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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?
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.
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
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.
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...
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
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.
Two reasons, probably.
First, the current batch of PowerPCs are no longer the FP monsters they used to be. The 604e ran circles around the x86 chips of the day, but x86 has since caught up.
Second, up until very recently OS X relied on straight ANSI C for its math libraries (pilfered from one of the BSDs). That code was recently replaced with hand-tuned libraries written in assembler, which should provide a boost. I'm not sure if the new mathlibs have been released or not.
If it's the OS, why is Photoshop only a couple of percent slower on OS X? Why is LightWave faster on OS X?
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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
Because photoshop uses 2D graphics and lightwave uses 3D graphics. When apple said they concentrated on usablity, they also realized people would want games. So they skipped writing 2D acceleration for the entire os but made sure that they had the best OpenGL (3D) acceleration on the market.
So, to answer your question, 3D runs fine, 2D has no acceleration, so anything that uses considerable 2D redrawing will be some percent slower, while 3D should be as fast or faster.
Fear trumps hope and ignorance trumps both
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).
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.
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.
LightWave rendering (which is what all the benchmarks I've seen have been measuring) doesn't use OpenGL at all. It's pretty much pure floating point.
Similarly, applying filters in Photoshop doesn't use 2D graphics accelleration at all -- it's all raw FP or integer (or AltiVec) depending on the filter.
The Photoshop speed difference is almost certainly the result of OS X not allowing apps to completely monopolize the CPU -- IOW, it doesn't demonstrated any OS X inefficiency whatsoever, it's just the cost of modern multitasking.
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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.
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?
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.
If browsing is slow for you on OS X, you might like to try Mozilla Release Candidate 1.
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
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?
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.
.sig: file not found
- 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.
Since when does FP intensive code show the speed of an OS? Are you using math library calls? The math library that comes with Mac OS X is a straight C implementation taken from NetBSD while OS 9's is hand tuned PPC assembler. They're going to port it and ship it with Mac OS X one of these days (maybe it's in 10.1.4).
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
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
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?
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
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
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!
Ew, that's mean! :) I have noticed how UGLY X Windows and their various desktops when I play around with Linux as a Desktop OS. I generally use Linux for as a server OS along with BSD. But then again, I work in the media so looks matter to me. I am sure most engineers and programmers couldn't give a damn if the OS interface is ugly as long as its fast and does the job. To each, there own!
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
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!
1) you must be using Photoshop 7, the version released on Monday, that I am still waiting to have arrive at my door.
2) IE is Carbon, whether you can run on 9 or not it's Carbon.
3) Your opinion of "first class citizenship" will change when Cocoa versions of your favorite apps appear. If you are actually using Photoshop 7, I offer your post as proof of this hypothesis.
4) Apple's opinion of "first class citizenship" will change when significant numbers of apps ported to Cocoa. Carbon is a stepping stone that will be discarded once it has outlive its usefulness.
cat
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?
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.
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.
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
Insightful my ass, damn moderators.
.exe and ActiveX items in your web page, very few pages use that. Most pages are optimized for a certain browser, not a cetain system.
Anyways, excuse me for being rude, but you're dead wrong.
It's because OS-X is a 1969-era operating system (UNIX) written to run on top of an 1984 OS (MacOS) that still has its core components running on a 68000 simulator!
The UNIX underpinnings may stem from 1969, but all but the very basic parts of the code have been rewritten many times since then, for all versions of UNIX. Secondly, it is not written to run on top of the classic OS at all. It is a stand alone OS. NO OS 9 NEEDED. The only legacy from 1984 comes from interface designs. The code is all new. Classic support is an option, not a requirement. The 6800 code was phased out a while back. I have no idea where you got thatone from. And espesialy in X, there is no 6800 code at all.
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.
That argument was killed with the advent of Win2K. Welcome to the year 2002, did you have a nice sleep Mr. VanWinkle?
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.
If you can't live without a scroll wheel and 17 other buttons, go buy a fucking new mouse. I own a logitech, optical USB scroll twobutton mouse. Cost me $20, works natively with OS X, no drivers nessesary.
Finally, the most important reason is that most sites were optimized for Windows
The only way to optimize for windows is to use
Do your homework before you spread your bull.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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 reason is that OmniWeb has anti-aliased text.
I've found
a build of Mozilla that uses it, but
it's very buggy, relative to the normal build.
Ben "You have your mind on computers, it seems."
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!
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.
A likely culprit is the alpha blending and the off-screen back buffers. The alpha blending is probably not supported by current hardware (since it does not exist on Windows). And full-window offscreen buffers would be similar to Windows Bitmaps (or X Pixmap objects) and those often do not get hardware acceleration because the memory is not connected to the graphics accelerator (this is as opposed to the clipped double-buffer used by OpenGL (and probably DirectX) and by the X Double Buffering Extension) which is usually hardware graphics memory (since the size is fixed and does not have to be larger than the screen).
"Transparent" windows and anti-aliased window edges pretty much require a window-sized buffer and until graphics cards are redesigened to render to main memory I don't think they will be fast.
Considering that most new OS X-only development is done in Carbon, not Cocoa, I doubt they will ever discard Carbon.
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.
Maybe IE is generating a more accurate view of the pages; IIRC, iCab doesn't properly indent Slashdot discussions, making it worthless for viewing nested discussions. I'm pretty sure that Mozilla does the Right Thing in OS 9 and Mozilla and OmniWeb do the Right Thin in OS X.
Which reminds me: did you view nested or threaded during your test? I was viewing nested.
-jon
Remember Amalek.
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...
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.
Man, what a troll. But I cannot let your technical lies pass.
Mac OS X cannot in any way be said to run on top of OS 9. It is running on a completely new kernel implementation, separately available from Apple as an open-source product called "Darwin."
OS 9, on the other hand, can run (complete with 68k emulation) on top of OS X in what is called the "Classic" environment.
I don't think Carbon is going away next year or anything like that, but eventually, I believe it will. Someone will write a portversion tool and there are significant benefits to learning/using the Cocoa paradigm. Besides, the NeXT guys rule the future at Apple, and Cocoa is their baby. iSteve is probably playing them against the Mac guys just like he played the Mac guys against the Apple ][ guys back in the day. At a certain point, they'll assimilate the best of the best from the OS 9 side of the fence and toss the rest. I'm talking code *AND* people. Carbon will become a demonized stepchild just like the Newton. The writing is on the walls, one indicator of this is OS X's blatant defiance of Apple's own human interface guidelines. Apple's history and traditions are sacred no longer.
cat
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?
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.
Loading this story (with 390-something articles showing, nested) with IE 5.1.4 and OmniWeb 4.1b4. IE took 3 minutes, 5seconds. OmniWeb took 58 seconds. Same page, same computer, I even ran OmniWeb second, so if there were more posts, it was OmniWeb that had to suck it up. It was still more than 3 times faster.
I'd say IE has the problem, not Mac OS X.
-jon
Remember Amalek.
Good interface? Did I miss a checkbox or something when I intsalled OS X?
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.
Hmmm. Well, I guess you can extend that logic even further as Mac OS X has BSD and Mach underpinnings, which make it's age go back further.
But I think my point stands, since no UNIX OS has really been point together with the features that this thing has.
Vos teneo officium eram periculosus ut vos recipero is.
I think it is quite possible to do this with hardware support, but I suspect that the hardware designs do not do it yet because it is unnecessary for high Quake frame rates.
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? :-)
Care about electronic freedom? Consider donating to the EFF!
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?
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.
Too bad someone can't also mark this insightful; it isn't just funny. If you care THAT much about browsing performance, use Lynx.