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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?
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
i have a rev. a imac, and OSX take 5 mins or more to boot. if you click the IE icon on the bottom of the UI, you get to watch it bounce for 10 second while IE launches. Yes, it was nice to have a console and *nix commands, but the UI was so slow I had to put yellowdog back on.
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
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.
If it's Unixlike does that mean there is a port of the X Window System? You could just get rid of that whole icky Aqua nonsense and run an X server with something nice and minimal like icewm.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
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
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
IOW, they left compatabillity in 'cause you would have had the 'million man march' on apple headquarters if they hadn't. (Apple did take forever to support their video card cards in the g3's - long enough to get some upgrades to g4)
It tells you the answer...
The VM in Mach is outdated. It was designed when semiconductor memory was small and expensive, and disks were much smaller and slower, and where L1 and L2 cache was non-existant. Mach VM was not designed for modern high speed disk drives and large semiconductor memory usage. It is truly a relic of the past.
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've got a PIII 450 desktop sitting nearby. Several years old, 256 megs ram, ata100 card. It's blazing fast for an old machine like that.
Apple is supposed by some supporters to be a vanguard of new hardware adoption (OK, so they were quick to adopt firewire). Yet the first iBook2 has pc66 memory! And OSX, for all its eye candy, is useless unless you've got a completely new G4. Really, save your money and buy a 386 based system. You'll laugh as the OSX users watch that spinning ball and you blaze around on something as old as a pentium II.
OSX is a cynical exercise by Apple, where they think their users are so stupid that they'll take eye candy over performance and usability (oh wait this is supposed to be usable). Or, maybe it's a ploy to make everyone buy new macs. Whatever they're doing, this reminds me of how I felt about Star Wars Episode I, where Lucas cynically thought he could put any old crap out and his fans would love it. Well, not this one.
If it's Unixlike does that mean there is a port of the X Window System?
yes. Rooted and rootless.
You could just get rid of that whole icky Aqua nonsense and run an X server with something nice and minimal like icewm.
Yep. This must be slashdot.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
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.
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.
Two reasons -
Apple knows if they turn their hardware in to commodity hardware (with constant upgrades needed to use the latest), their users will be less loyal, since that is one of the selling points for die-hard Mac users. Their users love backwards compatability and long machine livability. Think - FireWire and gigabit ethernet standard.
Also, Apple knows that a good interface will sell more machines. Mac users are likely to think that OS X is really pretty and simple to use when they try it on their G3, and will think less about its lack of speed. But in the long run, users will eventually realize the need for a new upgrade, and will of course pick something running OS X. That happens to be another Apple machine.
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
Apple is at the technological frontier at some areas (floppy disk, mouse, GUI, GigaBit Ethernet, FireWire, removal of the floppy drive), but still slower in some areas (RAM, system bus). But look, the iBook is a consumer notebook. Do you want to trade speed for price and battery life? Why didn't you get a TiBook instead then?
"I tend to think of OS X as Linux with QA and Taste", James Gosling, creator of Java
It does have *NIX behind it though, that might explain it.
I'll probably get "Flamebaited" or "Trolled" for this... but oh well.
I've been using Linux for my server for several years and it absolutely rocks. Awesome stability, fast execution of everything I do and I never have to reboot except when updating the kernel. My best uptimes are 50 and 60 days which I think is pretty good for a home system.
Anyway over the past several years I've explored the X Window System on my Desktop several times and I always end up going back to Windows sooner or later because it's just better. There's just no denying it. And I'm not talking about running MS Office, Video Games, Photoshop, or anything like that. I'm just talking about basic GUI functions and programs like E-mail and web surfing. Booting my Windows system is as fast or faster than booting Linux/X. (Rebooting is of course a major complaint of mine when it comes to MS Windows and that is a non-issue on any Linux system. However, it's not nearly as bad with Windows XP.) Windows just has a smoother/faster feel to it. Programs load faster, widgets automatically line up properly (ehem! GTK+ sucks ehem!), and so on. The issue of stability always comes up when talking about Windows. Well... I don't know what version of Netscape/Mozilla/Galeon/Opera/Konqueror other people are using but in my experience they are more unstable than IE/Windows. Is everyone running Lynx? What's the point of having a GUI desktop then? And I've yet to find a completely stable GUI e-mail program in X. Again - if I wanted to run Pine I wouldn't bother having a GUI desktop. Outlook Express has been rock solid for me. (Oh no... I almost advocated something about Windows. This is "flamebait" for certain now.)
Basically if you set aside all the "evil empire" issues surrounding Microsoft, which is hard for many of us to do myself included, I think Windows makes for a good Desktop environment and OSX and all the Linux distros that use X are in second place for the vast majority of Desktop users. Coders/programmers and other such people probably wouldn't agree but think about what your uses are for a computer compared to the average Desktop user.
Let the flame fest begin...
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 have a B&W G3 at 450 and it runs OS X -ok- (with 256 ram). It's not as fast as the G4/867, but it certainly isn't dog slow.
Its pretty poor to call OS X crap, too. OS 9 was faster, but sure as heck wasn't even close to as stable as OS X.
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
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.
I beg to differ. The Mach 3 i use has a revolutionary vm called triple-blade shaving system. Try it yourself.
/Pedro
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?
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.
US businesses that currently accept chip and PIN/signature
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
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.
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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)
The obvious: money. 500mhz with lots of ram should be enough for web browsing, ssh and X forwarding (which I have working on OSX but guess what--it's slow)--I didn't see the need to spend $800 more on the tiBook. But the point is not whether Apple makes any machines worth having (the TiBook is nice, no doubt about it) but that OSX is such a poor performer when compared to Linux on the same hardware or Linux or Windows on similar quality i386 hardware. 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? Maybe because, like other proprietary systems, they are much, much more interested in positioning themselves to make money (by forcing hardware upgrades) than in offering something useful. OK, alright, it's capitalism, but in this case any user not willing to fork out for a new G4 based system got screwed....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. This to me is what the beauty of open source is all about--a focus on the software, not on the business politics.
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.
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 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.
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
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?
XFree86 runs like a champ. Looks really slick with windowmaker too.
But maybe I am just not as demanding as everyone else, but I don't see any performance problems with the user interface. I don't find myself waiting any longer for things to launch on OS X than I do on my Windows or Linux machines. Now, I grant you that the five most used applications on my powerbook are mail, terminal, project builder, mozilla and StarCraft; and the five most used on my windows machines are behemoths like VisualAge for Java, WSAD, NetBeans, Mozilla and StarCraft. So I may not be the best judge of the snappiness of response time.
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"
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.
Would you care to outline its exact problems, or is "but it's old" good enough for you? Most of the things you stated would require a bit of tweaking, not scrapping the VM and starting over.
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...)
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
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?
the following comment says some bad things about windows AND linux. please mod -1 immediately. As we don't want more that one opinion here on slashdot.... I absolutely agree with you. I get a lot of crap from people when I say that kind of stuff. Fact is, the GUI of X Windows with whatever window manager doesn't even come close to the performance of explorer. Okay, blackbox, windowmaker, etc are fast. Then, try to play a game or watch a DVD. Yeah, you can get it to work. Only after serious time spent installing and tweaking. Then, performance isn't as goog as windows. Now, I LOVE Linux and use it for servers/firewall, but as a desktop OS....Its got a long way to go. Also, I HATE windows. Hmmm....that leaves OSX. CompUSA, here I come.
is very responsive, according to my daily experience.
IE on OS X sucks air.
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
And OSX, for all its eye candy, is useless unless you've got a completely new G4.
I've seen usable installations of OS X on beige G3s. You must be doing something wrong.
I've been running OS X on my 500MHz iBook (640MB RAM) and performance is snappy. I have very few complaints about OS X. Not sure what your problem is, but your experience is certainly not universal. I do notice some delays with page rendering but it's nothing I can't live with for now; I am looking forward to continued improvements.
The problem is not Unix nor Mach, the problem is Aqua. My old NextStation (Love40 @ 25Mhz, 32Mo Ram, 500Mo HDD, NextStep 3.2) boots faster than an Mac with OSX. And Omniweb2.7 is faster on this oldie than IE on a new Mac machine...
On the other hand, you get people like me who uses Sun Ultrasparcs and Dell boxes running Linux everyday evaluating OS X and I think it IS slow. Granted, the only thing I had to try it on was an old 333MHz G3 tower (the greenish ones) with around 384 megs of ram.. the thing is slow. It's pretty, but slow. I think I'd need at least a dual G4 1GHz machine and 2 GB of ram before it was acceptable for daily tasks like web browsing and word processing. I'll stick to my Linux box for now and just use MacOS Aqua themes if I really want to be cool.
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.
With 320MB on the iBook, you're probably going to need the window buffer compression trick. With that amount of RAM, and stock config (no window buffer compression), you're system will be paging out with just one or two apps running. The trick about will free 80-100MB of RAM, and it will help.
cat
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!
Not to be rude, but what did you expect? Even if you have the fastest Rev A iMac, that's still only what? 300 or 350 Mhtz? No kidding it's going to be slow, even a good version of Linux would be slow on that once the GUI kicked in.
Just out of curiosity. Were you using os X or X.1? X had about the same speed as the beta, which is to say, lousy. But X.1, even on my 300 Mhtz iBook had a noticable speed increase. IE only took 5-7 seconds to load, depending on what else I was doing. That still isn't great but it's better than before, and it will only get better
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
...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)
Fact is, the GUI of X Windows with whatever window manager doesn't even come close to the performance of explorer. Okay, blackbox, windowmaker, etc are fast
Exactly. And if you're going to run a seriously crippled WM (by todays standards) just to get the same kind of speed that you get in Windows, then what's the point? Linux zealots want to slam you for running KDE or Gnome because it's bloated or whatever... they tell you your system is slow because you are running a bloated Window Manager... well tell me this, why is it that I have to run a 1MB Window Manager like Window Maker just to get the same speed that I get in MS Windows which has a God Only Knows how many megabyte Window Manager running. To those people, I suggest you check out www.98lite.net That will help level the playing field once again. How fast is your blackbox now?
Then, try to play a game or watch a DVD. Yeah, you can get it to work. Only after serious time spent installing and tweaking. Then, performance isn't as goog as windows.
This is a really good point. When you install Windows all of these things work "out of the box". To get the same basic funtionality out of a Linux distro, you have to spend hours/days fussing with libraries and configuration files. And when you finally have it "working", it's slower than molasses rolling uphill in the middle of January.
Now, I LOVE Linux and use it for servers/firewall
Again - I can't agree with you more on this issue. Linux as a server for web, e-mail, dns, ftp, samba, nfs, dhcp, router, firewall, etc absolutely rocks!!
but as a desktop OS....Its got a long way to go. Also, I HATE windows
hehehe... I read a post on here somewhere a while back that said "Linux isn't for geeks, it's for people who hate Windows". There's a lot of truth in that statement. I hate M$ Windows but I'm afraid I hate the X Window System even more. I wouldn't mind checking out OSX, but it sounds like OSX has the same speed issues as the X Window System.
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
Because a $1400 computer should offer fast, responsive web browsing and a snappy interface. You shouldn't have to buy a $2500 machine just to have a portable with decent speed.
Besides, based on the article, that (upgrading to a TiBook) would not solve the problem anyway - apparently the problem is still there, even with an 800mhz G4!
"Basically if you set aside all the "evil empire" issues surrounding Microsoft, which is hard for many of us to do myself included, I think Windows makes for a good Desktop environment and OSX and all the Linux distros that use X are in second place for the vast majority of Desktop users. Coders/programmers and other such people probably wouldn't agree but think about what your uses are for a computer compared to the average Desktop user."
There is one glaring problem with that statement. Macintosh OS X does NOT use X Windows. It has it's own display system based on Quartz. So any observations based on X windows have no relevance to OS X.
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
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
Of course, I've also switched entirely from OS9. It's on a separate partition, and when I want to use it I just reboot.
Having become accustomed to FreeBSD on a 486, OSX on a G4 is a like a dream. I'm no gamer, so most of my CPU cycles probably get wasted anyway...
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?
All this discussions of speed reminds me of when NT 4.0 came out and ran like crap on most 486 computers. People with pentium 90's said it ran fine, and we laughed and said "Who has a Pentium 90?"....
Fast forward one year later...
Nobody buys Pentium 90's becuase they are two slow. The PII is out, and NT 4.x runs just fine on it.
Apple is doing the correct thing. They made a huge jump in software, after ~8 years of that same basic OS design.
This is similar to when they switched from 68XXX chips to the PPC chips. People who bought the first gen PPC chips were disapointed becuase there were no native apps and it ran slower than a 68040 machine. Again fast forward 1 year, and it wasn't a problem any more.
The only people that seem to gripe about this are the people that purchase a machine once every 5 years or later. If you bought a mac before OSX was out and it runs great with OS9, then use OS9 for the next year or two and then go get a new computer. I realize that this is expensive, but nobody ever said owning a computer was cheap.
Lastly, I don't own a mac. I might consider one, but I don't think now is the time to purchase one. Perhaps next year when all the bugs are worked out and the performance will not be an issue at all... I do know that if I do purchase one, I won't bitch and moan 4 years later when their new OS doesn't run awesome on my machine.
Steve Michael
smichael@netcapade.net
There is one glaring problem with that statement. Macintosh OS X does NOT use X Windows. It has it's own display system based on Quartz. So any observations based on X windows have no relevance to OS X.
I'm sure that's going to be considered "Informative" or "Interesting". Anyway, for my response I'll just copy and paste right out of the article.
"Tests conducted by Wired News confirmed reader complaints that a new 800 MHz iMac takes an average of twice as long to render Web pages as a comparable or cheaper PC running Windows XP."
And I don't recall saying OSX was based on "X Windows" (as you incorrectly call it)...
The entire point of this thread was the guy who said "It does have *NIX behind it though, that might explain it" and really had nothing to do with Quartz vs. the X Window System.
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.
But what's the point of that? If you wanna run X and *nix apps, then run it on a cheap x86 based Linux or FreeBSD box. You'll get better performance for way less.
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.
Well, try getting some relatively recent: it takes about 3s (4 bounces) on my 733 G4. That's about the same speed as Mozilla on a 1Ghz pentium/W2000. (IE5 of course preloads on launch under windows 2000, which is presumably why it takes so long to log in =P.)
A.
* 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
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.
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.
User experience has a lot to do with how much you enjoy someplace. For example. You go out to a resaraunt. You pay much more money, you wait much longer but you get very good food and in general have good experience.
When you go to McDonalds, the food and the experience leave much to be desired, but eh speed and cost are great (comparatively). It's all in the user experience.
This is the stuff that psychologists study all the time, and I'm sure (knowing Steve Jobs has a habit of being unorthadox, for example, Apple had a Human Interface Guidlines manual for developing software) that somewhere in the vast world of Apple R&D someone asked a psychologist how much does the user experience impact a persons liking of a computer.
Apple doesn't just want you to use a computer. They want you to like it, and integrate it into your life.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
Have you ever *used* one of the newer macs? Or is this the usual drivel from PC wannabes?
Jeez --- grow up.
D
ELITISM: It's always lonely at the top. Uninvited company is rarely welcome.
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.
I find it amazing people can actually say this with a straight face. I have a TiBook 667 with 1GB of RAM and it's _slow_. I don't know what you people consider to be "dog slow", but I'd hate to have to use it (I harbour a suspicion that many of the people saying OS X has decent performance have just traded in from a Performa running OS 7.6.1). I also have a P2/300 with 512MB of RAM running Win2k that has a more responsive UI than my TiBook - a machine that on paper is easily twice and probably closer to three times as fast.
I like OS X - it's all the usefullness of Unix (important for a Unix SysAdmin like me) but none of the hassles. However, it has some serious performance issues that need addressing.
"Apple is doing the correct thing. They made a huge jump in software, after ~8 years of that same basic OS design."
Modern CPUs have such a surplus of processing power, it's shameful they can't make a responsive UI w/ an 800Mhz G4. The thing I liked about my old Mac was, even with a 8Mhz Mac SE, the UI was snappy. Menus popped up fast and the mouse cursor was smooth. It's not like they're doing serious number crunching. It's just drawing some window widgets and putting up some text. Hell, even the Next black boxes ran Display Postscript on a 68040.
heehee... :-)
[|]
Why would I put more load on it than I actually need? Even on my linux machines I tend to only run windowmaker. Sure, I load up KDE for the occasional time I need it or if a friend wants a more familiar environment to work with, but otherwise I have everything I need with windowmaker. Heck, I mostly have everything I need at a command line.
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.
The whole point of a Mac is that you don't have to do anything special to make it work. Saying "you must be doing something wrong" is apologism of the worst sort. You shouldn't have to perform any sort of optimisations on a machine to get decent performance for such basic tasks as web browsing and email.
I've been running OS X on my 500MHz iBook (640MB RAM) and performance is snappy.
The mind boggles at what you would call "slow". I've used OS X on a whole swathe of different machines from a Beige G3/233 to a brand spanking new G4/933 (my daily user is a TiBook 667 w/1GB of RAM, which in and of itself is _damn fast_ computer) and none of them have had performance I would call "snappy". Indeed, the only one that had performance I would deem "adequate" was the G4/933. "Adequate" in this sense means the UI is about as responsive as Win2k on my slowest PC (a P2/300 w/512MB).
I don't know what you're doing on your machine to be able to consider OS X "snappy", but it can't be much. Shit, I'm sitting here right now running Mozilla with 4 tabs open, Entourage and three Terminal windows. I just went to click on a menu and there was a noticable delay before it appeared - that is ridiculous for a machine of this calibre. Then there's window resizing - if Apple do nothing else in 10.2 except allow for a global option to turn off opaque window resizing I'll be happy - but being unable to easily resize a window because the UI is so unresponsive is simply unacceptable.
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...
Exactly. And if you're going to run a seriously crippled WM (by todays standards) just to get the same kind of speed that you get in Windows, then what's the point?
The point is that when an app or your windowing system crashes, it doesn't take the whole OS down with it. Ctrl+Alt+BkSpace, then startx again. Voila!
I have to use Windows here at work, and I hate every minute of it. IE sucks, period. It is slow, buggy, and unstable. IE6 has some cool functionality, but is even more buggy. Ever try burning a CD on an IDE CD-R under Windows? It brings my 1Ghz P3 to a crawl. The same PC under Linux, I can burn a CD with 3% processor usage, in X, and then browse and shell to my heart't content without a slowdown at all.
Frankly, if it weren't for Exchange, I would use Linux 24/7. Thank you Nvidia for good X drivers!
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.
Your logic and facts == a steaming pile of horseshit.
There is no magic to the Mac OS, old or new. You have no facts, only accusations.
Shouldn't you go back posting more of your "insight" on CNN TalkBack or Rosie or something?
I appreciate a good point (pro-Mac or not) but nothing pisses me off more than some newbie to the Mac who wastes our time and electrons.
Vos teneo officium eram periculosus ut vos recipero is.
Well, I cut my teeth on a Digital 8e with teletype terminal. 8^)
I don't know what you're doing on your machine to be able to consider OS X "snappy", but it can't be much.
Surfing while burning CDs in the background, while passing large amounts of data over FireWire to an external HD, moving data while image editing, etc. Things get sluggish sometimes but a logout/login usually fixes it (or, if not, a restart). OS X is a work in progress and it will get better. But, I can't help loving it even now. So sue me.
This is one of the reasons I hate using IE on OS X. It's a Carbon app.
jhw
Did you ever upgrade the OSes, as well as defragment the disks?
My Performa used to be blazing fast, but after upgrading the OS to 7.5, and not defragmenting it since 1997, it's dog slow now.
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.
-------
I find it amazing people can actually say this with a straight face.
I find it amazing that you can so blithely dismiss the testimonials of others simply because they do not coincide with your own experiences.
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...
Stuffs me how you can possibly call it "snappy" then. I spend most of my day with a dozen or so Terminals, Mozilla, IE, Omniweb, Entourage, Word, Excel, OroborosX+a few X apps and a Citrix client running and it's _slow_. Performance ranges from unacceptable to adequate (mostly adequate), and only when there is a single program running would I deign to call it "responsive". This is on a TiBook 667 with 1GB of RAM (and always 100MB+ free, so swapping isn't the issue).
But, I can't help loving it even now. So sue me.
I think it's great as well, but it's not fast by any definition of "fast" that I'm familiar with. The only Mac I've used that's come within a sniff of having as responsive a UI as Win2k on my P2/300 is a G4/933, which is simply obscene. Quite frankly, if 10.2 doesn't deliver a significant speed increase, or a way of disabling enough UI features to make the system faster (primarily opaque window resizing) I'll be going back to either a Windows PC or a FreeBSD box. Heck, the Ultra5 (and it's only a 270Mhz one) running Solaris 8 I use for my Solaris-related activities is about as responsive as my TiBook running OS X, and it has barely 1/4 the capabilities in terms of processing power and RAM.
Maybe OS X will get fast enough to be "snappy" in the (relatively) near future. I hope so. I Want To Believe. However, if that doesn't happen with the next OS release I'll be selling my TiBook and checking back in 6 - 12 months. It'd be a damn shame, as the dual-display capabilties rock.
Yes, I really had a Mac SE with System 6. It couldn't run System 7. Sure, the disks were slow, and processor intensive tasks were slow (note: I do not consider drawing the GUI a processor intensive task), but I could type stuff in Word, plot a graph in Excel or do some little line-drawing in MacDraw. Menus popped up without much lag, and the cursor only got jumpy when you were saving to floppy (and 10 years later that's still true).
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.
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 :)
This always sounds like a compelling argument - right up until the point you realise for that 99% of people having X crash has the same end result as having the whole OS crash. When X goes (and it does so at least as often as Windows does) it also takes out all your running apps (inside X) with it. Most people I know running X are also running most of their software from inside X. Thus, all their unsaved work has now disappeared into a black hole. Sure, it might only take half as long to restart X as opposed to rebooting the machine, but when you've just lost half a day's work to /dev/null, an extra 45 seconds doesn't really mean much.
I have to use Windows here at work, and I hate every minute of it. IE sucks, period. It is slow, buggy, and unstable.
I'd love to know which browser you are using that has IE's featureset that is faster and more relaible. I don't know of any.
Ever try burning a CD on an IDE CD-R under Windows?
I do it all the time.
It brings my 1Ghz P3 to a crawl. The same PC under Linux, I can burn a CD with 3% processor usage, in X, and then browse and shell to my heart't content without a slowdown at all.
Either you're lying or your hardware has serious issues with its Windows drivers. I've got a 300Mhz P2 here that will quite happily burn CDs whilst also doing all sorts of other interesting things like browsing the web, playing games, etc. It runs Win2k.
Typical knee-jerk reaction of some Windows geeks.
You probally read the parenthetical remark,, too bad you didn't get it.
(hit once more with the "ironyless" filter)
I don't like big words..., does that make me anti-semantic?
I've seen and used a lot of Macs - I've yet to use one that can run OS X fast. If I'd only ever used one or two different Macs here and there and didn't sit in front of a fairly fast TiBook for ~12 hours every day I wouldn't have made the comment. However, because of this I feel fairly confident in making a unbiased and experienced judgement in the performance of OS X on a wide range of hardware and, quite frankly, it sucks.
As I've said, I don't know where this person is coming from to be calling the performance on a G3/450 "ok", but it's obviously not a from a platform with a fast, responsive GUI (or even just a responsive GUI). That, or they're only running one or maybe two applications at once.
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"
Chimera 0.2.1 renders this thread (nested, threshold 2, ~200 messages) in a second or two on my Ti550 on a T3 line.
Solaris may be have a lot of overhead that makes it slow(er) on single processor machines for many things, but the UI is very snappy. Did I mention CDE and XSun are fast?
Be ot or bot ne ot, taht is the nestquoi.
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."
This is a 270Mhz Ultra5 with 128MB of RAM and a slow IDE disk (the disk in my TiBook is probably faster). This is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a fast machine. It's basically just a (slow) PC with an UltraSPARC processor. Higher-end Ultra5s (particularly those with the large L3 cache and 7200rpm drives) are probably reasonably quick, but this one certainly is not. Neither CDE nor Xsun are particularly fast compared to something like Windows or BeOS - although they probably are compared to other X implementations.
Solaris may be have a lot of overhead that makes it slow(er) on single processor machines for many things, but the UI is very snappy. Did I mention CDE and XSun are fast?
The primary reason they are "fast" is because they aren't doing very much (and they're not even "fast" IMHO - although they probably are if you're comparing to other Unixes). However, the processing power of my TiBook is at least three times that of the Ultra5 and it has 8x the RAM and a faster hard disk. Solaris isn't particular fast either, but it does have the advantage that it tends to scale exceptionally well and not get any *slower* as load increases.
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.
Headline! Headline!
Slashdot posts OSX article and nothing else for the REST OF THE DAY!!!!
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
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.
Booting my Windows system is as fast or faster than booting Linux/X
/etc/rc.d/rc5.d/S* stuff to /etc/rc.d/rc5.d/K* stuff. Linux itself boots within a few seconds. Even X doesn't take that long. Starting up KDE/GNOME and starting daemons is where all the time goes.
So don't have five zillion daemons start up at boot in Linux. mv unimportant
widgets automatically line up properly
I find this rather amusing. Windows (and at least classic MacOS) does almost nothing in terms of positioning at the widget level for you. It *does* use non-pixel based units in dialogs, so that changing the system font will also change the dialog size automatically. GTK+ has quite fast and powerful positioning and resizing built into the widget system.
I've yet to find a completely stable GUI e-mail program in X
I dunno what programs other people are using, but mutt and dillo+galeon is a pretty sweet combination for me. They aren't unstable. Once I started using a console email program, I couldn't switch back. I can manipulate it with just my keyboard and use it from anywhere I am (most people have ssh or telnet, but few people have an X server sitting around on their Windows box).
Also, I can't figure out why people like Outlook so much. Have you ever used any other email clients? Of all the GUI email clients I've ever used, I have to say that Outlook is my least favorite (though I don't use the workgroup features, which I suppose might be a big draw if you needed them). Have you ever used Eudora?
May we never see th
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).
but he said specifically to get rid of the aqua nonsense, which would imply not running any normal mac apps, making the mac an overpriced *nix box.
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?
Good interface? Did I miss a checkbox or something when I intsalled OS X?
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.
I spend most of my day with a dozen or so Terminals, Mozilla, IE, Omniweb, Entourage, Word, Excel, OroborosX+a few X apps and a Citrix client Although I admit OS X is a little sluggish, I am confused as to why you need to run three web browsers at once and some terminals when OroborosX has xterm.
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.
It's not that much slower, and for some reason it just feels smoother. Plus with the multi tasking I can launch four apps at once and dont have to wait! And ZERO crashes,
Apple will get the speed up in time, just as they did with OS 8 and 9.
I dont find any speed problems web browsing using either Mozilla 1.0 or IE 5.1.
-- if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic - Lewis Carrol
Not all web pages work in my preferred browser (OmniWeb), so I need to use IE for them. And Mozilla is the only one of the three which allows quick and easy changing of proxy settings (important to me since I take care of ~12 squid machines and need to be able to test them). Terminal is simply a matter of preference - I despise X and only use it when absolutely necessary.
I think something is wrong with your install. Wipe the drive clean and start over! I've used OS X on an iBook and it was not that slow. Mozilla is very fast on my 466MHz G4. I never get the spinning disk either.
-- if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic - Lewis Carrol
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.
That's IE for you... it sits and grinds for a time, all while pegging the CPU. This is MS's way to get more speed? Of course on Windows the HTML rendering is built into the OS. OS X had more HTML rendering support in the Public Beta, but they removed most of that, because they felt it wasn't up to par.
I've been using Mozilla since the 0.9.9 build, and I really like it. IE has some very nice features, but Mozilla feels much faster to me.
I'll admit that browsers feel faster on PCs, but I don't think it's OS X as much as the browsers. Photoshop for example, runs faster in X than 9 on my machine. :)
-- if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic - Lewis Carrol
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.
So don't have five zillion daemons start up at boot in Linux. mv unimportant /etc/rc.d/rc5.d/S* stuff to /etc/rc.d/rc5.d/K* stuff. Linux itself boots within a few seconds. Even X doesn't take that long. Starting up KDE/GNOME and starting daemons is where all the time goes.
... just to name a couple.
This is a non-issue. The only daemons I have starting up are ones that are mission critical for my Desktop. (i.e. I don't run sendmail, ftp, nfs, etc..)
I dunno what programs other people are using, but mutt and dillo+galeon is a pretty sweet combination for me. They aren't unstable. Once I started using a console email program, I couldn't switch back. I can manipulate it with just my keyboard and use it from anywhere I am (most people have ssh or telnet, but few people have an X server sitting around on their Windows box).
Console? Laugh. Here's a quote from my original message that you cut out of your copy/paste.
"Again - if I wanted to run Pine I wouldn't bother having a GUI desktop." In case you didn't know it, Pine is a console e-mail program. The point is all the Linux zealots want people to use technology that's based in the dark ages in order to achieve speed and stability. Dude... don't get me wrong here. I don't not like Linux. I use Linux every day. I'm a huge advocate. But I think it has it's place which is the server arena and not the Desktop.
Also, I can't figure out why people like Outlook so much.
Actually I don't like Outlook. I've used it and I didn't find any advantage at all (for me) to use it over Outlook Express. They are two very different programs. Outlook Express is a small considerably light weight e-mail client that just does the basics.
Have you ever used any other email clients?
Yes, dozens. Netscapes mail program, Mozillas mail program, Sylpheed, KMail, Pine, Outlook, Outlook Express, Eudora, Aileron, GNUStep's Mail.App,
Of all the GUI email clients I've ever used, I have to say that Outlook is my least favorite (though I don't use the workgroup features, which I suppose might be a big draw if you needed them).
Again I don't use Outlook so I don't know if the "workgroup" feature is a draw or not. I don't use that feature.
Have you ever used Eudora?
Yes... a few years ago. It was a good e-mail client but I didn't think it was really worth paying for considering all the free alternatives. A quick glance over at their website shows me that it appears to be "free" now. Allthough based on this quick glance it appears to be just for Windows/MacOS. And this thread is about Linux so mentioning Eudora is kind of pointless.
I have a 500MHz Ti Powerbook. I have no problems whatsoever with the speed of the Aqua interface. Admittedly this was not exactly true before I upgraded from 256Mb to 512Mb, but memory (even for a laptop) is pretty cheap.
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
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
Note that there's a lot of things I dislike about Microsoft and Windows (insistance of MSN Messenger, reticence on security issues, Passport and so on) but many of the same things can also be pinned on their competitors (eg. Scott "you have no privacy, get over it" McNealy). A lot of msft criticism really depends on which software version you've used.
As for the topic: I haven't used OS X for myself, but I have seen it in action (on the 550MHz TiBook) and it's an extraordinarily good operating system. Sure, it's not exactly a speed demon, but it's very usable and as fast as it needs to be - and seeing the speed difference from 10.0.3 to 10.1.3, things can only get better. I'm planning on buying a TiBook myself soon, entirely because of OS X.
Odd... My TiBook and PowerMac 733 both run pretty damn fast. Hell this entire slashdot article loaded up in OmniWeb 4.1b4 in less than one second. What the hell are you people doing to your Macs? :-)
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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?
This always sounds like a compelling argument - right up until the point you realise for that 99% of people having X crash has the same end result as having the whole OS crash.
With Nvidia's latest binary drivers X has been rock solid for me. Crashes only because of KDE 3, and when it does, I zap it and 'startx' again. It really does work like a charm. I agree that Win2K is fairly stable, but my real beef is with IE.
I'd love to know which browser you are using that has IE's featureset that is faster and more relaible. I don't know of any.
Moz. ph34r.
Really, I wanted to like IE. It does support "everything" because "everything" caters to IE. It crashes on me constantly though, and on a brand spanking new machine. It is slow as a dog, accessing FTP sites hangs up ALL the IE windows. Need I go on?
Either you're lying or your hardware has serious issues with its Windows drivers.
Perhaps, but this is on a Dell Dimension with the latest IDE drivers from Dell's site. All this under Win2K.
Win2K and XP, the best versions of Windows to compare with a *nix, have the CTRL-ALT-DEL task manager. Simply take the app out, or explorer.exe. They hardly ever crash on a properly configured system anyway.
Sure, but kill explorer.exe and now systray won't work until you reboot, and explorer starts acting odd. Don't start with that "properly configured system" crap =).
Strange; my experience with IE is the exact opposite of yours, although I use Mozilla now (two words: tabbed browsing). Are you sure it's not, say, bad video (or other) drivers?
To be honest, except for some wierdness with CS, the Nvidia drivers have been rock solid. I game under Win2K too, and can't recall it ever locking or crashing.
Are you sure you have DMA enabled on that?
No, not sure, but I was using it under Win2K, with the latest version of the drivers for my chipset. I've since replaced the machine with a laptop.
I should point out that my problem is with IE, not necessarily Win2K, which I think is Microsoft's best effort to date. IE is just horrible, and it irritates me to no end that I actually have to start it up just to check my bank account.
As for OS X, I've used it on a tiBook and my grandmother's G3 iMac which I just got her. It is simply the most gorgeous interface I have ever used. It is completely useable, even on a G3 with 256 meg of RAM. Certainly not as speedy as Mozilla is on my Wintel box though =)
And OS X might be the catalyst that gets me to buy a G4 tower. I bought an iPod last year and it was the best investment I ever made.
Good point, Apple does have people from other Unices coming over. But I would imagine that they hope those people are trying out the interface on a new Powerbook G4 or top-end G4 desktop in the store. At the same time, it's hard to convince someone using a 270MHz Ultra 5 to switch to a 800MHz G4 processor with an interface that feels as slow as a 110MHz Sparc 10.
Too bad someone can't also mark this insightful; it isn't just funny. If you care THAT much about browsing performance, use Lynx.
I have to disagree - I have OS X running on a original iBook SE (366MHz) with 320M RAM, and it is quite usable. It would be better if the video drivers were fixed, but it's not bad. My G4/500 MP is faster (duh!), but I have no problems using the iBook.
Window Maker runs pretty good... but then you lose 95% of your GUI environment.
Heh. I've been introducing folks to ion lately, and those who actually try it for a day end up loving it -- not one exception yet. ion gets rid of even more of the "GUI environment" stuff than Window Maker does -- but it's blazing fast, tremendously efficient (particularly for those who favor using the keyboard where possible) and uses a much more orderly paradigm than the usual moving potentially overlapping windows around over a desktop thing (that's right, in ion windows can't overlap; you'll need to try it to understand).
What I'm saying that having more of a traditional GUI environment doesn't necessarily translate directly into having a better end-user experience. ion is minimalist -- some might even call it "crippled" -- but it's also better than anything else I've ever used. Shiny does not necessarily mean good.
Btw, using the binary nVidia drivers made a huge 2D speed difference for me -- the choppy window resizes you discuss sound just plain Wrong (though, running ion, I haven't resized a window in... well, a long time now). Sure everything's working correctly (AGP support and such)?