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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?
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
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'.
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
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
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.
What makes you think IE on the Mac is just a patchwork port running in some sort of mythical compatability layer? While it may be true that older versions of IE on the Mac (versions 4.5 and earlier) were based on the Windows versions, version 5 was built from scratch for the Mac. I would encourage you to do a little research before posting next time.
tim
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.
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.
This space unintentionally left unblank.
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?
What is your roommate doing? Ripping out PCI cards while the machine is running? Clearly this guy has some kind of hardware problem because I have three machines running XP and the one thing they almost never do is crash. Clearly your roommate needs to take his machine back to the store or -- if he built it himself -- learn how to do it properly.
(Seriously) not trying to troll here, but an XP machine in proper working order shouldn't crash twice a day. Did he forget to attach the heat sink? Did he drool some hummus onto the motherboard? Does he have back issues of Gent piled up on the cooling vent? Something is clearly wrong with that machine.
You're better off using Mozilla, especially the rapidly developing Mach-O version which has an multithreaded Unix backend and is very fast.
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
Or how about apple gives em $5 a pop for each OS X system they ship that includes omniweb, and omnigroup doesn't include nagware?
I would take $5 x 100,000 month (im just guessing) compared to $20 x 1,000 a month.
See, the cool thing is, omniweb is free, it just reminds you everyone once in a while that it would be nice if you paid the people who make it. I bought mine with an education discount.
Pay for good software, because then they write more of it (with the exception of microsoft).
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.
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?
They can by giving them some money, like they do with the current PowerBook software bundle (OmniWeb and some other Omni stuff is in there, licensed for you by Apple).
Sure they do. Everyone who buys Windows pays for a browser. Even in the sense that you meant it people do pay, I did for example because I really like OmniWeb a lot and had $30 (or $25?) to spare.
Then consider paying for it. Either that or realize that you just posted "I'm too bloody cheap to fix something that irritates me, but I'm upset enough about it to complain in an international publication..."
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
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!
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
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
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 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.