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Mac OS X Slow for Web Browsing?

Posted by pudge on from the mac-os-x-slow-for-everything dept.

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" ...

3 of 637 comments (clear)

  1. Let's see by ekrout · · Score: 1, Flamebait

    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

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  2. I'll tell you why they surf so slowly... by newbob · · Score: 1, Flamebait
    It's because OS-X is a 1969-era operating system (UNIX) written to run on top of an 1984 OS (MacOS) that still has its core components running on a 68000 simulator!

    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!)

  3. Mac == voodoo, Apple == Brezhnev by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Flamebait
    No computer platform has ever been shrouded in so much mystery and voodoo as MacOS. This is because the users never have a clue, the pundits need to protect their emotional investment, and Apple never tells you anything. MacOS X just continues this well established tradition.

    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?".