluggish performance is a bit easy. Coming from the IE project manager, it's downright insulting.
For browsing outside a proxy, I sometime uses the new Chimera browser. It's a Cocoa (Objective-C) -based browser that's based on Fizilla. Fizilla is a Mac OS X version of Mozzila.
Chimera is astonishingly fast. It's render is better than Netscape 6.2, but like OmniWeb, it's JavaScript support is still lacking somewhat. Fortunately, javascript support isn't an issue for me, unless I require online banquing, where I'll use Netscape 6.2 (despite it's utter ugliness).
I do most of my work on my GNOME desktop with some work being done on a windows2000 box and I can say that GNOME is way faster for most things. Nautilus is still a bit slow but I have the GNOME 2 beta 2 on a laptop with just 64 megs of ram AMD-K5+ processor and Nautilus is so much faster. So that unix jab is most likely from somone who doesn't have a clue or used one of the Linux desktops five years ago when code just started to trickle in.
BTW the slowness of OSX has to do with the fact that they have heavy use of alpha blending and window effects. It has nothing to do with the unix core. Also the display is based on technology similar to Adobe's PDF.
Now I've got a G4 700mhz imac w/56k modem, running Mozilla (which is only in beta). Browsing is -much- faster. I'm (almost) sure my bottleneck is the modem speed, and not the browser/OSX.
That article mentions that it takes an avg of 10 seconds to connect CNN web to from a mac? My PC at work w/High speed internet usually takes 10+ seconds to connect to. CNN site can be brutally slow.
Maybe the article is referring to browser speed on OSX in a corporate environment with a high speed network? On that, I can't comment.
I almost never use Internet Explorer, its slow, you can't block pop-up ads, it looks ugly, etc. As a case in point, I ran IE vs OmniWeb (latest versions of both) and loaded a recent Slashdot discussion with 400+ comments. OmniWeb loaded and rendered with 8-9 seconds, IE clocked in at 19 seconds. I running over a cable modem with no cache the pages had to downloaded and rendered in both cases. I've tried Mozilla, Fizilla, Chimera and Opera, and all render faster than IE.
Microsoft of moving towards using 3D hardware to accelerate GUI performance, treating windows as surfaces and textures in order to offload the eye candy to the graphics processor.
I have heard that Apple is trying to (essentially) port Quartz/Aqua to OpenGL, so they they, too, can take advantage of hardware acceleration for drawing their eye candy.
The days of 2-D GUI acceleration, where fills and bitblts were 90% of the solution, are quickly passing. 2D hardware acceleration does not help with alpha blending, for instance.
I wonder how X/QT/Gtk will keep up with this next round of WIMP: WIMP-3D. Perhaps the Gnome Canvas could be hardware-accelerated using GLX. Rasterman is working (supposedly) on EVAS, a 3D-assisted rendering mechanism for X.
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
Slow performance diminishes user experience.
I use OSX on an old G3 333MHz system and although it *is* slow in terms of responsiveness, the whole UI seems made to provide a sort of "pseudo" realism in that there is a lot of animation going on all the time, all windows support alpha transparency and in order to make dragging a non flickering experience, Apple has made every window double buffered. There *are* shareware goodies that'll turn off the shows but I think Apple made a mistake by not allowing users (or coders) easy access to a panel to turn off live scaling, live drag'ndrop and double buffering on a system wide level. I think Apple did this on purpose partly in order to sell newer hardware (from whence they gain the revenue so it makes sense) and partly in order to create a consistent "branding" in order to raise market awareness. Since I spend a fair amount of time in the terminal I'm not so affected byall this.
.9 or 1.0
On the topic of browsers, MS IE is definitely the worst in terms of stability and speed in OSX. The other main contenders, Omniweb and Mozilla (and especially the Cocoa based Mozilla derivative Chimera) have improved enormously over the past year, from the point where Omniweb could not render any css or do any javascript and Mozilla crashed just about every 5 minutes to the point where Omniweb renders Hotmail better than IE itself and Mozilla now supports native UI elements and almost never crashes. IE improved a bit from the first beta version last years but has since only had the odd security upgrade and no feature or performance improvment whatsoever.
My personal two winners in the future will be Omniweb when it is fully CSS and DOM compatible and Chimera when it gets to version
I have also noticed that the UI has improved to the point where it is not that much slower than the Classic MacOS anymore and I presume that with 10.2 and further on it will get even better.
...Lynx screams on my TiBook!
A buddhist walks up to a hot dog stand and says ``Make me one with everything.''
Apples market isn't the hard core geek (not yet anyway) they are trying to puncture the home PC market with the iMac, not the corporate desktop. So far I think they have done suprisingly well.
I just bought a G4 and it comes with: mp3 software, dvd / cd burning software, video editing software, email software, web browser, and a VERY intuituve interface.
Another nice feature is the DVD playback isn't sketchy (I had a creative DVD Player in my old Win2000 machine and could never get the DVD Window to size right.) and you can even tile applications without having any wierd show through from the DVD window.
Straight out of the box, you can do more than any WinXP/2000/ME/98 Box ever did. Then throw on any of the available apps Office / Photoshop / Illustrator / Mozilla / FTP (for those who don't like the command line) etc.
The set up is easy and the "iTools" that mac provides (free for mac users) are actually quite nice.
I have been using intel based machines for a little over 12 years and have always regarded mac's as odd. But now that OS X (BSD) is at the core, its a truely robust system. The only thing I use my PC for is work (we are married to some microsoft technologies like SQL Server.)
I will sacrifice speed for two things:
Mac has them both now. And without the need to reboot the machine due to memory leaks if an application crashes. I have this problem all the time on my Thinkpad.
AF-Design, web development.
There used to be a Athena widget set-based browser for X11 called Chimera. (At least Debian seems to carry it still...)
It was a nice browser, just, ahem, limited in functionality - and, due to Athena, somewhat... unaesthetic.
Shouldn't Chimera (MacOS browser) rather be called Phoenix, then, or something? =)
The Mach-O version of Mozilla (which uses the Unix backend and Carbon frontend) flies on my Powerbook G4/400. With ATSUI text rendering it looks great. When the developers turn their attention to the Mach-O build and whip it into shape it'll be my browser of choice. Check out an experimental Mach-O build here: http://homepage.mac.com/stevekstevek/
and here's a screenshot of the Mach-O build running the Pinstripe theme.
I don't know if this is pure co-incidence but I have a dual boot PC with linux and freeBSD (which
OS X is based on) both running Xfree86 3 . FreeBSD
is noticably slower running X than linux. Perhaps
the microkernel architecture of *BSD systems and Darwin causes this slowdown of the graphics subsystem?
i'm running a g4/400 powerbook, and the performance in osx generally is pretty good. yes, ie renders tables like crap and often chokes--reload page... the os is stable, fast enough, and while the dock as it stands sucks, the ui is pretty darn nice. i'm a graphic designer, and since quark express is programmed by monkeys at typewriters, i don't expect to use it full time for a bit. i really do not like classic! so, when mozilla is finallized, i expect to jump, and expect the response to increase. but, in general the os is very usable. and having used nextstep, and older mac oses, i find the os to be an improvement. also, the tools that do exist for osx are very well done. btw, i switched from windows 2000 on a 450/p3 and the performance is not noticably different.
I have a 750Mhz PIII Win2k system side-by-side with my 600MHz G3 iBook OS X system. Both have 256M of RAM. The OS X system boots about 10 seconds faster than the Win2k system (RedHat 7.2 with KDE on the same PIII beats them both by about 15 seconds, including me having to log in), but the Win2k system's GUI does seem to be faster some times. Nevertheless I can't complain about the GUI on OS X. It's fast enough for me.
.NET to the Mac, now they're blaming them for the speed of IE. Typical.
I've used Opera for web browsing for the past two years because it's faster than IE and because I prefer the interface. Likewise, Opera on OS X is a lot faster than IE on OS X. Is Opera on OS X as fast as it is on Win2k? No. It is, however, better than IE on Win2k.
Microsoft is blaming Apple for not bringing
Opera is great, beside of it can identify himself as any browser is fast as hell!!
While others have made this observation, I'll second (or third or fourth) it--when you use a web browser that's fully Cocoa, it's a lot snappier. I've given up using IE except when I have to; I primarily use OmniWeb, but I have to say that Chimera's rendering speed is pretty stunning.
I don't doubt that OS X's speed can be improved, particularly particularly in the "subjective performance" category. Very few people seem to have learned what was (IMHO) the real lesson from Amiga: if you make your UI quick and responsive, your entire OS will seem quick and responsive. BeOS figured that out. OS X, well, hasn't. It's great that they're pushing stability, but in my experience OS X has been the least stable Unix I've used (and I say that as a committed OS X fan). I'd like to at least have gained speed from that tradeoff, but that isn't there yet.
Here's hoping OS X 10.2 has that missing hardware acceleration.
Incidentally: when it hits 11.0, what are they going to do? Call it OS Y?
ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/data/loadtimes/daily_loa dtime.html
Yes, MacOS X is the slowest (~1.5 times longer than windows). Consider the screen rendering model they are using... But is it unusable, that is a matter of personal optinion.
My 450MHz Cube (100Mbps ethernet) renders pages pdq.
Even my 300MHz G3 ancient power book (10Mbps ethernet) is reasonable... but maybe I am less picky.
MAK
I swear people, slow down. Not everything has to be instant! Go get a cup of coffee or something and just sit back and enjoy your web browsing. Or better yet, get outside and do something.
Who gives a damn if it's 1 second or 5 seconds to load? Is 4 seconds so much of your precious time? Trust me, getting your little opinion on a bulletin board about SWII or LotR isn't THAT important. It can wait a few seconds.
Is Apple really using PDF/PS for desktop graphics. Both of these formats are interpreted and have to be rendered. I can't imagine how slow the html->pdf->display conversion is considering how long it takes to render a large pdf document for printing.
Galium Arsenide is the material of the future, and always will be.
But I guess that it depends on the browser. links unleashes a can of whoop-ass regardless of the *nix flavor that it's running on.
:wq
I use it on 9, and it's great. Crashes less than Netscrape.
On the other hand, OmniWeb is my "Browser Of Choice" on OS X, because it's good for browsing sites with javascript pop-ups/unders (in that it doesn't execute them at all.)
Just my 2 cents...
Pi
ha... takes DAYS for /. to post some stories, they are already wadded up and in the trashcan by the time /. gets around to posting them...
/. slams that up on the page RIGHT AWAY. and, the article is substantially incorrect.
but, a little bad news about Apple, just a few hours old now, and BINGO...
so, in short, fuck you.
bye!
Four years ago I purchased an iMac G3/233. At the time, it was fairly fast, and it remains to be a speedy machine, even today. With 96 MB of RAM it runs Mac OS X well, and my mother now uses the computer daily to stay in touch with me. The average consumer Mac user (iMac/iBook) is more concerned that things /work/ rather than how fast they work.
Mac OS X on a G3 isn't "painfully slow," but it isn't a speed demon (haha) so to speak, either. Mac OS X on a G4 rocks all over, and anyone who thinks otherwise might want to install an OS X native browser and stop whining. =)
jrbd
You're better off using Mozilla, especially the rapidly developing Mach-O version which has an multithreaded Unix backend and is very fast.
I'm not sitting at my OS X box right now, but I believe that IE defaults to displaying a page only after all of its components have been downloaded. If you turn this off, you'll see text and placeholders displayed right away while the graphics are downloading, if you can tolerate annoying reformatting and redrawing as you go.
:wq
Just installed OS X 10.1.3 on a 400 Mhz iMac the other days -- and noticed that IE was indeed painfully slow, especially when compared to Mozilla on Yellow Dog Linux on the same machine, which is the fastest browser I've ever seen, anywhere.
But -- since it's pretty obvious that Microsoft just Carbonized the existing IE for Mac OS 9, and since everything else OS X is real fast (I threw in a gig of RAM) -- I think the real problem lies with IE. A true Cocoa version oughta rip whenever Microsoft comes up with it.
It is just odd that Wired would take IE as the only browser in their performance tests without looking at the others.
Mozilla RC1 is noticably faster than IE on my TiBook 550 and Chimera is at least twice as fast as Mozilla.
I've never used OmniWeb which most Mac users swear by, but IE on the Mac is a good bit slower than IE on Windows - but I would easily say that Chimera is the fastest browser I've use on ANY platform.
Lack of memory is the problem. I run a G3 "Snow" iMac, and when I decided to get in to OS X whole hog, I bought a 512mb chip and threw it in. It works great. The response time is good, and doesn't temporarily "freeze" like my Win2K laptop, with 1 gig of ram.
Just a dude. Stuck in IT.
If browsing is slow for you on OS X, you might like to try Mozilla Release Candidate 1.
Hey smart guy, I barely know anything but even I know that OS X isn't based on Linux.
Regards,
proclus
There is a way to build mozilla using native API's to take advantage of anti-aliasing and make it faster. Info here
All of my colleagues use Windows 2000 PCs. We work on a project that involves writing code for some old technology and that development is primarily done on VMS machines. My Win2K colleagues are using VMS's editor to edit code and have been using it for a long time. I use BBEdit via Interarchy to pretty seamlessly remotely edit. What has that alleged speed of Windows gained them? I suppose they can type ctrl-b ctrl-j faster than I can....
--- What?
I thought raw performance is supposed to be THE user experience.
Sure, it's nice to say that you're using MacOS "ten"... but in reality you're using a new OS. Brand spanking new... with a remarkably noble achievement in using postscript for the entire rendering. Most people don't get what this means, but it's a completely different way of dealing with what you see on the screen... You can take anything and save it as postscript.
Of course it's a little slow. It's new code. That's why they can make it faster with each revision. It's probably going to continue getting faster and faster as the coders get more comfortable with the code base.
So yeah, it's slow. Is anyone really surprised?
Response time is very important to a user.
-- Are you an EFF member yet?
Say you have a young daughter who, at 7 years old, is a whiz at math and has great promise. Then, say that you have a new baby son. A year later, the 1 year old has learned to do the same thing as the now-8 year old, only slower.
It's a simple way to say that Mac OS X is really a "1.0" product, folks. NOTHING like this OS has been put together to do the things it does. Other posters indicated that many of us would trade speed for stability, and I fall in that camp, too.
The original Mac OS became quite refined and swift from the OS level after many years of development. Windows 95 wasn't all that optimized at its introduction but its successors do well in this area. Yet Microsoft sacrifices stability AND security for speed.
Mac OS X is pleasing to the eye, but graphic pros know a slug when they see it. Still, time will fix it. Now that Apple has solved most of the serious feature deficits and bugs (or at least knows of them), they can concentrate on optimization--big time.
How much performance and happiness did you get out of Windows 1.0? Linux 1.0? Cut the new kid some slack. It's doing good for a 1 year old.
Oh...OmniWeb rocks for general viewing. Loading 200+ posts from Slashdot is much faster than IE, which has to load ALL the posts before you can view them. Cocoa also adds antialiasing to text that makes web browsing great.
In comparison to web browsing in Windows and Mac OS 9, things a little slower in OS 10.1. But then, IE won't kill my OS when it crashes, and my OS X system has never suffered an OS X kernel panic for over a year. I'll take that over the speed thing any day, for now.
Vos teneo officium eram periculosus ut vos recipero is.
There is Omniweb and iCab and Opera and Mozilla, and so on and so on. You have half a dozen browsers to choose from under OS X, probably more. Try a different one.
Oh, and slashdot reads just find under Omniweb 4.x as well as iCab, I should know, I use them at home for Slashdotting all the time.
--Won't that be grand? Computers and the programs will start thinking and the people will stop. - Dr. Walter Gibbs
that it might be IEs fault...
it'll be XI?
Don't forget that Apple has been in a contract with MS for the past 5 years, and part of that required Explorer as the default browser. Now that the contract is coming to an end, Apple can choose a different browser to be the default (like, say, OmniWeb?
mark
If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe. -- Carl Sagan
They're right. Almost. It feels a little slow to me, but not unbearably so. Perhaps my tolerance is too high, but I don't feel like I'm sitting around waiting for the system. Or perhaps (since I've been using Mac OS X since the first day of the public beta and Mac OS for several years!) I'm so impressed with the overall improvements to my "computing experience" that have come with Mac OS X that I don't notice *all* of the warts. Frankly, I've had my performance complaints, and the browser hasn't been one of them. Don't get me started on the Finder...
My system is an iMac DV G3/400MHz with 512MB RAM and a 27GB internal HD. Certainly not a performance champ... in fact, except for the RAM it's rather low-end. My point of reference for Wintel is my work PC, an IBM thinkpad 1GHZ, 392MB/32GB running RedHat 7.2 and occasionally booting into Win2k (when I need to edit someone else's MS Project or Visio files). For most operations (checking e-mail, running MS Office, browsing) I don't find that the iMac *feels* slower. Most days, I work from my home office with the two machines sitting side by side. I don't find myself turning to the Thinkpad for browsing; in fact, it's rather the opposite. I do much of my office correspondence on the iMac due to the superiority of the Office implementation for Mac OS X.
Perhaps the reason I don't find it so slow, though, is that I seldom use MSIE. I am not morally opposed to MSIE; I do use office after all, and actually like office V.X. (It's the first version I've liked since the version with Word 5 (Office 4.0?), though I found Office 98 tolerable.) MSIE is just not the best browser for Mac OS X. Its rendering engine is buggy, and it's *SLOW*. By that, I mean that it feels significantly slower than the other browsers I use. I find that I use 3 browsers:
All that said, though, IE is the default, and it's IE that the Mac will be judged on. I think the Moz crew has proven that the performance hit is not all apple's fault, though. Even so, Apple and MS would be well served to ensure that IE and Office are really snappy on Apple's newest hardware and OS combinations. I don't doubt that they will, now that OS development seems to have stabilized somewhat.
.sig: file not found
On my new iBook, I have tried Mozilla, Chimera, IE, and OmniWeb.
I just installed Mozilla 1.0RC1 yesterday, and I have been using that for my main browser, and it seems nice and fast and stable. It's not as nicely integrated with OS itself as IE, but that's a small price to play. I'd really like to see Apple devoting some resources to make it the default browser in OS X and more seemlessly integrating it. By this I mean having it get all the mime/type application associations right, and making the key bindings more consistent with other OS X applications.
Chimera seemed painfully slow, but then again it's in the early stages of development.
I really liked Omniweb, it renders pages beautifully and I particularly liked the default fonts. It seems very light and fast. However it's not free, and displays some nagging "Register Me" messages which was enough to turn me off to it.
I'm definitely sticking with Mozilla. Oh and if any Mozilla people are reading, you should change the icon for the OS X version to the red dinosaur, which would look way cooler in the dock than the "M".
The Microsoft guy is just making excuses for why Explorer sucks. Try Chimera Navigator, it's twice as fast as Mac IE on average, plus it's more standards compliant.
We had a series of dhtml/javascript drop menus on some of the pages I wrote and they were always a pain on IE/Mac: OS7(?),8,9&X...It would take 10 to 30 seconds to draw all of the tables with the drop menus. I tried for hours to find a way around it and never did. The problem was limited to IE for Mac though, Netscape on the Mac was fine, IE and Netscape on Windows were fine too...I didn't chalk it up to the platform.
(to be fair I think I tried it on OS7 but I can't remember,it seems like I had a hard time getting IE 4 to run on OS7)
I have noticed the slowdown since puchasing a new G4 with OSX. I have also noticed a beautiful interface, a terminal window allowing me under the hood and a slew of new software for both OSX and Darwin. I'd say apple got right the stuff they wouldnt be able to fix later and the rest will follow. I, for one, have no complaints (OmniWeb is quite impressive btw). If web browsing is what you want the machine for, here is a solution:
1) Restart in OS9
2) Stay there for the next 18-24 months
So you judge a operating system by the speed MS-Internet Explorer? How stupid is this?
o r
It's not as if IExplorer was the only browser available on OSX.
There are
Mozilla
Netscape
iCab
Opera
Chimera/Navigat
and probably more i don't know.
Personally I use OmniWeb 4.1b4, it rocks speedwise and is usable and isn't a MS-Product.
Wow, this is a cool opportunity for Microsoft: Slow down Internet Explorer and make clueless people tell that OSX is slow.
k2r
Apple could have saved themselves some problems by going with X11+Render rather than Quartz; they would have gotten pretty much the same imaging model (transparency, affine transforms, ...), and the GUI would look exactly the same, but the system would be faster and less resource intensive. Even using the unoptimized X11 server available for OSX right now, X11 apps are often more responsive on OSX than native Quartz-based apps.
As for browsers, I prefer Mozilla: while Microsoft has done a decent job of porting IE to the Mac, Mozilla works a little better in my experience, and Mozilla's rate of improvement seems better.
IMHO as a 15 year Mac developer there are a few major reasons why MacOS X is slow:
(1) Backing store for windows
Quartz uses a RAM-based backing store for every window. That prevents flicker and reduces the number of update events, which is good, but it also uses up a *ton* of memory and requires all drawing to go offscreen and then get blitted later on. This hogs the bus, invalidates the CPU caches, etc, etc.
(2) Too many layers in the OS
The BeOS was fast not only because it was highly threaded, but also because there weren't a lot of layers of crap in it. On MacOS X, we have Carbon, Cocoa, BSD, and mach all present on a single machine. Something as simple as a function call or callback can turn into hundreds of instructions to translate from one set of semantics to the other and back again.
(3) The CPUs are slower
A 1GHz PowerPC is slower than a 2GHz P4 or 1.5GHz Athlon. Period.
(4) The bus is slower
No DDR RAM hurts.
(3) No async i/o
The async i/o support on MacOS X (and many unixes) sucks. Windows users get extra speed by using chained async i/o.
All kidding aside, I've always told the rabid Photoshop benchmark fans that speed in one area is only a piece to the puzzle. You have to look at the bigger picture overall speed, stability, usability, etc.
I have a Quicksilver with OS X on it and OS X just gets better all the time. There definitely was a slowness to it but each update seems to make it run a little better every time. While it hasn't been as quick, it has been rock solid and all the apps I've tried have worked well. Network browsing has been my biggest complaint.
My conclusion is OS X is good on a G4 but my rev D imac and 8600 will continue to run linux/OS9.
According to the upgrader, the IE 5.1.4 security update "resolves all potential security vulnerabilities in previous versions of Internet Explorer 5."
Whew, now that's a relief. I'll never have to think about brower security again. That's what they wanted me to think after the 5.1.3 update back in November, too. Well I'm sure they've got it right this time!
- Win IE & Mac IE have completely different codebases. If there's overlap it is only in snippets of code shared between the development teams.
- Aside from knowing the product history this is easily demonstrated by looking at the errata for each browser. They have very different feature sets / CSS implementations / rendering issues / etc.
- Win IE 5.x is a "Carbon" application; this means it is running using a set of libraries based on the old MacOS. However it is not running in the old MacOS itself (a "Classic" application). Indeed in spite of being a Carbon application the IE 5.x for MacOS X cannot run on MacOS (though there are IE 5.x for MacOS.)
- This is in line with MS Office v.X which hasn't been code-synched with it's Wintel cousin for years, is also Carbon-based, and also does not run on MacOS.
- So, in point of fact, you've got every one of yours wrong.
Mac IE is not a port of Win IE, is not running in an emulation layer, and has no excuse not to be faster.On the other hand Mac IE is more standards-compliant overall then it's Wintel cousin in spite of some glaring CSS deficiencies & other asst'd bugs. It has a notably better design in some areas, incorporates some nice features like the left-hand bar, and a much better cache (as in not-broken.)
Of course Win IE has it's own set of bugs and deficiencies so overall they're about equal with the Mac IE being somewhat more "right" & the Win IE getting more support from sites.
For the future I expect that Carbon applications like Mac IE will be eventually replaced (or superseded.) Though they've been pushed farther then Apple originally wanted (gotten more features, more support, etc.) they're still not as effective at taking advantage of MacOS X as Cocoa applications are. On the other hand they're a relatively easy port and work nearly as well so they're the obvious step for developers with large code bases and little familiarity with Objective-C & Apple's Next-derived OO development environment.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
IE 5.1 is still a Carbon App, meaning it has lots of OS9 code in it, which is very old. IE 5 was the best browser on OS9 by far; on OS X it is really showing its age.
IE is not my main browser on OS X, but I use it occasionally and it doesn't seem *that* slow to me. Did Wired apply the OS/browser updates? I find it conspicuous that don't mention versions or date, and refer to the Macs as "out of the box". If they're running 10.0.x, I wouldn't be surprised about some slowness. Its performance problems are well known. Under 10.1.4 with Moz 1.0RC1, I get 3.4 seconds load on this slashdot article with a 400Mhz G4. So I say, at worst, it's not the OS.
If Wired had mentioned the OS version, then I'd be interested, but without that datum, it's hard to evaluate whether the article author is insightful or just dumb.
For the benefit of tricked-up speed but at the expense of reliability, Microsoft (in NT 4.0) moved the drivers from protected
memory to ring 0. I'll take uptime over speed anyday.
Browser slowness is flat out the biggest problem I have with OS X. I have been using X for about eight months, and every day I spend at least a few minutes staring at the screen while that annoying little wheel spins. Funny thing is, I tried a few other web browsers and found that most of the time they are just as bad as IE. Rendering anything even a little complicated takes too long. Once a site gets past the first ten or so images, images seem to impair performance exponentially (For a great example of this, load up one of Fark's Photoshopping links.) based on size and number.
And of course, being IE, it still crashes all the bloody time as well... *sigh*
Oh well, maybe one day we will see a "light" version of Mozilla without all the extra shit slowing it down and making it crash and port it to OS X.
that the problem lies with OS X, not the browser. In particular, he said hardware graphics acceleration was largely missing from OS X at this stage in its development. "The effort of drawing something to the screen (on Windows) can be offloaded to a graphics card, but in OS X the CPU is heavily involved,"
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Trade performance for user Experience! bah!
what the hell is apple thinking , are they smoking some new weed or something
I want better performance! why do I care if it looks shinny when my work load take 5 years screw that!@#
Screenshot of the old Chimera browser.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
They do not mention benchmarking at all.
The only browser they really refer to is Internet Explorer.
Yes they _mention_ Opera in some sentences, but the whole conclusion of OSX being slow is based on the experience of Internet Explorer.
I don't see where they even mention OmniWeb or Mozilla / Netscape.
Get your facts straight before you call somebody a troll.
ONE BUTTON MOUSE!! THAT'S THE PROBLEM!
one button mouse!
one button mouse!
one button mouse!
one button mouse!
one button mouse!
one button mouse!
one button mouse!
one button mouse!
one button mouse!
(this was supposed to be all caps, but the lameness
filter kicked in. Maybe it should be renamed a "ironyless" filter
I don't like big words..., does that make me anti-semantic?
The main issue is the Internet Explorer still runs off of the "Classic Event Model" where it constantly polls for new events. The newer Carbon event model supports those old methods, because EVERYONE used them in the old system. Think how much CPU that takes when all those old programs (even though they are "carbon compliant") are constantly jumping up and down asking if they've gotten an event.
o n/ CarbonPortingTools/carbonportingtools.html
The new "Carbon Event Model" allows you to associate events with handlers, and when an event fires that you'd like to pay attention to, your call-back gets fired. Much more effecient.
The cocoa event model is even more robust.
The problem lies in that programers were able to compile a "carbon compliant" application, without moving to these new event models. THIS IS GOOD. Imagine how PISSED off a developer was if they were told, "Yea, you have to move all your event code over to this new system, cause it's better." No. A developer would rather have a product up and running on OS X natively, and then move over.
Anyway, it's not that Apple has "buggered" up the system someway, the applications have exploited the API's that Apple has made available, but it was a necissary evil.
http://developer.apple.com/techpubs/macosx/Carb
Has information about the carbon event model, and high performance computing.
- Sighuh?
I am happy to defend Apple sometimes, but statements like this are totally silly. Speed and responsiveness is an important part of "user experience." That's why us Amiga nuts stayed with our 50 MHz machines for so long: the 500 MHz machines weren't able to keep up! (But today's gigahertz machines are able to, which is why Amigas are finally fading away even among the diehards). Responsiveness is part of the user interface! No amount of newspeak, rationalization, and Gnome/Microsoft/Apple apologism will convince me otherwise.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
OS X is implemented on top of the Mach microkernel. This (mach) is slow. So slow that OS developers (excepting QNX) have essentially given up on microkernel designs, convinced that they added unavoidable latencies. How bad? IIRC, a null-IPC (the shortest inter-process message you can send) in mach took on the order of 30,000 cycles. Every call to an OS service requires at least 1 such round-trip, and 2 or 3 if it goes to a driver (program -> mach -> driver -> mach -> program).
Recent work (esp. by the late Dr. Jochen Liedtke) such as the L4 -Kernel has shown remarkable improvements in IPC speed and bandwidth -- on the order of 150 cycles on a Pentium-1.
If I had enough spare time, I would port Darwin (the OS X kernel) to L4/x86 and see how much faster it goes.
...
Of course, having said that, I should note that Microsoft was probably not motivated to make IE on OS X run very fast or reliably. So the answer is probably "it runs slow because of both the OS and the browser"
The nerve of those PC-loving, baby seal clubbing, non-recycling, SUV-driving monsters. Why, nobody uses Opera on a mac, which is why they're spreading their FUD.
And MS, selling millions of dollars of software to mac users, with an entire business unit dedicated to that platform? Yup, competitors.
user_pref("network.proxy.http", "proxyhost");
user_pref("network.proxy.http_port", portnumber);
user_pref("network.proxy.type", 1);
Replacing proxyhost and portnumber of course. This works for me (verified with my squid logs).
You could also just copy your entire Mozilla prefs.js. It's at ~/Library/Mozilla/Profiles/ and so on.
You can drastically speed up your OS X machine's network speed by modifying some sysctl variables. Toss the following lines into a script somewhere:
/usr/sbin/sysctl -w net.inet.tcp.sendspace=65536
/usr/sbin/sysctl -w net.inet.tcp.recvspace=65536
/usr/sbin/sysctl -w kern.ipc.maxsockbuf=524288
/usr/sbin/sysctl -w net.inet.tcp.delayed_ack=0
/usr/sbin/sysctl -w net.inet.udp.recvspace=73728
It literally doubles my web browsing and file transfer speeds. This will probably be of value only to folks with broadband or ethernet connections. It wouldn't do much for obsolete modem users.
Not having used OSX I can't comment and I know I'll get flamed for this......but I find browsing on Linux 7.1 to be brutally slow using the latest version of Netscape, but acceptible using Opera.
My hunch would be it's the application and not the OS that's the problem.
And I find IE to be much faster on a Windows box.
J.
I have an old PowerMac upgraded to a G3 300 512k cache on a 50Mhz bus and 96 Megs of Ram it only takes me seconds to load 150+ comment pages on Slashdot? I use IE 5.0 over Opera and iCab and all because it supports drag and drop so damn well and renders pages better than either. (My local newspaper www.timesfreepress.com will now load it's sidebar correctly in Opera or iCab, it works fine in Mozzila and Netscape, but at 96Megs of Ram...)
Did they happen to consider atleast also in IE's case that they Windows and Mac ones are NOT the same. I find myself doubting how much of the rendering engine is even the same. They both seem to behave rather differently and the interface is very different. The Mac IE even uses Netscape's html bookmark format. It is slow on some complicated pages, the like that slashdot forums end up being, but it's also one of the best browsers I've used. I guess MS's Mac department is actually talented.
Interestingly, I've noticed over the years that Netscape 4.x (Windows and Linux) has problems with some pages with tables. A page that loads instantly in IE often forces Netscape to freeze up for 30 secs using 100% CPU. Invariably, those pages were generated by a MSFT product, such as Frontpage. Time for a conspiracy theory? Perhaps. I haven't noticed it so much in the last year though.
Ask yourself if this is better or worse than optimizing for user experience rather than security, which is what MS does routinely.
Besides, IE on Mac? Please. It went in the bit bucket April 1, the day I got my iMac G4.
Do not touch -Willie
I just tried the Opera browser, like wow man it's haf as ast as Netcrud 4.789999.
If Apple had used a real browser, not an the IE crud based on Opera, it wood be fast.
Mac zealots love to say "windows is just a dos extender that runs on a 16-bit processor" but the real truth is that Mac is much,much worse.
Another reason they surf slowly is there's only one mouse button. I use my mousewheel all the time to scroll. If I only had one button, it would take longer.
Finally, the most important reason is that most sites were optimized for Windows.
(Also, maybe mac *users* are just a tad slow!)
Recently, I'd been having some performance issues with Mac OS X on my titanium Powerbook 500. (256 meg of ram on 10.1.4)
/var/run/cron.pid, but don't quote me...)
The problem was that EVERYTHING gave me spinning beach ball. File operations, minimizing Finder windows, you name it...Even scrolling in MOzilla and IE were affected. Then I read on MacAddict that OS X needs to be left running all night so that various "cleanup" tasks can run.
Anybody who has OS X should consider leaving there machine up all night so these run... It will resolve a great many problems that you're having, and allow us to go back to bashing MS and Oracle instead of Apple...
Unix people familiar with cron should have no problem with editing the cleanups to run at a more reasonable hour than 3am, 4am, and 5am (like one when your machine will be running)... (I think the file to edit is
Alternately, if you're a regular mac user and don't feel like mucking about with the terminal, hit Version Tracker and pick up MacJanitor. It's a friendly GUI that lets to schedule your daily, weekly, and monthly jobs, or trip them manually on demand.
Since I'd used the machine, it had never been awake all night (I close the lid when I go to bed, usually before 3am...) so cron had never done anything to optimize my machine.
Now? All better. Faster than I remember 10.1.1 being...
Who did what now?
is anybody else sick of those horizontal lines OSX puts on everything yet?
is very responsive, according to my daily experience.
IE on OS X sucks air.
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
I actually find this whole thing quite amusing. A microsoft employee is complaining that apple did not optimize it's OS for performance and thus, IE runs slowly in OSX. If you want pure performance stick to a command line OS. If you want a reasonable user experience, well that's a different story. There are a slew of very fast browsers for OSX, so what is IE's problem? I suspect that it is because it is a bloated piece of patched together crap. ;)
Admittedly OSX has some serious overhead in the graphics department and gobbles down RAM, but it is also a very new and very stable platform with some great features and even greater potential. Speedwise, it is still more responsive than my Win2K box and I don't have to reboot it every 2 days to clean up all the memory leaks. Also working in OSX every month or so I'll be sitting there, working away happily and think to myself, "wow this kicks ass." Two nights ago was one of those times when I realized that I was simultaneously running:
a OSX mail program, web browser, and chat program
a OS9 video game
a java Peer-to-peer client
a pentium II emulator installing a copy of windows
an X-windows based graphics program
and all the while a command like distributed computing project was using up the remaining 30% or so of one of my processors. Try that on your windows box
My advice to OSX users concerned about slow web browsing would be to do what I did. remove execute permissions for IE (but leave it in place so when apple sends you yet another security update for it the installer is happy) and download a decent browser. Omniweb is fast and clean. Netscape will render most of the 2.5% that omniweb chokes on.
responding like this just makes you look like a fool. the troll that posted obviously knew this, and that there would be people desperate enought to declare their superior knowledge who would respond like this. i forget that not everyone has been on slashdot for years, but if you don't know the lay of the land, lurk a while youngster.
And, at least in Wired News tests, OS X didn't mimic 9.2's habit of locking up completely, requiring the Mac's power cord and/or battery to be removed in order to reboot it -- hardly a satisfying user experience.
-as quoted from the article
Last I checked, the reset button worked just as well for desktop macs as it does for a regular PC. And for laptops, a simple control-command-power press will reboot everytime, no matter how badly crashed.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
I recall several months ago (on the max-osx-devel list) that someone discovered a serious performance drain in the way OS X does window repaints. The example was if someone changed something in two corners of the screen; the whole window rectangle would have to be redrawn instead of just the bounding rectangles around the changes. There is even example code which showed this. This is obviously something that will needs to be addressed in the future releases.
As to stabilty, yes it's quite good. BUT, I have had times where the system becomes usuable (after a month of so of uptime). Once it was because the netinfod died. Of course, I couldn't login in as root and restart the daemon since I couldn't get authenticated. Reboot time!
...a linux user.
C-X C-S
http://www.pcmag.com/article/0,2997,s=1487&a=25260 , 0.asp
Have fun: Join D.N.A. (National Dyslexics Association)
I almost bought a flatscreen iMac about a week ago, but I looked at the spec sheet and saw what I thought had to be a misprint; PC100 ram. The sales guy told me Apple holds back the pc133 for "high-end" machines only.
These days all but the slowest pee-cee's use 266 mghz ram, and the p4 is about to jump to a 533 fsb!
Macs are getting by because of their backside cache, but that doesn't help when you are creating new data in ram.
To my knowledge, html rendering is always done with cpu and ram, and then copied as a bitmap to the graphics card. (IMHO the MS guy was just wrong.)
The search for "the thing makes MacOS X slow" is a chimera. First of all it's not that slow, considering what it does. If anything is hard, it is to make something look easy. Apple customers are more than happy to pay that price.
Second, forget about the first point. MacOS is slow, and it doesn't make sense to look for a single spot that makes it slow -- the slowness pervades throughout the system. Font rendering is slow, Mach is slow, the CPU is slow, memory is slow, file I/O is slow, Carbon is slow, Classic is slow, applications are slow. It is really no surprise that the system as a whole is slow.
And it won't get better. Mac people like to think that future OS revisions will make OS X run faster on their \iMac/iBook. But that's just because Mac people like this idea of the computer becoming gradually, magically, f\aster; the underdog slowly growing stronger, that kind of thing. It's not true. While future revisions of OS X\ will undoubtedly incorporate faster code, that does not keep Apple from adding things that make it run slower again. Meanwhile your iMac/iBook hardware keeps aging, until in a couple of years time, the introduction of the G5 or G6 or Gwhatever, Apple finds an excuse to basically drop support for your outdated hardware altogether. And then the cycle starts anew. The promise of an "all-native" system will never actually have been realized for your hardware, but Mac people won't mind, since they are ideologically compelled to look to the future, not whine about the past.
It is rumored that chairman Stalin once said: "The communist ideal is already on the horizon!". When questione\d by somebody in the audience as to when the ideal would be reached, he just smiled and said: "Comrade, don't you know you can never reach the horizon?".
With all the praise heaped on OS X, everyone seems to forget to mention how slow it really is. They are right - it is really nice. But it is SO SLOW!
Due in large part to positive comments I read on Slashdot, I purchased an Apple iBook with OS 9/X, however, I wasn't interested in 9. I only wanted to use X.
Took it home, very excited to play with my new toy. Up comes the "Welcome to your new Mac, please register" window. It's all pretty and aqua-like. I click in one of the fields to enter my name and (this is not a joke) the computer was already lagging! I couldn't believe it. When I clicked to pop down widget for "state" there again was a noticeable lag which continued as I went through the fields! Keep in mind, this is just the "welcome" screen - I haven't even started using the computer yet.
And yes, before you ask, this computer had 640 MB of RAM, so that wasn't the problem.
The situation did not improve as I began to install the applications I wanted to use. Dragging and resizing windows is an exercise in frustration. Switching between browser windows or applications is very slow. The bundled mail.app has a noticeable lag when I switch to a different email message in the preview pane. (Even a crummy client like Outlook is lightning fast when switching between locally stored messages.) Opening the system preferences window takes 5-10 seconds.
I think one of the greatest inventions is the wheel mouse. When I'm reading Usenet or web pages, I like to use the wheel to quickly page up or down. On even a 'slow' wintel, 400mhz let's say, this is a very smooth process. A few clicks of the wheel and the screen smoothly scrolls to the bottom. On OS X is sputters and lags, and takes 3 to 4 times as long to reach my destination. It's not just the wheel mouse, if you just click and hold the window scroll arrow there is the same problem.
Apple says the G3/G4 is suppposed to be far faster per mhz than Wintel, and I bought into that when I bought the iBook. However it simply IS NOT TRUE. In fact, I feel the G3 is actually SLOWER than a PIII of the same clockspeed. Keep in mind you can buy a Wintel with double the clock for the same price and you have an ugly situation.
After a while, I just couldn't take it anymore - it was constant frustration everytime I booted up. It was just not acceptable, especially considering what I paid for the computer. For what I paid, I could have bought a 1 ghz AMD laptop, which I can assure you, does not lag in the slightest when running Windows 2000.
I ended up selling it, just 8 weeks after I bought it, and I don't miss it. Right now I'm shopping for it's replacement.
You don't hear any Mac users warning you about this - instead, they recommend that you purchase the computer! I'm under the impression that either they just don't realize how much faster Windows/Linux is (maybe they haven't used x86 in a few years) or maybe they are just in denial as a way of trying to defend the platform that they love. (i.e. they know it's very slow, but deny it when asked because they want to preserve a favorable opinion about Macs).
This is the dirty little secret that no one wants to admit. There is a thread on MacSlash about how attractive the Mac is supposed to be for Java development. I tried some java programs like Jedit and NetBeans and they ran at about 1/2 to 1/3 of the speed of running them on Wintel.
Hello! The emperor has no clothes! It's okay to say so!
that's why mozilla tabs / load in background are god
Spoon not. Fork, or fork not. There is no spoon.
ps. Chimera is lightning fast, too bad there's not plugin support, yet.
"You never want a serious crisis to go to waste." - Rahm Emanuel
How well does mach thread? and
how threaded / multi-process is the environment?
It would be good test if we had say, a dual 500Mhz
-vs- a 1Ghz. (but the min dual was a 733Mhz, right?)
But you say, 500+500M does not equal 1G, because of the overhead, locks, etc.
When a task/thread becomes runnable, there is better % chance between
1 of the N CPUs being idle to take the task, at the same load.
Testing the theory that N x 1/N SMP is better for interactive work.
"Don't lie to me Gustav, you stinkin' Mac User"
-laugh or flame on
To start with, I will ask the same question of you I ask everyone else that bitches about OS X (by the way, if so many peole here seem to own and use macs, why do they still only have 7% of the market? I think some of you are lying!) are you using X or X.1? If you haven't yet installed X.1, do so NOW! You will notice a definate speed difference to a usable level (faster than KDE on linux in many cases).
You my friend must be doing something wrong because I put OS X.1 on my 300Mhz iBook. (192 megs of RAM) and had very little problem making it useable.
How can it be that Apple, with all its resources, is not able to come up with a faster OS than the Linux PPC distros, which have so few people and so little money supporting them?
I guess you don't recall early versions of Linux do you? Those were dog slow, you could get more done in DOS than you could in an early versionof Linux. OS X is the same way. This is a new operating system (yes it has a developed core, but the core is only part of the whole system). This means that it's going to be slow in the initial release. So why didn't Apple wait till t was fully developed efore releasing. 1) the consumers were screaming for blood, X was delayed far too much. 2) They needed to get app support. What good does it do apple to release a super fast OS but have no application support. This way, apple can produce newer and faster versions, and continue to gain application support.
one might think that a useful, quick OS that worked on even older Mac hardware would also make money but that's not the direction they chose. It's telling how they decided not to support older machines and yet within months users (presumably in their spare time) had come out with software that enabled OSX on those same unsupported machines. So it wasn't that hard--but it wasn't in Apple's interest, so they didn't do it.
Actualy, the reason that support for pre-G3 was discontinued was because of the same reason that support for the 68k processor was discontinued with 7.0. The older hardware support lags the system and wieghs it down. Ever wonder why Windows is so bloated? Cause it never eliminates support for older systems (you would all scream bloody murder if it did). Apple does want people to buy G4s. Because alot of mac users are still using very old machines. As I type this I am on a machine from 1996, originaly 180Mhtz with 16 megs of ram and a 1.5 gig HD. currently it runs OS 9.2 after only a memory upgrade, a cache and processor upgrade, and a hardrive for good measure. And I have the plans for, (and have doen with an old machine at my school) turned and old LC into a machine that can run OS 8 (havn't tried 9 yet). Admitedly, not well, but it does run it.
My point is that old support is something that has to be left to the people that want it. You can not assume that someone wants old support automaticaly. But those that do will find a way.
This to me is what the beauty of open source is all about--a focus on the software, not on the business politics.
You champion the virtues of open source and then critisize the company for not doing everythign for the consumer? Isn't part of open source the ability to make stuff run where it isn't originaly designed to run? So then why critisize a company for letting the comsumers do their own compatability fixes?
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
That OmniWeb stuff is the problem; my NeXT box is a *Turbo* and it's dog-slow.
Yet another alternative to IE on MacOS X is iCab. While still a preview version it works and stuff. You can check it out here.
this is my sig
1. Because my colleague's windows laptop offers no even marginally convenient way to switch between two different 128-bit encrypted wireless networks, he can play Minesweeper on his laptop really fast in our lab, while I am forced to get work done wirelessly after the flip of a switch (in Mac OS X it's just a single menu selection to switch locations which can have entirely different settings, types and sets of connections). Play vs. Work? It's a no brainer - Windows wins this round.
2. My windows colleague gets lots of face-to-face quality time with tech support staff. My PowerBook means no chat time with Bob & Timmy, Microsoft-trained support wizards for rooms 213b *and* c, and that means, yet again, I have to work. Good conversation vs. Work? Windows takes this round easily as well.
3. My windows colleague doesn't have to manually surf for porn, rather, some people in Uzbekistan put child porn on his system for him. What a time saver! Windows wins again.
4. Blue is a pretty color. This ones close, but Windows squeaks it out.
The final tally is 4 in favor of Windows and none for lowly OS X. How sad.
--- What?
I have no problem using the latest Mozilla on OS X.
And it's NOT hard at all to change the default browser to Mozilla.
1. Open System Preferences.
2. Open Internet panel.
3. Switch default to Mozilla using drop-down list.
If those aren't the steps exactly, they are close -- right now I'm at work, on my crappy Win2K laptop -- so I'm working from memory. I've got a flat-panel iMac running OS X 10.1.4 at home.
I'm running a quicksilver 733Hz G4, OSX 10.1.3, and right next to it a Dell Dimension 4100, 1Ghz P3. I'm on a Pacbell DSL link.
I loaded www.cnn.com and www.apple.com under both IE and moz (9.9) under both machines.
For cnn.com, IE5 and moz on the Dell were about the same, around 2s. (Moz was the fastest to get the banner ad up, maybe IE5 was fractionally quicker overall. Very hard to tell. IE5 had the worst outlier though -- one time it took 5s.)
Moz 9.9 OSX was around 2.5-3s, and IE5 on the Mac was slowest -- 3-4s.
All browsers loaded the Apple page pretty much instantaneously. I couldn't tell the difference.
Lesson #1: use Mozilla under OSX; it's been getting faster with each point release, while IE5's remained static. IE5 can be sluggish at times.
Lesson #2: there really isn't that much of a difference between the machines. I do a fair bit of surfing on both, and they're literally side-by-side, hooked up to the same monitor. Up until now they'd always seemed about the same speed, surfing-wise, to me. So I was taken aback by the article -- and after testing, I guess the OSX browsers are a *little* slower, but not so's you'd notice much.
Mind you, I do have plenty of memory. Perhaps the iMacs were hitting the VM a little hard? Or, the pixmaps for all those pretty alpha-blended graphics probably add up. I believe there's an option to store them compressed in memory to speed things up on low memory machines, probably mentioned on one of the numerous OSX hint sites.
A.
Open IE on a Mac OS X system. In the background, run "top -u" from a Terminal window (or logged in remotely). Watch IE float to the top of the CPU usage column. Q.E.D.
* And now that OmniWeb 4.1 beta 4 is out, most of those problems are resolved. It's far more stable (hasn't crashed once), has better JavaScript handling, faster rendering, and many other improvements. I like it so much I've just handed over some money for it when I could have carried on using it for free! All OS X users should give it a try.
Ceterum censeo subscriptionem esse delendam.
That's a file containing the cron process id.
:)
Not having a mac (yet) I can't tell you which file to edit, but it isn't that one
-Yarn - Rio Karma: Excellent
Isn't there IE 6 for the PC which had a whole slew of significant features?
Mac users (including myself) are stuck back in 5.x, I believe.
Anyone know how significant an update IE 6 is?
D
I love OS X! I got my first mac, an iMac DV 400mhz on eBay and OS X from staples. It was absolutely the coolest OS I have ever seen.
I sold the iMac and got an iBook. At the same time they released the X.1 upgrade. For a while it seemed faster. Since the iBook was 500mhz (oh by the way, i missed the 600mhz model price shift by 2 days).
I used it for five months, right up until I couldn't take the performance hit any longer. Few things that annoyed me. The web browsing was terribly slow, also switching between apps was really slow. The transparent terminal helped for a while since I could read the contents of the IE window beneath the terminal, but it didn't help me work it pimpstyle with the chicks on AIM.
The List of Grievances with Slashdot.
The Omni Group already has a couple of applications bundled with PowerMacs, so they are getting revenue for each system. I'm sure that if Apple thought it was time to bundle OmniWeb, they would come to an agreement.
Omni would probably be tickled to death to have OmniWeb bundled. I wouldn't be surprised if it happens eventually, but there are still bugs to iron out and incompatibilities to fix.
I don't think it's unreasonable for Apple to say that they'll start bundling it if it is at least as compatible as IE.
The big problem now is that IE has name recognition among Windows users, and of course OmniWeb has none. So if they took out IE and put in OW, the average person on the street would think they were cheap and chintzy for not including the better known product.
That's why I don't think IE is going any time soon - but if OmniWeb could be added to the default install, I think that would be a Very Good Thing, since it sure does make MacOS X look fantastic.
Final point: I happily paid for OmniWeb, since I think the browser is worth the $30. It's a great product and deserves the support of its users. This is not a big company like Microsoft that can afford to work for free because it gets revenue from Windows. If you want independent companies to survive, you should support the ones whose products you appreciate.
D
I had similar rendering problems with Mozilla/FreeBSD and Mozilla/XP.
I guess I have to nice Mozilla to +10
While I as a mac user find Apple's tendency to over hype everything a tad annoying, but on the otherhand it's fun. There are loads of sites all over that contain rumours about the next product from apple. (www.mosr.com for example). Even here on /., when a new release is scheduled, we have a tendency to speculate wildly. And it's fun. It's all part of the experience of being a mac user. It's community. Sounds lame but it's true.
When was the last time you saw a rumor site about Dell, or Gateway, or even AMD? No one really cares about what new stuff their developing. Partly because we already know. AMD will turn out faster chips, Dell will turn out crapier machines and Gateway will market more windows boxes.
But what will apple turn out? Will the next computer from apple litteraly be a notebook type of computer (anyone remember watching inspector gadget?) Will they revisit their handheld with a Newton II? Will they make a iCorder, the newest digital camera? We all enjoy the hype of apple, even when they let us down. It's fun. We expect nothing less of apple.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
sudo sh /etc/daily
/etc/weekly
/etc/monthly
sudo sh
sudo sh
Each of those commands will ask for your administrator's password.
First off, what a sloppy way to compare browsers. Their so called "test" doesn't mean anything; I won't even begin to rant on that. I have no complaints on my G3/400 on adsl. It's pretty speedy for an "old" machine, at least for surfing the web. I also have an amd 1ghz with win2k/redhat. I don't surf the net on my pc because webpages, as well as environment, are not as attractive as seen from my mac. It's a matter of taste really, some have good taste, most have bad taste. Blah!!!
As a follow up, I just installed Mozilla RC1 - and it is even faster than 0.9.9. Better yet some of the goofy timing bugs have been fixed - for instance I have a bunch of folders organizing my bookmarks on the "links" bar - and when I would click on that it would pop up two menus - one with my booksmarks and the other with the "properties"... a real pain in the ass. Fixed! YAY! Sorry... back to the point - this new release of RC1 seriously topples IE 5.1 now. I the Microsoft Mac buinsess unit is working on the next version of their Tasman rendering engine... and I'm sure they'll bring things up to speed - but these initial ports of their software have been rather disapointing to me. While IE 5.1 for the mac brought loads of web standards and CSS improvement that no other browser at the time had - Mozilla has clearly taken the torch for best CSS/web standards browser and with these latest speed enhancements I'd venture to say it is the best browser out there for the mac. of course... until Chimera comes along. :-D
A note about OmniWeb: While a nice effort from the OmniGroup... even the latest betas have far too many problems with CSS to even consider using this broswer full-time. Chimera is the answer because it uses Gecko. Mozilla team has already done all the work to get standards compliance in and is working closesly with developers (People like Netscape's Eric Meyer who hand-crafted the CSS spec.) Even OmniGroup themselves have said some of their engineers don't have a full grasp on the HTML spec...
Ok, that's all my bambling for today.
I see a lot of comments here about how "dog slow" OS X is compared to whatever.
Let me just say that I was, and if Windows is the other option, am a big Linux advocate. And though I'm not particulary wizardly on UNIX, I prefer to use it when I can, just because I don't like MS's corporate policies. On the other hand I'm very fond of the Apple way with regard to hardware/OS integration, and general user experience. Apple's corporate policies are another story.
I quit using Macs back in '95 because of several hardware debacles and have used Linux at home, and Windows/UNIX at work.
When OS X came out, I jumped on the bandwagon, the opportunity to use a UNIX based system with the Mac experience on top of it was too compelling to pass up. So I got a 600MHz iBook. With 640MB of RAM.
For the iBook vs. PowerBook argument, it comes down to simple economics. I couldn't afford a PowerBook. Period.
So far the iBook's been fine, with caveats. The screen's sorta small for my aged eyesight. But the size of the machine is perfect. Finder is really slow in directories with lots of files in list view. Other than that it seems fine.
So I don't know what kind of "speed" people are looking for. Honestly. I use a Dell 2 GHz Win2K box with 256MB RAM at work, sometimes side by side with my iBook, and the differences are not so glaring to me. I mean they're two different machines, I expect them to behave slightly different, but I don't go from the Dell box to the iBook with a sense of decreased performance.
So I don't understand what the big beef is. It makes me think that some people who're complaining about lack of speed are being disingenuous about their experiences. Either they haven't really used OS X and are anti-Mac on principle, or they're relying on some second hand anecdote for their comments.
Ultimately I'd like to see Apple fix the finder list-view issue, and obviously optimize the system as mentioned in the Wired article, but OS X seems "useable" to me.
Like the subject says.
Uninstall MSIE and install Netscape. Problem Solved.
Yeah, apple is designed to be easy to use, yeah os x 10.0 or beta is slow as hell, yeah the normal apple user isnt going to know the word optimization from the phrase multitasking or "two buttons", but we're nerds, so we have no right to complain. I like to open word, and walk off, then come back and hour or two later and run top (g4 400 w/ a gig of ram)... what process is taking up 40% of my processor time and 20% of my memory? Word you say? that right! Turn off genie, dont run aim (adium is much better), and shut down your freakin microsoft applications (IE isnt actually that bad... texshop all the way!). Check out some of the speed optimization tips online (there is more than a hand full of sites out there directed specifically at this) and you can get it running pretty speedy (its more than usable on my g3 400 w/ only 192 megs of ram). If you really care, buy more ram, and 2 scsi drives (apple supports the 2940u2b and the 2940u160 cards oem'd by them... other than that I cant say, especially not for a boot drive), make a ufs file system on there (HFS+ is rather slow, IMHO... perhapse the bfs thing will pan out (or some kind of speedy journalling file system)), and run some software raid. Even on a 400 my system rocks, and I've had no performance issues what so ever (much faster than a 400mhz or even 700mhz x86 machine). And if all else fails... just wait until nvidia and ati start making cards that do hardware support for all the nifty features in os X.
On a 400mghz TiBook with 192MB RAM, mozilla 0.9.9 running on Yellow Dog Linux is very snappy, feeling the equivalent of a gigahertz Athlon. Rebooting into OSX is like pouring molasses in it, and not just for web browsing either. Hey, is there a benchmark for browser performance? Scrolling speeds would need to be a major component of it....
http://tinyurl.com/4ny52
IE and Opera are not NATIVE OS X. Go to www.omnigroup.com and grab the latest OmniWeb beta. Works great here.
heehee... :-)
[|]
There's a fix for that, and it's called Mozilla. Why don't you head on over to mozilla.org and get yourself a copy. It renders much faster than IE, once it finally launches . . .
The article is interesting - but that's not the results I've been seeing. My Mac seems to load/render pages as fast as any of the PCs I've used. I've found that browsers on OS X seem to load/render considerably faster than on OS 9, especially if there are frames and/or PNG graphics involved. I don't use IE (IE is rather slow - it crashes *much* less often than it did on 9 or on Windows though) but even comparing "Apples to Apples" by using the latest build of iCab or Mozilla on comparable machines running 9 vs. X I don't see the results the article talks about.
However, he is primarily talking about the new iMacs (even though the article states that the problem is OS related across the whole line). The new iMacs use nVidia based graphics systems and the nVidia drivers for OS X are still playing "catch up" with ATI. They're slowly improving but a Radeon is going to be faster because ATI has a lot more experience in writing Mac drivers. I think that's probably the culprit - the author of the article is blaming OS X when it's actually a video driver issue - the nVidia driver may not be as mature as the ATI driver so on nVidia based systems you're going to get more of a performance hit.
At any rate, this may very well be a non-issue within a couple of months. nVidia is working on it's drivers and they are steadily improving and OS 10.2 is due out by the end of the summer(?). There are supposed to be some major performance enhancements rolled into that release.
ObTagLine: The more you run over the 'possum, the flatter it gets.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I just realized that my 28 seconds were mostly likely skewed by the fact that i'm also running limewire and AIM on the iMac, which is dutifully saving it's downloads to the XP computers drive (Via DAVE). So, there's a few other processes going on, plus a bunch of network stuff that may or may not affect it all.
Still, if i dared cancel limewire, i could probably must a better figure for page loading, but i'd rather not...
Two red flags jump out at me when reading the Wired article (did any of you read it, or did you just join the Slashdot discussion already in progress):
1. "I'm tired of seeing the spinning wheel..."
-- When a page is taking forever to load (which doesn't happen that often) the IE logo in the top right spins. Wheel spinning is the OS working, not the app drawing on the screen.
2. "Better than OS 9, which required users to pull the power plug and/or PULL THE BATTERY"
-- ?????? I've never had to pull the battery on ANY mac to reset anything. That's a ludicrous statement. This whole article appears intended to stir up a negative connotation in Windows users' minds about the Mac. Many of the statements in this article are intended to plant a seed of doubt in the public perceptions of OS X.
Don't stand for it!
http://www.scottauld.com
When you have a really slow interactive program, look for bugs like those. Machines today are fast enough; if there's a performance problem, it's probably a design bug like one of those above.
They are judging browsing on OS X by IE, the weakest of the OS X browers. Mozilla is by far the best of the bunch and IE is the weakest. They should do an article on Mozilla and OmniWeb then come back for a follow-up. I think the main problem is that people tend to use only what's given to them and not investigate options, so therefor we have the greatest portion of users using IE exclusively. And also why people use Microsoft Windows.
I totally agree, Windows XP definitely DOES suck cat's nipples. And hey, sorry about your old lady taking a dirt nap. Simply chill out, pop the tab on a cold brewskie, watch some WWF, and stop moping. She's fish food now. Forget her. She was probably screwing around on you anyways. In fact, Annabel Lee kinda sounds familiar...was she into handcuffs and watermelon?
Zoober
We encountered a different problem with this platform/browser combination - under a specific set of circumstances, a very common Flash/Action Script command seems to fail (LoadMovie). We currently have an open incident with Macromedia and they're investigating - it's been over two weeks. So there goes your "stability" theory...
Reading all of these people trying to state the case for their particular browser of choice being the fastest doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Posters are all using different methods to get to the net as well as different hardware.
So one guy swears that icab is the fastest but he's connecting with a 56k modem while another guy says IE is fine as he sits there hooked up to his cable modem. What's fastest is what works best for you on your machine with you connection.
I have a Dual-Gig PowerMac w/512MB RAM that I have hooked up to Charter Pipeline (which is one sucky service folks) and I've tried the latest versions of IE, Netscape, iCab, and Omniweb (or whatever the hell that thing was called, OmniView? I dunno)all within the last week or so.
In MY case I observed the Netscape was a pig but seemed pretty stable, IE was fairly quick but crashed all the time, icab was about the same as IE but didn't crash that often, and the Omni "thing" crashed with alarming regularity. I mean all the friggin time. It was almost funny.
So what can we learn from this? Not much unless you are me and have my computer and my connection. OSX being slow isn't something I can agree with but then again, I am running it on a brand new Dual-Gig machine. It's fast and friendly and I'm happy. What else can I say.
I do have a G3 Beige tower upgraded to 500Mhz with a Newertech processor. I don't run OSX on it because of the onboard ATI video not being supported with accelleration but I have in the past. Despite that video problem I thought it was completely usable at the time but I dropped it back to OS9 to run my older apps in the OS they are supposed to be in (and to not "soil" my new machine with older non-OSX software). Truth is the only reason I upgraded to the Dual Gig was to play newer games.
Unless the thing is just unusable it's all just mental masturbation anyway. People crying about OSX being unusable on a G3 with supported video running at 500Mhz or better are either doing something wrong or just looking to complain about in my less than humble opinion.
This is a big reason why graphics-heavy apps are slow on osx. Try going to a web page with lots of radio buttons rendered as gum-drops. s-l-o-w
Sure, OS X is impressive for a 1-year-old OS. But it isn't a year old. It would be more accurate to say that OS X is NeXTStep 5.0, the 5th major revision of a 13-year-old OS. I think OS X performs about as you'd expect for a major facelift of a tried-and-true system.
This is one of the reasons I hate using IE on OS X. It's a Carbon app.
jhw
All web browsers suck. I don't care which platform you're on.
:(
It's 2002 now... and the web, moreovere, webbrowsers, have had over five years to mature. Yet there isn't a single browser out there that is a respectful mix of standards-based compatiblity, ease of use, and speed. Why?
Don't feed me that line that you can't have everything in one package because once you add-in all of the features, things must slow down. Phooey. We can get Quake to run @ 92837423947fps, but can't get a kickass browser in the market. WTF is *that* all about?
And looking upon the IE alternatives...
-Netscape 6.2? Get real. I would probably look upon it more favorably if it were coded to take advantage of Quartz/Aqua & Carbon/Cocoa in OSX. I'd also like to mention that its scrolling bar is *way* too narrow...
-OmniWeb? They want me to pay them ~$30 for an incomplete browser... yah right. Try fixing your java & CSS support, guys.
-Opera? You're kidding right? It's in the same class as Omni, if you ask me.
-IE? It has wronfully become the litimus test for web-development. Yet... is a necessary evil. The majority of browsers out there are IE. Why wouldn't your site be geared towards it?
I've said it before, and I'll say it again... the *ONLY* competition IE has is Netscape.
What really boggles my mind is that this likes to render in a variety of ways depending on which os, browser, and platform you use. That to me is just pathetic.
Stupid as this sounds... I'd rather build a webpage based on PDF. Then I'd at least know it would look the same no matter where it loaded. And would scale so it wouldn't be tethered to a set screen resolution.
Funnier than hell!! I love it. Oh how I love the dumb ones, without them, I would never laugh. Thank you for pointing out his stupidity.
Ok, big giant W: Whatever.
Some people don't like Macs and they Bitch.
some people dont' like PCs and they Bitch.
Some people don't like anything.
MacOS X is pretty nice--kinda slow in places, but pretty nice. Cut it some slack--it's new.
It's great on a new box and crappy on an old
one--welcome to the industry. Did you buy the
minimal standard stuff on the box for your video games? I think not.
Win2K/ XP are pretty nice, too. Security is its biggest problem. This is a feature to keep
MCSE's employed. Thank MS for your job security. Those patches come out by the day.
Rejoice!
The sloth problem with X is aqua and the mach. Apple will probably tweak them later,
but only for new hardware--it's marketing innovation. Buy a dual 1Ghz G4 and watch
OS X fly. Try it on your aging G3 and wait.
That's the computer biz--deal with it.
Somebody posted with a comment about how much faster his NeXT box booted over his Mac. The C-64 and TRS80 booted in just seconds--what's your point again?
The problem with today's computers is the software. The hardware is more than we really need, but software companies keep BLOATING their OSes and software.
When RAM and disk space weren't so cheap, programmers were artful and crafty.
Today's development tools, don't optimize code--they include the kitchen sink for just one little piece, ship it out the door,make the company a dollar, and fix it with the next decimal point. It's a dead-line issue.
It's quantity not quality. The stock value
goes up when the new release is on time.
Your manager gets a bonus and you keep your job--everybody's happy except the guy who has to buy a new box just to use the
new bug-ridden version.
Apple and MS are in a one-up battle for bullsh*t features that Joe Luddite User want
not for what geeks want. MS Office is a prime example. It's a piece of sh*t. but everybody
"has to have it" just like everybody else.
There's a flocking algarithm applied here.
AHHH!! I'm going insane!!!!
Somebody got tired of this and just wrote his own OS...I think his name was Linus something or other.
[rant mode=off]
I might know what I'm talkin' about, but then again, this is Slashdot...
I bought an iBook (500mhz, 640 MB RAM) with OS X, 10.1 and updated it to the current stuff using the software update control panel.
The new iBook is signifcantly slower (switching between applications, moving windows, resizing windows, scrolling) than a PowerMac 7100/66 that we keep around for testing. (It must be 6 or 7 years old.)
Now I don't know (and frankly, I don't care) about cocoa vs. carbon, display postscript, window managers, OpenGL, UNIX, C++, java, or any of that. But I do know something is wrong with the speed of OS X.
It just sucks and it's not acceptable. I no longer own the iBook.
On an MS Windows machine, your graphics driver can bring down the system quite easily because it runs in the kernel. The display system is rooted in 15 year-old technology and has had years of optimization. On a Mac, this stuff is not in the kernel, the display system is cutting-edge, and has had only a year or so of optimization, and many third-party developers are still learning how to optimize their apps for the new system. It's not surprising to see that there are some performance bottlenecks in Mac OS X. What's surprising is that it works as well as it does at this point, that there are so many major native Mac apps, that UNIX and Java2 apps run like a dream come true, that it is incredibly stable, even when running apps like Final Cut Pro 3 (pro-level video editing). It's surprising that you can sit the most technically unsophisticated user down at a new iMac and they will make hay with it without coming to you for help all the time. And, you can also sit down the most technically sophisticated user and they will pop open Terminal and create the kind of UNIX environment that they prefer in no time.
Also, it bears mentioning that the hardest part of switching platforms is that you instantly notice the things that are subjectively worse than your old system, while it may take a while to appreciate the things that are better. In other words, a Windows user could get a Mac, notice that the Web browser seems a bit slower and be unhappy with that, and then they launch iMovie, plug in a camcorder, edit their movie, export to QuickTime or DVD or back to the camera, and now they've just done something that they might never have even attempted on their Windows system, and if they had attempted it, they would have run screaming to the Mac even earlier. You see the bottlenecks because your muscle memory is used to the other system. After a very short while, you develop new muscle memory to go with the new system, and your workflow speeds right back up again.
maybe microsoft made IE slow so they can say XP is much faster... thus making costumer chosing PC (windows) instead of Mac computers...
Fabio - Sumare/Sao Paulo/Brazil/South America/Earth/Solar System/Milky Way/Universe
http://www.morroida.com.br
Reading through the comments here, it appears to me to be more of a problem with MSIE ... I do 98% of my browsing in Mozilla (usually a recent nightly; currently its build 2002041805, aka 1.0RC1) and only switch over to IE if a site requires it or if I'm doing browser compatibility testing for a site I'm launching.
I'm on a G3 iMac (400MHz + 512MB RAM) and I'm pretty happy. Some of the newer OS X apps seem a bit sluggish, but the ones that aren't doing anything too fancy (BBEdit, etc.) seem perfectly fine.
I also have XFree86 loaded (XonX) and I use the OroborOSX window manager. I prefer xterm over Terminal.app and I've recently gotten SciTE, a kick-ass "proof-of-concept" editor for Scintilla, a general purpose coding editor (does autocompletion, call tips, etc. for languages like PHP, Python, et al). This is what's used in Komodo and since I can't get Komodo for OS X, I'm using SciTE in the meantime.
In short, even with a 400MHz G3, I'm getting along just fine. Mozilla is perfectly responsive, Quicktime movies play w/o problems, Flash sites also work without any noticeable delays ... compared to Win98/Win2K running in VMware on a dual-proc (I know, VMware doesn't do SMP) 450MHz PIII with 256MB RAM, I'd say my iMac is quite a bit snappier. I imagine that if I ran at a lower resolution (say 800x600) like many, many web designers do (such as the one I live with), Aqua would be even more snappy, as it would have less to do.
Even so, I'm looking forward to getting a new iMac w/ a G4 proc, to take advantage of those Altivec enhancements and the oh-so-sweet flat panel display :)
"Where's my change?" "Change must come from within."
The fact that the MBU would blame it on Apple is pretty lame...they decided that their best course of action was to port directly to OS X using Carbon, and hence they are using 90-95% of the Mac OS 9 code...if you would care to boot into OS 9 you will notice that it has the same problems as the OS X version...namely that it chokes on large html files...I have always had to use another browser like Netscape to view anything larger than 40KB at a reasonable speed...just think about those readme and tutorial files sitting on your hard drive that you try to read with IE...its sometimes impossible.
IE for OS X is subpar for anything but compatibility...which is why Apple included it...Apple can't have a browser that doesn't do just about everything correctly even if it is slow...making sure people can get to all those stupid services that are aimed directly at IE are a necessity. Every other browser is faster than IE on Mac OS X, but none has such a wide range of compatibility.
Wired only mentions one other browser which they think is slow, that they have tried, and that is Opera. Opera is slow...period...Opera even knows it...they say its their event model and I believe it. Omniweb has been in development on the cocoa framework from the beginning and it shows...it leverages the OS very well especially when you look at your CPU monitor and see that it isn't using more than 30% CPU to render a page at any one time. Compare that to IE which takes up as much CPU as it can get.
Chimera, which I am typing this with right now, makes all the others look dead as far as speed goes...and thats at version 0.21...I have used IE, Netscape, Mozilla, Fizilla, and Omniweb throughout their development, and they have NEVER been this fast. I don't care what you think, when it has more features implemented it will still be faster..nq.
As far as hardware acceleration, that is a cop out on IE's part...page rendering is not handled anywhere but in CPU, and the Quartz layer is probably the fastest CPU dependent implementation of a 2d gui I have ever seen...have you tried other OS's without hardware acceleration?...they are practically unusable and they are only drawing boxes!...with the degree of complexity within the compositing layer, its a wonder its as fast as it is...the fact that it only draws what it has to at any one time is a refreshing change as far as gui's go...if you don't see it, your CPU isn't wasted drawing it.
There actually is some hardware acceleration in OS X and it can be seen when you drag a window...the fact that it may appear slow is that the shadows around the window are alpha blended and as such are CPU dependent...these shadows from my own testing can take up to 60% of the CPU to draw, and when they are not drawn the same window uses 25% of the CPU it had to before...you can see for yourself the hardware acceleration using the Quartz debug utility...all those portions of the screen that are being redrawn by Quartz are flashed yellow...and when you drag a window, only the shadows are updated...the bitmaps from the main windows are handed off to the QuickDraw layer for hardware acceleration.
Apple will definitely bring more hardware acceleration to Quartz and especially to alpha blending and compositing, but it will take time and man power...they don't have the same resources as MS.
IE is just passing blame and although it is expected, its just plain sad.
Wired knows it hasn't really looked into the facts because then it couldn't print what it did...I don't see any numbers for times of loading or anything...I just see noticeably faster, twice as fast, etc...where the hell are the numbers...this is computer science not computer subjectivity...I'd like to see some results of timed testing, where they took a stopwatch or used the apps own feedback to tell them...from the time a link is activated to the time the page is fully loaded...hell, I'll do it my own damn self, and then we'll see what merit this has.
--"It's Bradford Company, slash your last name, dot your first name"
too bad, /.
mozilla rc1 release should appear on
instead of "tree close" and branching"
-- Hasbullah bin Pit (sebol)
I don't understand that kind of complaints.
I've got a OS X 10.1.4 running on a beige G3 at 292 Mhz and 160 MB RAM (with a 7200rmp HD) and it is fast enough for me!
I don't say that browsing might not be slower but it is barely noticable.
The truth is that you Inernet conection and internt traffic are probably the real bottelneck to faster browsing.
Chimera 0.2.1 renders this thread (nested, threshold 2, ~200 messages) in a second or two on my Ti550 on a T3 line.
stop feeding the trolls....
I'm a long-time Mac user and it gets on my nerves when I see other Mac users dismiss these kinds of critiques against Apple by pointing out how it may be Microsoft's fault because of their browser. I'm no defender of MS, but gimme a break!
MSIE is one of the few examples of software done right on the Mac... or anywhere for that matter. The Microsoft Macintosh unit doesn't port Windows code to the Mac--they maintain their own code and overall, they do great work. Read one of the interviews with Kevin Browne that have been featured in Macworld or Macaddict. This excuse that I'm seeing posted here (and hinted at) that it's "not made for the Mac" is pure apologist horse-shit and an embarrassing example of the kind of zealotry we Mac users are routinely (and not always fairly) accused of.
There's no excuse for Apple not to have OS X optimized at this point. Steve Jobs himself even used the clock analogy to show OS X's progress over the last year, and this March was 12:00. OS X should have been optimized for speed then... not in the possibly "18 months" that the article specifies. What possible excuse could there be for that? Apple is one of the few companies actually turning a profit right now. It can't be budgetary reasons.
I don't understand the delay on this issue, but no Mac users should be rushing to Apple's defense over this.
--Rick
--Rick "If it isn't broken, take it apart and find out why."
Just loaded this slashdot article using IE on my Ibook 600, which now has over 300 comments... Less than 10 seconds to load. I have 640 MB o RAM and I'm sitting on the receiving end of a T1. It took about 3 seconds in IE on an NT 4.0 box with 256MB o RAM using the same T1. Interesting...
Perhaps once Mr. Christoph has his speedy new Windows portable he'll be able to type trolls even faster. I can't wait!
--- What?
Getting a little OT here...
As I geek, I have some problems with the way the window manager works. I've become used to switching between two arbitrary windows that I'm working with using Alt-Tab (I use this both in Windows and Linux with KDE). The equivelent in OS X is Cmd-Tab which switches between *applications*, and always in the same order (rather than the stack model that Win and KDE use, keeping the most recent ones closer to the top of the stack).
That and I miss focus follows mouse.
If anyone can tell me how to quickly switch between to arbitrary windows in OS X (using the keyboard) I'd love to hear it.
OS X is a beautiful OS, and I hope they improve it, but the fact is, from the OS 9 days until now, the operations of the OS are slow!
.html file from the LOCAL drive onto the browser (pick one, doesn't matter).... it will take a loooonnnngg time if there are tables or graphix (even locally).
Sure Photoshop actions are fast, but whoopie, how about day to day tasks?
Another test... drag and drop an
Do this on any other OS (windows, linux), and it flies...
Headline! Headline!
Slashdot posts OSX article and nothing else for the REST OF THE DAY!!!!
Just goes to show you the Media reports anything for sensationalism.. anything to fill the blank lines.
I see no slow down when browsening under OSX
Apple has a fine product.. a BSD unix layer
With a soild desktop...
MS Can't beat it in thier wildest dreams of being the snott-balls they are to the computer community
Now I abhore IE just as much as the next geek but give me a break.. IE 5.5 is anything *but* slow on windoze. Surely you have better M$ disses than that. If it's slow on your computer(s) then I suggest you look into that problem because it really shouldn't be. Now, crashes and security issues, that's a totally different ball game =P
IE is very slow, but iCab is the fastest browser I've used on any system, and I run OS X on a 500 ibook with a 66 Mhz bus.
I'd have to say that's one of the greatest ways to tweak OS X that I've found. I'm using an original iMac on a broadband connection (college campus serviced by multiple DS3 lines -- it's great) and huge /. comments pages show up as fast as iCab can render them. BTW, I have found iCab to be dramatically faster than any other browser on OS X, and trust me, I've tried them all. Maybe it's just my combination of older hardware and a fast connection, but iCab smokes every other browser out there.
-rq
Hey old timer.. make use of that sweet g4 processor by pointing your walking cane to Links and see what you're missing.
I can only speak for myself, however, I really have better things to do than spam the email box of someone who says my computer is slow.
I only use NS on mac. Because it could display Chinese, my native language, properly. IE on mac even could not display Chinese character on hotmail, It is frustrating experience to open a email from my friends. But NS6 works fine. that's it.
There is a spark in every single flame bait point.
As for the parent post's second point, there is an excuse but it's not a good one. Apple is undergoing alot of changes, and the OS department is now switching from a legacy system it's been using for over 18 years to a completely new system with completely new problems, obstacles and gotchas, including supporting the ENTIRE legacy OS on top of all that. That's right, I'm sure 9 is still under development, and will be until it's no longer needed at all. Think about how large Apple is. I mean, they are big but they're no Microsoft, their resources are somewhat limited, and they have alot going on. Times of transition have always been hectic at the Apple camp, and this is probably the largest transition of ANY type Apple has ever made. The switch from System 6 to System 7 was relatively painless, a few bugs here and there but they got the job done. The switch from 68k to PPC was much smoother, somewhat slow but the PPC was backwards compatable with 68k code though a software emulator that ran at near native speed, that's impressive.
Now all that has changed. Everything the Mac ever was under the hood, it isnt' anymore. Sure the API is still supported through Carbon but this is only a tie-in.
Try this for me and tell me if you have no time to optimize because you're too busy making it work:
- 1. Take a Linux kernel and modify it to work on a processor it wasn't intended for.
- 2. Redesign Windows Media Player, DirectX and the standard screen drawing APIs (whatever they are) to integrate seamlessly with it.
- 3. Port the Windows GUI to it.
- 4. Add a system for including three seperate APIs (Win95/98, NT/2000, and a new MFC no one is too keen on yet).
- 5. Make sure it not only boots and runs wth reasonable speed, but can also run XP as a "side chain" process to support programs that would otherwise not function correctly under the normal OS.
I'm sure after only a year you could have 500 engeneers on it and still have trouble. I would say Apple took on a HELL of a task and it ended up working out quite nice, dispite a few kinks in performance. Imagine if Microsoft had done the same thing?<rant>
Another thing I've noticed: Users are getting less and less patient with computers. Once they see the fastest one, nothing else is good enough. There is a difference between functional and perfect, grandma doesn't need to surf that fast...
</rant>
<zealotry>
And, just for shits and giggles, the only time I've ever seen IE take more than 4 seconds to render a page on any Mac is when the page uses tables heavily (i.e. SLASHDOT, amongst others). Most pages are rather responsive, even on my lowly 250MHz 8600.
</zealotry>
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
This is how I metamoderate, BTW.
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
Ok, some stats please. How many US users have broadband, and how many use modems.
Here in Australia, it's like 90% modem at home. I'm sure it's that way in many other countries too. Modems are far from obselete.
performance will be up to par, Real Soon Now (TM).
I notice all of these settings revert to their previous values upon a reboot. How do I set this up so the settings you gave get set automatically upon startup?
I'm guessing setting it up as a script to be executed by that cron thingy. As you can tell, I'm not exactly versed in unix. Anybody care to show me how this would be done?
If you want to run those commands every reboot, you instead need to add commands to your init shell scripts. Those are just a list of command-line programs that are run every time you boot.
The location of the init shell scripts varies depending on the unix you use, but it's always somewhere in the /etc directory tree. I'm not familiar with MacOS X, so I can't tell you exactly where; look around in /etc for files called "init(something)" or "rc.d". Find a file that seems to be starting up a bunch of initialization programs and just cut-and-paste the new commands at the end.
LOL... i have links installed too, you young whippersnapper.
Go fink!
A buddhist walks up to a hot dog stand and says ``Make me one with everything.''
Err... correct me if I am wrong, but if you login as >console why are you paying for Mac OS X? You would be better off running darwin.
This may sound kind of strange but has anyone thought that the speed difference between the two platfoms is actually non-existant but that users perceive a speed difference because IE/Win32 makes a little "click" noise when a page loads? This has always struck me as a bit of psychological trickery on MS's part. What's the easiest way to make a page feel snappy? Play a little snapping noise while you render it, of course. :)
I'm in your boat; no speed problems with IE on my G4.
my personal box's been running linux (not a hardcore distro) for a good time and I like it, but there's an undeniable fact: current desktop unixs *are* slow. OS X is sluggish and KDE 3 isn't much better that 2.x. (On the other hand, strict compiling/crunching tends to run faster.)
Having said that, WIRED's "testing" IS a joke.
Of course their guy didn't use a controlled LAN environment. When you read the story, it's obvious his procedure wasn't even simultaneous. If you type an URL then go to another PC and type it again... server and network conditions are constantly changing.
Results: of course OS X is somewhat slower even when rendering simple webpages (because it *is* slower overall), but it's NOT NEARLY AS SLOW as WIRED's flawed testing suggests. If someone did accurate tests, the HTML rendering hit would be around 15%-20%, not the 70% WIRED suggests.
Apple's hardware could be better, but so-called serious journalism could be much better too. WIRED should describe its testing procedure.
I'm browsing on my new iMac right now with a Verizon Broadband connection and it freakin' screams.
I did have to set the tcp send and recv spaces higher though.
But, i have never had a problem with slow displays.
Actually, I put all of these commands in /System/Library/StartupItems/Network/Network. I put them at the bottom of the script. After a reboot, they had taken effect, and my computer was working quite well. I don't really notice too much of a difference at this point, but I'm going to try some large file transfers between my iMac G4/800 and PowerBook G3/500. We'll see how it goes.
I just installed and updated OSX 10.1.4 on our aging G3 fileserver with 572Mb RAM and it's way faster than it was running OS9. The main performance increase has to be the fact that with the *NIX kernel we finally have some 'real' multitasking rather than the pathetic OS9 (on OS9 - hold down the mouse button - all disk access stops!! Yes, your web server stops serving pages too!) I dont think I'll be complaining about OSX considering how crap an utterly unreliable OS9 is as a server. I dont think we'll be upgrading our 200 OS8.6 / OS9 clients for some time though - not unless we get offered free OSX versions of all apps overnight.
Thank you. I found a file in /etc called rc.common. I pasted the above commands into it, restarted and voila! They were set upon startup.
Thanks again. Mozilla doesn't seem like a dog now.
I noticed this phenomenon then I installed NutScrape 6 for MacOSX and it now flys... next is the opera 5 beta...
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing. Emo Philips
If Apple sold it, blame Apple. They didn't have to take your money.
Let me start by saying that you CAN connect a 5, or 6, or 65,355 button mouse to the Mac, and each button will be recognized, including a scroll wheel. Taking advantage of over 3 buttons is a task for special drivers, but they can be had. In fact, I'd seriously consider the purchase (only like $39 or less for a lil USB mouse, right?) if it wasnt' for what I'm about to share...
With that out of the way, Apple has done it again - they made it look like it was harder, but in reality it poses a unique advantage. You see, I don't really feel as though I "use" my Mac, I kind of "drive" it, almost like a car (but without the gas pedal and such). With my right hand (YMBL - you may be a leftie) I hold the mouse, and my left hand stays on the keyboard. Now, Apple has provided a Contexual Menu system for quite some time now, since MacOS 8, if memory serves. In order to "right-click" on a Mac, I simply hold the control key down when clicking. YMMV between different apps which don't use the CMM Plugin (Apple's contexual menu API) to do contexual menus, and instead roll their own, possibly with the option key or Command key, but those cases are few and far between. This gives me the advantage of having other shortcut keys at my disposal.
I keep my hand with the keyboard like i keep my hand with the mouse, and if i click something and want it deleted, Command-Delete. Wanna select a bunch of files or folders and open them all? Drag-select and while you're doing that, reach for Command-O. As soon as you let go with the mouse, punch it and away you go. Much faster than the let-go-then-double-click-and-try-not-to-deselect method. It's like having a button for each menu item and such on the mouse. Who says only mice can drive a GUI? Think Different and speed around your OS. (Yes, I'm aware that Windows and Konqueror do this too)
Also, F1-F12 keys are assignable. I can put a browser on one, a mail reader on another, Photoshop on a third, my favorate MP3 playlist on a fourth, and the Finder (i.e. "MacOS Explorer" - I feel dirty now) window for my main hard drive on a fifth. This is why Apple doesn't make a corny internet-savvy keyboard with the extra buttons up top that half the time dont' work - they keys which are there provide the nessisary functionality (and FYI they can be made to only shortcut if you use Cmd-FKEY, so programs that use them like Word aren't affected). The keyboard is just as important in navagating MacOS as the mouse is. I know it's possible in Other OS Worlds as well, but typing directory names and doing Cmd-O is a great speedy navigation tool, much like using the Tab key in a shell, only to go back, instead of deleting the entire directory name, I can Cmd-W. With enough practice, I can perform non-routine tasks with lightning speed and accuracy, making onlookers' eyes bulge and prompts the question "How the hell did you just do that??" Workflow efficiency at it's best.
As for speed. Macs can be fast, but liek any other computer, you have to know how to use them. I can make a 733MHz G4 run CIRCLES around a P4 of around the same clock. Then again, I can probably make the P4 do the same. It all depends on how you interact with it. Ever notice the people who aren't compter savvy have the sluggish, troublesome machines? Computers are delecate and need to be babied alot, and it just depends on your experience who you are a better "parent" for. If you perfer KDE and you know every little thng about Linux and X, then I'm sure you'll have an easier time with keeping that healthy than a Mac. Same goes for Windows.
Why do I use a Mac? To summerize:
Windows is an automatic that's a quart low. Linux is a standard with a V8 & NOS. MacOS is a goddamn F-14. (think which-is-more-fun-to-drive metaphor)
:-)
Oh yea, Jobs is a stick-in-the-ass. But we like him because he concentrates on quality, instead of quantity. Gates and his puppet Balmer just want to sell you whatever buzword they overheard at lunch and had R&D whip up into a .NET total solution for everything, ever. Steve wants to sell, too, but most of Apple's products have a clear, concise place in the computing enviroment, whilst what we see from Microsoft is Octopusware: It's tentacles attach to everything else and every progam tries to be a remote control for the rest though unessisary levels of componentry and regestry entires, IMHO.
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
And in case I didn't make myself clear on the EXPENSIVE AS GODDAMN HELL Apple hardware: Yes it's pricey but when you buy a Lexus you cruise comfortably...
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
IE is a PoS on OS X, but OmniWeb 4.1 on my 400 Mhz G3 iMac is much faster visually more appealing than IE on my 600 MHz PC running Win XP. In terms of stability, OS X is simply unmatched. It has never crashed once ever since 10.1, and you never have to quit applications or turn off the system, you just hide them or put the machine to sleep. I leave dozens of apps running for weeks and there is very little performance degradation. In contrast, I hardly use anything other than IE on the PC, and XP appears slower after a day's use, and it does crash quite a few times over the last month or so since installed. The only thing that is fast on the PC is booting XP, but then I only restart OS X once in a few weeks, so what do I care about booting?
Grewal does a far better job of inventing excuses for his team's bloatware than he does of pretending to understand (graphics, operating systems, 2D rendering take your pick).
Internet Exploder doesn't even USE the anti-aliased text from the ATSUI library, and it's dog-slow. Chimera *does* use Quartz's text rendering, and it kicks IE's ass.
Why is that every time MS does a shitty job on one of their Mac apps, the wintrolls claim that it's the Mac's fault?
Too bad someone can't also mark this insightful; it isn't just funny. If you care THAT much about browsing performance, use Lynx.
IE-Mac is actually pretty zippy on both 9 and X for average web pages, but not as zippy as it is on Windows.
However, any page that is LONG (e.g. Slashdot), or table-heavy, or which has a lot of tricky JavaScript and/or DHTML, can take quite a long time to display. Even if it is stored locally. IE-Mac's JavaScript implementation (called JScript, or simply "Scripting") is famously slow and has caused many headaches for web developers trying to make nice roll-over menus.
This has been true since OS 9, and if anything 5.1 on OS X is better. (5.1 for OS 9 brings it about to parity.) Loading the Java API pages at Sun was painful on IE 5.0; with 5.1 it takes about 7 seconds now on my iBook 600 under OS X, and about 8 seconds on my G3/350 running OS 9. Which is still about 6 seconds too many.
So to me it seems that the blame can't lie that much with X; if anything, it must be in the Carbon API's (for both platforms), or the IE code itself. The fact that Netscape has managed to be consistently faster (even 4.7x) at displaying some pages suggests to me that IE must bear some of the blame. Also, another IE problem is that it occasionally just gets stuck, yielding the spinning beachball (or technicolor pinwheel) of death for long periods, sometimes never to return. This leads to a significant perception of slowness. There are also some cases in which the beachball keeps spinning even after it should have returned to a pointer, such as when downloading something and it gets queued up into the download manager; moving the mouse fixes it. This can also lead to perceived slowness just because you yourself are being told to wait even when you didn't need to be.
There are also some pages it simply doesn't render right and I have to pull out another browser (typically Mozilla, but lately Opera) to deal with them.
With that said, I don't think anything beats IE-Mac's UI or feature set. It's extremely well-designed and robust, and dramatically superior (besides speed) to the Windows version. Like night and day. I hate IE-Windows. And one other thing I love about IE-Mac is that you can tab through every single UI element on a web page; you don't need to reach for the mouse to select boxes or click buttons.
As for the other Mac browsers out there, every few months I do another roundup to see where they're at. OmniWeb I like the look of, but the first website I went to with it was eBay, and though I can't remember the details, it failed me when I tried to sell something; I suspect this is its well-known JavaScript problems. Mozilla and Netscape are fast to render but glacial to launch, and painfully ugly to look at, and don't have particularly well-designed interfaces. Oddly, despite criticism from elsewhere, Opera (for X) has worked pretty well for me; it seems pretty fast and attractive.
iCab is serviceable (not especially attractive) and has a lot of flexibility, but does have some serious JavaScript problems. HotJava (for 9) is, well, HotJava; useless, except that it offers better Java compatibilty for applets under OS 9 than any other browser does.
So I digress, but I think what I was trying to say is that whatever the problems of OS X are, I don't think IE's slowness problems can be entirely blamed on them, as evidenced by its OS 9 performance.
Ivan.