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Apple Creating iBrowser on Mozilla Code?
louismg writes "The Register is claiming there may be a browser mutiny in Cupertino. The Mozilla-based Chimera browser was featured by many speakers during this month's WWDC, which may constitute a backhand endorsement, and could be used as a weapon in the 'negotiations' with Bill Gates and Co. over IE ..." Chimera is beginning to turn into a usable browser, favored by many Mac OS X users. Who knows? Update: 05/28 15:33 GMT by P : Chimera 0.2.8 was released today.
From Hyatt's blog:
Monday, May 27, 2002 Posted 1:12 PM by David Hyatt
Eep. Sometimes I forget that people are actually reading this thing and developing grand conspiracy theories. I especially like the part where I'm referred to as a "long-time Mac nut." Until about 3 months ago, my Mac desktop was a glorified paperweight, Cocoa was something you drank, and Objective-C... well, I would have just blinked and responded with "Objective what?"
Just to set the record straight on this conspiracy theory... all Netscape employees who were hired before AOL took the company over are eligible for a six-week sabbatical after four years of employment. You also have to take the sabbatical within one year of becoming eligible for it, or you have to go through the hassle of filing for an extension. As of July 5, I'll have been working for Netscape/AOLTW for 5 years, so I had to take the sabbatical now. It also seemed like a good time to do so since Mozilla 1.0 is wrapping up (and in very good shape). This sabbatical has absolutely nothing to do with Chimera.
Although an iBrowser would be an interesting development--IE is only one of three third party apps that ships with OS X, and the use of Mozilla in a Beta version of a Mac AOL client gives this some weight, I don't think Hyatt is working on it.
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$tar -xvf
David Hyatt, Chimera's principal developer, said that since he was on sabbatical no new builds were in the works until July. However, the demand for more development was so high, and the rumors were so rampant, that he released a new build this morning. See for yourself. David has denied the rumors repeatedly, and I doubt that Apple will take Chimera and rename it iBrowser or (even better) iBrowse. However, I wouldn't be surprised if it eventually became the default browser and shipped with future versions of the OS.
I for one hope this is happening, because the browser situation is (IMO) the most disappointing thing about OS X. As a professional Web developer, it drives me crazy, because I love OS X in almost every other way.
I have seven browsers installed on my Titanium, and I basically use one until it pisses me off, and then switch to another. My current favorite is Netscape 7 PR 1, but it pisses me off now and then, too.
OmniWeb is nice, and a cool idea, but these guys are crazy for trying to keep up with HTML/CSS/ECMEScript, and so on, in their own rendering engine. Every once in a while, it'll just hang, and it has problems with complex sites. But, it looks the best.
iCab is the fastest browser I've used, interface-wise, but it suffers from many of the same problems as OmniWeb. In short, it's cute, and is a great browser -- for about three years ago.
Similarly, Opera's Mac OS X effort is cute, but it's essentially a second-rate browser. It seems to display things quickly, but certainly doesn't live up to its claims of being the fastest. Besides, its font display and Java/ECMAScript support leave a whole hell of a lot to be desired.
Then there's IE. I have to use IE when Mozilla botches a download (yeah, happens frequently). IE also has superior printing (which they debuted on the Mac OS 8 version, a couple of years ago). However, it's the slowest at displaying pages; the Tasman engine is basically a piece of garbage, and I don't have the patience to spend my days looking at spinning beach balls.
Finally, we have Mozilla and Netscape 7. Netscape 7, on my system, actually feels more responsive than Mozilla 1. Mozilla 1 is the most unstable browser of any of them; it will crash on occasionm and certain commands, like "load into new tab" will just not work at certain times. The XUL framework, while interesting for other reasons, is just stupid. It makes Moz/NS not behave like a Mac application. It doesn't display OS-standard UI widgets, doesn't properly launch your preferred email program, and so on.
I've been arguing in online forums for months that what Apple needs to do is just take Gecko and put it in a Cocoa framework. That's what Chimera is. Chimera is awfully promising, but for me, it's not really usable yet; lacks way too many features. Still, I have it on my machine as demo-ware, and check it out every so often. If Apple is doing either of: (1) expand on Chimera and make it feature complete; or (2) wrapping Gecko in a Cocoa framework themselves, then it makes me very, very happy. I'd like to see a solid browser supported on the level of iTunes et al.
gameDB
I used CyberDog for about two years, myself, both for email and web browsing. Of course, Apple stopped improving it a few weeks into that two years, so web site compatibility was never great. On the other hand, it had great disk caching, and could load frequently visited sites almost instantly over dialup. It also resized the pages to fit the window, so there was never a scroll bar on the bottom of the window. The mail client never supported html, but used a form of RTF instead, with embedded picture support. There was also separate FTP and Gopher tools.
The Cyberdog web tool did speed up the back arrow by keeping recently viewed web pages in memory, but that became more of a liability as web sites became more complex. I have a feeling that it would have choked on today's Slashdot threads.
"Common Sense Ain't" -Unknown