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

No troll, but the WHOLE UI is slow

[qurob]

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

Re:No troll, but the WHOLE UI is slow

[blixel]

Actually, I installed the nVidia binary-only drivers recently onto my 450 MHz Linux/Windows 2000 box, and X runs way faster now. Of course it takes longer initially to start but once that happens it runs faster than I've ever gotten X to run (I'm using FVWM95 at the moment because I don't have the bandwidth to download KDE).

Once I download and install KDE it might slow a bit but the difference has been so amazing under FVWM95 that the slowdown might not be significant.

I too am running the nVidia binary drivers for my GeForce2 card. I can't honestly say I've noticed a bit of difference. I can run Quake 3 now, but the GUI isn't any faster.

I am running KDE 3.0 because I actually want the convenience of having a common looking Desktop environment and applications. It's just slow though... that's the only word to describe it. It's slow to load and compared to my Windows system it's slow just using it. And I don't have an old system either. AMD T-bird 1.33GHz CPU w/ 512MB of PC2100 DDR RAM and a 40GB ATA/100 IDE drive.

Window Maker runs pretty good... but then you lose 95% of your GUI environment. (i.e. no Desktop, no taskbar.) And even Window Maker doesn't seem to refresh as fast as my MS Windows system does. For example, open up any window and have your settings set so that your Windows are opaque (display contents while moving)... Now click the title bar area of the window and drag it around the screen with your mouse as fast as you can. Now do the same thing in Windows. Notice how much faster it is in Windows. Granted that's probably not a very scientific way of testing the speed of the GUI but never-the-less it's an easy way to see the difference. Resizing windows is the same story. In X it's like lagging, sluggish... especially when viewing Images. I have a digital camera that takes pictures up to 2048x1536 resolution. I can scroll through them pretty quickly in Windows and I can resize the window with only a slight delay. In X it's like a painfull process... When I click a corner and resize a Window it's choppy and the system will lag, the mouse cursor will start pausing and unpausing. I can't really blame my hardware because it runs fine if I reboot to Windows.

Re:MSIE

[wjlroe]

who needs flash - it's crap, leave all that to the Winblows slaves

Actually, it all has to do with the

[dan_the_heretic]

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