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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" ...
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?
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
When's the last time you downloaded a new one? Mozilla for OS X has had an "Aqua" style appearance for like three or four months now.
Sheesh, people, quit judging Mozilla based on stuff before 0.9.5. There may have been a few regressions here and there, but there has been a lot of progress since the start of the year.
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
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.
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
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
LightWave rendering (which is what all the benchmarks I've seen have been measuring) doesn't use OpenGL at all. It's pretty much pure floating point.
Similarly, applying filters in Photoshop doesn't use 2D graphics accelleration at all -- it's all raw FP or integer (or AltiVec) depending on the filter.
The Photoshop speed difference is almost certainly the result of OS X not allowing apps to completely monopolize the CPU -- IOW, it doesn't demonstrated any OS X inefficiency whatsoever, it's just the cost of modern multitasking.
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You're better off using Mozilla, especially the rapidly developing Mach-O version which has an multithreaded Unix backend and is very fast.
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.
Or how about apple gives em $5 a pop for each OS X system they ship that includes omniweb, and omnigroup doesn't include nagware?
I would take $5 x 100,000 month (im just guessing) compared to $20 x 1,000 a month.
See, the cool thing is, omniweb is free, it just reminds you everyone once in a while that it would be nice if you paid the people who make it. I bought mine with an education discount.
Pay for good software, because then they write more of it (with the exception of microsoft).
X is the roman numeral 10 not the letter X. It stands to reason that Mac OS 11 will be Mac OS XI. Has a nice ring to it.
They can by giving them some money, like they do with the current PowerBook software bundle (OmniWeb and some other Omni stuff is in there, licensed for you by Apple).
Sure they do. Everyone who buys Windows pays for a browser. Even in the sense that you meant it people do pay, I did for example because I really like OmniWeb a lot and had $30 (or $25?) to spare.
Then consider paying for it. Either that or realize that you just posted "I'm too bloody cheap to fix something that irritates me, but I'm upset enough about it to complain in an international publication..."
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