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" ...

Comments

Interesting Source they chose

[Microsift]

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.

Browsers differences and UI responsiveness

[theolein]

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.

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 .9 or 1.0

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.

Usability & Stability over Speed

[giberti]

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:

• Usability
• Stability

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.

It's as much IE as OS X

[Watts Martin]

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?

Perspective from an early adopter

[petard]

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:

1. Mozilla - It's reasonably fast. My main complaint is that it takes almost 15 seconds to launch! Once it's launched, I find page loading to be fast and stable. It takes a few seconds to open the preferences panel, but that's no different from Moz on my Linux box, which is faster than my Mac.
2. Omniweb - It's probably in fact slower than IE, but it feels faster because the threading is better. It doesn't block while it's loading a page, and pages look great because it uses Quartz rendering. It's still slower than Moz, though, even when I compile Quartz rendering into it, and Mozilla has less trouble rendering pages with CSS and Javascript.
3. Chimera - This one is going to be the best, hands down. It's fast as blazes, even on my hardware. It's the first browser I've used on any other platform that felt as fast as Galeon. It's in a very early dev version, though, and far from feature complete. I like it a lot, so far.

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.