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Macworld Holds Battle of the Browsers
dumbArtMajor writes "Macworld has an article breaking down most of the available browsers for Mac OS X and evaluates speed, rendering, etc. Did your app of choice kick the other guy's ass?" I don't want to know which one kicked which other one, or where they kicked them. I just want one browser that works.
telnet www.apple.com 80 has all the functionality that I need.
Neck_of_the_Woods
#/usr/local/surf/glassy/overhead
most all browsers will get the job done, even IE...it's just nice because just about every browser, with the exception of IE undergoes fairly regular updates.
i'm still in good ol mozilla.
I think I have a chance at taking home the trophy. I've been browsing since the mid 90's, and I've got my moves down. I can read User Friendly in one window while submitting a Register article to Slashdot in another and bookmarking the latest Flash meme in a third. I haven't seen an ad since 1998, I've never been fooled by a goatse link, and I clean my cache biweekly. My History is organized better than most people's Favorites, an appropriate plugin is always found, and I have a script set up to automatically notify webmasters of broken links. I truly am a Great Browser, and I think I have what it takes to compete with the best.
Sign me up.
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
Now if only I could get my Mac to serve the browser to my X-thin clients.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
Need I say more...
It's because the damn thing will totally lock you out of doing just about anything if you have the misfortune of trying to contact a server that won't respond immediately. IE just sits there, waiting for a timeout instead of letting you do something.
This is what makes it totally unusable.
AC comments get piped to
I didn't read the article, but a lot of people think that IE5 for Windows is the same as IE5 for Mac. IE5 for Mac is actually a decent browser because it was headed up by a guy at Microsoft who pays attention to the standards set by the W3C (I forget his last name, but I think it starts with a T). IE5 for the Mac is as good as Mozilla for Windows. They are both awesome browsers. Unfortunately, IE Anything for Windows sucks.
-Vic
Browsers Battle MacWorld!!!
Quote "The Last Word
Microsoft's Internet Explorer effectively controls the Mac OS X browser market -- its overall rendering quality and its support for Web standards made it the browser to beat in our tests. Netscape's fall from grace as IE's main competition has opened the field to newer browsers, such as Opera and The Omni Group's OmniWeb, that focus on speed and standards compliance. But what may turn out to be the biggest surprise is how Mozilla.org and the promising Gecko rendering engine have risen from the ashes of Netscape Communications to mount a credible challenge to IE's dominance. Although Mozilla is still too similar to its Netscape cousin in performance, Navigator's speed and rendering fidelity make it the OS X browser to watch. "
This is a load of crap. First Navigator is based on Mozilla. I use Mozilla and Chimera as my browsers on OS X, and on Windows I use IE and Mozilla.
Saying IE is the "standards" leader is like saying you find your grandma attractive (fucking crazy). My company runs all linux on the server side (except one db on solaris) and when building our JSPs the ONLY browser that constantly fucks up is IE on OS X/9. If it works fine in IE for PocketPC you'd hope it would work on a Mac. Oh well, I guess if you use MS you get what you pay for.
I just cant wait for Apples iBrowse (or whatever they decide to call their own browser). Sherlock is not exactly what I'm envisioning for the future.
I am disappointed the article did not mention more about iCab's unique abilities. It does have some problems supporting CSS, and it is HTML compliant to a fault (although being "compliant to a fault" with HML could be argues as impossible), but some features it does offer are only now being integrated into other browsers.
iCab's Filter Manager is one of the most powerful things I have ever seen in a web browser. You can filter almost anything (cookies, JavaScript, images) based on domain, link, or another other thing.
Mozilla's coders could learn a lot by studying iCabs Filter Manager.
Do you want to turn off JavaScript except for your online banking (that requires it), and allow all cookies but those coming from DoubleClick? Done. Want to accept Slashdot cookies forever, but Yahoo cookies only until the end of the session? Done. Do you want to not load images that are 480x60 pixels big and not accept any images that come from */ad-bin/*? Done.
iCab (along with some other browsers) also supports "Open in Background Window", which is something I cannot imagine being without while surfing.
Another great thing? You can set it to only send a Referrer: header inside the same domain (or set it to not be sent at all)
Unfortunately the article forgot to mention iCab's ad filtering (which is much more powerful than simply rejecting all images not from the original server and its ability to block pop-ups without seeing them.
- (c) 2018 Hank Zimmerman
I subscribe to Macworld and read this article in the December issue. The coverage of Mozilla was very poor. The editors just don't "get it" when it comes to why you would choose Mozilla. They didn't cover any of the useful Mozilla-only features. They didn't cover the fact that you could report bugs directly and download daily updates that can fix your problems. They didn't cover anything about the value of open source. They didn't cover any of the cool plug-ins, like the preferences toolbar, mouse gesturing, or whatever. And worst of all, they didn't mention that Netscape removed the GUI control for allowing you to block pop-up windows. That feature alone would convince half the IE users to switch to Mozilla if they knew about it.
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
I really don't think it is a terribly good article. It isn't very specific in problems. They also didn't do what I think is applicable: a bank test. Most problems Mac browsers have are with banks. Chimera handles most of them as well as IE. Omniweb doesn't.
I should add that the browser scene is changing quickly. The latest releases of Chimera really have improved a lot. Although its still a beta, it is a beta far more usable than many iApps. Omniweb is falling behind, but version 5.0 is just around the corner. It'll have an entirely new rendering engine and should remove all the problems it has with CSS and tables.
Time spent in loading a web page has to be one of the most rock solid, consistent and predictable experiences a computer user cam ever hope for. Thus their decision to only load each webpage once per browser is more than enough, and anyone suggesting that this is a ludicrously simplistic and flawed benchmark needs to get help.
I applaud the scientists involved in this research for their painstaking efforts and astonishing attention to detail.
Kicks the arse of IE anyday.
;)
It still needs some stability fixes though.
I would hate to see IE 0.6 in action
...according to this idiotic article DOESN'T support tabbed browsing. Since it certainly DOES, the rest of the article isn't worth the pixels it's rendered with.
Oh yeah - my choice? Omniweb 4.1, Chimera 0.6, Netscape 7.0 IN THAT ORDER.
That was classic intercourse!
its overall rendering quality and its support for Web standards made it the browser to beat in our tests.
Really? Standards like ISO 10646-1? Let's see:
Internet Explorer for Mac: No Unicode
Mozilla: BMP and Plane 1 support (maybe more; that's what I've seen)
I just use IE for the sites that are too stupid to code to W3C standards like they ought to.
The coolest thing is you can selectively allow pop-ups based on whether they are requested (followed link) or not.
I cannot remember if Chimera does this but I think it does. Once Chimera implements 90% of Mozilla I'm changed for good.
My favorite feature (this is real cheezy I know) is the fact I can add a Home button next to the stop button without having to show the Personal Toolbar!!! YEAH!!!
I thought we all new there was only 4 real choices:
1) IE
2) Mozilla or variant therof
3) iCab
4) Omni
IE was/is the most reliable rendering wise...
Mozilla/Netscape et al, too slow and buggy.
iCab was ok.
Omni I hate.
There really is no good browser for OS X.
A fast IE with tabs that is not a Microsoft product would be great. To bad Apple has little apparent interest in doing such a thing.
Notice that all of these cons are just what you'd expect in beta software -- in fact, improvements in all of these areas has been made since the release of 0.6.
This suggests to me that Chimera is going to be one awesome brower when it reaches 1.0
Die Menschen verhoehnen was sie nicht verstehen. -- Goethe.
>
A fast IE with tabs that is not a Microsoft product would be great.
>
Oh, you mean like Chimera?
It has tabs, and it usually renders pages slightly faster than Mozilla.
It's all about the Pentiums baby
omnia tua castra sunt nobis
--"It's Bradford Company, slash your last name, dot your first name"
Chimera or Links.
Chimera is a fast lightweight (unlike Mozilla) browser using Gecko layout engine and Cocoa user interface. Links on the otherhand is an excellent text browser. Sadly neither one was in the review.
*lbrt
I know someone else out there HAS to give up to OmniWeb with me. It renders SO beautifully. It's fast. And it really IS written in Cocoa.
I don't care if Mozilla *calls* itself Cocoa --- If i cant use CocoaGestures with it then it ain't, period. I do believe that it's the only browser (haven't used iCab) that lets you do this so far (as all apps really written in cocoa will support).
if you don't kmow what Cocoa Gestures is, download this http://www.bitart.com/CocoaGestures.dmg NOW!
and you'll thank me.
CS majors know the time/space tradeoff, but they never get taught the 3rd, crucial, tradeoff of the set: comprehension!
This article explains how to bookmark groups of tabs in Chimera. And this one tells you how to block images selectively by server. The more I use Chimera, the more I like it-- it's fast and stable, and it's nice to know that folks can expand upon its functionality easily. It seems like every day I learn about a new way to trick out Chimera.
Try this on the command line:
/Applications/Mozilla.app "http://apple.slashdot.org/"
bilbo% open "http://apple.slashdot.org/"
It uses you Internet prefs to decide which browser to launch.
But do you want to see something really bizarre? My prefs are set to use IE as the default browser (yeah, I know, sorry). But If I explicitly try to launch an url with mozilla, it launches in IE instead. That is, the following command launches IE:
open
*shrug*
iCab has been my default browser since day one. My needs are fairly simple with regards to code (I don't often visit pages that are jam packed with all the latest and greatest web standards) although with each release its getting closer to covering many of the more complex things.
In fact iCab was the FIRST browser to pusue standards compliance as its main goal. The problem is that its a small team and they can't get everything working at once (that's why it's still only a Preview release).
But what a Preview!!
iCab has much too much going for it cover in this post. It is the most configurable, compact browser I have ever used. Stable as hell, snappy and very well thought out.
As has been mentioned, the filter manager has to be the Holy Grail of web control. If you're a control freak this thing is for you.
The Link Manager is terrible handy. The kiosk mode can be a godsend. The contextual menus do just about everything. And with the new Beta the cache navigator is working again! Browsing your cache can be an enlightening experience!
It's still not finished but if only all unfinished products were as good as this.
And I see two or three of the suggestions I made to the team have made it into the new beta.
It's Lynx, not links you dumbass! If you've actually EVER USED IT you'd know that, since you have to TYPE THE COMMAND IN to use it; no clicking you fag. Fucking Unix poser; You've probably never even TOUCHED the command line of your Mac. FUCKING COCKSUCKING UNIX-POSING LOSER.
The problem with side-by-side comparisons like this -- MacWorld is an especially egregious offender -- is that they strongly favor comparisons on quantifiable attributes, like feature matrices and benchmarks.
... look better. They're easier on the eye, scan faster, read faster, and are just ... pleasing. I defy even Tufte to quantify that.
Unfortunately, these things aren't what users really care about.
Most any modern browser will render most any web page at a perfectly acceptable speeds. I don't really give much of a shit about rendering times, unless some browser's are so incredibly bad that I actually notice them. (Perhaps I'm more patient than some users, but honestly, I really don't care. They'll all just fine.)
What I care about is the whole "browsing experience" -- and that's hard to quantify. A program's functionality is more than the sum of its features: it also involves how well those features work together, and the smoothness of the facade under which they fit. I don't actually want a lot of features -- I want very few powerful features that give me tremendous functionality.
This bake-off misses the subtle, truly important differences that make it worth switching. For example:
OmniWeb renders pages gorgeously. They just
OmniWeb (and, increasingly, Chimera) feel much more like OS X apps than the alternatives. They have great UIs. Apple goes a long way toward quantifying that in their HI guidelines, but really, it's a "feels good" thing.
Mozilla's tabbed browsing isn't just a feature in a checklist -- it's a wonderfully powerful and well-thought-out feature that's tightly, thoughtfully integrated with the app. Menus are keyboard shortcuts for tabs are there where you'd want them; tabs behave helpfully and sensibly. It's not the tabs that are exciting; it's the fact that they work so darned well.
Do keep trying, MacWorld. I'm glad that somebody at least acknowledges that there are alternatives!
Internet Explorer 5.2.1 [...] Most reliable renderer; good performance; great standards support.
.hqx files it would automatically execute them. Granted it doesn't do this anymore, but it shows IE has a bad track record.
Um, what? If this were true, then why would Apple make an article documenting the IE's shortcomings? Also, on the subject of verions, why do they test version 0.5 of Chimera? 0.6 is much better and has been out since November 4th. It's a month later! The tested version of IE is 5.2.1, but on my machine I have 5.2.2. The modification date is October 3rd. This article is dated.
Also why didn't the article address security? I seem to recall a problem with IE in that when it would download
Some people have pointed out that Chimera is at 0.6 already. However, as much of an improvement as this is for stability, I think it should be noted that turning of disk caching increases stability as much if not much more. Since I turned off disk caching I have only had one crash of Chimera as opposed to crashing about once every 2-3 days. (This is with the nightly builds that tend to be less stable than the regular release.) Turn of disk caching and enable http pipelining, and Chimera beats the pants off anything out there. It's fast, it has tabs, and it's nearly as stable as the other browsers even though it's a beta.
Okay, I don't know what anyone else's experience is, but my primary reason for switching to Netscape 7.0 (then to Chimera starting with 0.6) was that IE was so incredibly slow and unreliable, prash-crone and sluggish. I almost wonder if they are using the same IE I am to call it faster and more reliable.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
How could anyone who has experienced tabbed browsing discount this feature? The lack of tabbed browsing alone places IE dead last. When you add in the fact that it doesn't support ad-blocking the whole article becomes a troll.
Of course IE will win if you discount features it doesn't have.
What many of the IE bashers fail to realise is that IE has many features that none of the other browsers do, and it works with any site you could care to name.
There aren't a ton of rational reasons. It's all feel. IE for Mac feels like Microsoft's operating systems; that is, like junk food. Omniweb gives the impression that is thinking oh so hard about how to construct a page.. iCab made more sense in OS 9, and Opera is easy to forget about after it crashes. That said, I've gone back to the Chimera .5 formulation; .6 appears unsteady.
And yeah, I like tabbed browsing. Wow. My desktop's already a mess, might as well not add to it.
Most web sites work without JavaScript, CSS, etc. Well at least sites with actual content.
My primary reason for using IE is it has the better Mac interface. It supports drag+drop peroperly and supports InternetConfig settings. In fact without IE I couldn't even change the system-wide MIMEfilename extensionHFS type mappings.
It's SAD that Explorer, which hasn't improved in a VERY long time, still has the best interface.
Yes, I have tried EVERY Mac OS X browser out there!
>80 column hard wrapped e-mail is not a sign of intelligent
>life
Um, last I checked, Netscape 7.0 had tabbed windows.
waIstingg ???
my box:
867Mhz Quicksilver G4, 2Meg L3
640 Megs Ram,
Many Open Applications, with Uptime > 2 days.
There is sufficient free memory to avoid any
swapping.
i'm using DIALUP avg 4.0 Kb/sec for both tests.
opening ESPN (what they liked to test in the article), it takes:
OmniWeb
1:32 Seconds.
Mozilla
1:11 Seconds.
BUT, considering that it's dial-up and not highspeed, I think the render-time proportions between the two would shrink to a factor where OmniWeb's other merits become a factor to appreciate.
Observe, I ran them consecutively. They don't share caches so they both loaded from scratch. Being 4:00am on a college dialup means there aren't many fluctuations in network availability.
if we imagine then that everything was the same, but run 16 times faster (like a dsl can easily achieve), then the rendering times come out to be
5.75 second for OmniWeb,
4.4375 for Mozilla.
That is not a large difference. Someone up on the thread mentioned that it's really hard to get objective speeds with browsers, but this is a unbiased as i can get. Especially when, did i mention, i'm a 56K warrior.
I think Omni caught up.
Now feel free to blow my little science fair project away...
regards, jamesr.
CS majors know the time/space tradeoff, but they never get taught the 3rd, crucial, tradeoff of the set: comprehension!
Things like klicks in the URL address bar:
single klick: place the cursor
double klick: mark a word
triple klick: mark the whole line (URL)
Or drag-n-drop support:
Can I drag-n-drop a URL address or HTML file item onto an open browser window? Onto the browser icon in the task bar or on the desktop? Can I mark text in a HTML window and drag it to an open editor window? Is text from HTML tables tab separated? etc.
All in all a pretty shallow review, but then it's only MacWorld, and not a serious computer magazine suited for geeks...
Idempotent operation: Like MS software, wether you run it once or often, that doesn't make it any better.
Uhhh... you *do* realize that Mac MSIE *is* a Mozilla variant, right? That's why it's so different from the Windows version.
Mac MSIE identifies itself as "MSIE/Mozilla 4.0" I believe...
1) It doesn't rate Chimera, iCab, or Opera because they're not final release. Frankly these days for most software "final release" is a meaningless phrase. Maybe MacWorld needs to have a provisional rating scheme to make articles like this meaningful.
2) NetScape 7.0 is stated as having "no tabbed windows". Um, what?
In any event, unless you're starved for bandwidth almost all these programs are free. Why not download them and make up your own mind?
And as a final note: tabbed browsing really makes up for rendering issues. You don't notice a new page's loading time nearly as much when it's opened in a background tabbed versus having a blank window shoved in your face...
I guess my issue is this: I don't like Netscape because its flipping huge, and seems slow to launch, and generally slow. I haven't used Mozilla much -- I'm on a dial-up connection, and I don't have time to keep downloading the new version that comes out every three days. I've tried Opera, and I liked it -- up until they threw in the tabs. Opera does not appear to have a keystroke for changing tabs -- that I've found. IE may not be ideal, it may not be up to standards, it may be evil, and all that. But, for me, it works. I'd love to be using some other browser, but I have yet to find one that is fast, stable, has keystroke shortcuts, holds to the standards, etc.
Please give me something other than IE --now. I'm sure Chimera will be there eventually, but I'm somewhat conservative. I want one browser. Not three. Not one that gets reprogrammed every week.
Can any browser meet those requirements?
"Politicians are the same all over. They promise to build a bridge even where there is no river." -- Nikita Khrushchev
I give a vote for Omniweb. First, beautiful rendering. Second, it's Cocoa, and thus you get all the benefits of services, which I cannot stress enough. Third, in Omniweb, you have a nice HTML editor with error checking. Fourth, ad blocking and pop up blocking. Fifth, shortcuts ... which I realized are really quite useful. It's just I overlooked them, because with Omniweb using them is ubiquitous. I've grown accustomed to searching Versiontracker by typing vt "query", Google by typing Go "search", a dictionary site by Define "word", etc. In and of itself, that's a cool feature ... but being fully Cocoa, I can combine this with services. A good example is when I'm talking in Fire and someone wants me to look something up for them. Simply Go "Search" Apple+A and then Control Shift U. Boom, search. That's convience. True, we need tabbed browsing and speed enhancements. But, I'm willing to deal with those short commings.
By far, the fastest web browser for MacOS X is the quick'n dirty port of Phoenix.
Quite frankly, it is amazingly speedy, although it lacks quite a lot of features. But if you are willing to sacrifice compatibility for speed, it's the way to go. Launch speed is pretty lousy, but once it's launched, boy is it fast!
No matter how good a browser is, it can't compensate for badly coded sites.
In other words, it's basically garbage in, garbage out.
If a webmaster optimizes for Windows IE, there will be certain functions that just won't work with any other browsers. One example is wmf/wma files. It always gives me trouble when I'm not using an MS OS.
I've been using iCab for a couple years now and have only recently become unhappy with it. Their support for nested tables has gone to hell, and they seem to support many elements of CSS sporadically (sp?) at best. I still use it and enjoy it (my god, what would I do without their image blocking, contextual menu, error report, etc.?), but I wish they would re-fix their damn tables!
It is the most configurable, compact browser I have ever used. Stable as hell, snappy and very well thought out.Hear, hear! I switched to iCab way back when because I will *never* use Explorer as my main browser and NN is so bloated it was making me sick. iCab is light and fast. It would be nice if they took a lesson from Mozilla's form manager though...
"I think we should tax people who stand in water! " - Mr. Gumby
Zuh? I'm running 100MHz less than you (and yes, it's a G3) and there are NO pauses in Chimera while I type.
Omniweb is nice, but the bastard won't even render some Apple corporate HTML properly. Try going to the
Chimera, rules. Plain & simple. Rules.
Did anybody else notice that they had just 256MB in the computer? 10.2 launches and that's it, its all swap from there on out. If you actualy have $30 to blow on memory your computer will perform much better and differently than these tests.
Interesting.
my flatmate and I both use OmniWeb 4.1 (on different machines) both bank online (through a total of four different banks) and have no difficulties what so ever in doing so.
In my experience OmniWeb only fails to render a page correctly very *very* rarely, certainly no more frequently (in its current incarnation) than IE5 did last time I used it for any length of time, and far less frequently than the only other candidate I've any experience with: Netscape 7 (which I'm stuck using on the Mac at work - blech!)
This of course just demonstrates the core of the "Problems with [the] article" which is that we all browse different combinations of a bewildering number of sites, most of which are undergoing almost constant editing and reconstruction, so we all have different experiences... *shrugs* happily I've found the browser that works for me.
My ideal browser would be something like Chimera with iCab's filter manager (with real regexps, not the current fakes). iCab filter manager just rocks. Period.
Maybe the guys at iCab should use Gecko and concentrate on what is their added value?
Aaaah, let me dream...
For those who use browsers in a professional capacity, good ad-blocking is essential, as is built-in validation. But the CSS? I honestly think iCab simply gave up a long time ago. Pity.
There's really no "best" browser. Each has its strengths and weaknesses.
I use Chimera/Navigator almost exclusively now. The Flash instability problems seem to be a thing of the past, and even the nightly builds are useable. It's damn fast, and renders better than IE or OmniWeb. Preferences are still a bit spartan from the UI, but you can always edit the preference file by hand if you want tweaks. I've enabled HTTP pipelining and some other things in that manner. There are also pointy clicky utility programs like Chimerchanga that will do this for you if a text editor is inconvenient.
Mozilla for OS X handles certain Javascript better than Chimera. It's more mature, but it's slower and doesn't feel like an OS X app. It's a good choice for those who prefer suites to standalone browsers. The mail program is quite serviceable.
Netscape 7 is a bit clunky and cluttered. It's great if you access Netscape webmail, or if you need a spellchecker within your mail program.
OmniWeb is a very respectable browser: fast and pretty, and quite stable. Like Chimera, it has a support community around it. I recently loaded OmniWeb and spent a few hours seeing how it has come along. A very nice ride, but I miss tabbed browsing. I understand tabs will make it to OmniWeb soon.
IE for OS X is a much better browser than its Windows counterpart. I keep it on my drive to access our company's internal websites, which all require IE. It handles tables poorly. Don't bring it to Slashdot.
Opera has a huge following: it feels light and was the first with tabbed browsing. You can set it to identify as pretty much any browser right from the toolbar. I've never liked its rendering, but a lot of folks think it's great.
iCab does nothing to my satisfaction, but has its own faction of supporters.
In my view, it's a great time to be an OS X user. We have a ton of great browsers. My top 3, in this order: Chimera, OmniWeb, and IE.
All bets are off if Apple delivers a branded browser. It would almost certainly be based on Chimera/Navigator. Would be nice to see a commercial distribution of an already terrific product.
This is my post. There are many others like it. If you don't like what you read here, go try one of the others.
I'd really like to see a browser comparison that emphasizes reliability. Nothing on my new iBook ever crashes, except Mozilla and IE. They don't crash all *that* frequently, but it's way more often than on my PC, strangely enough. At some point, I'm going to play around with OmniWeb, and see how that is.
Check out this hint that shows how to add an image handling preference pane to Chimera's prefs. It works great, and adds that most essential feature you mentioned.
"I like systems, their application excepted", George Sand (French)
I'll represent. OmniWeb is the only browser I've used for many months. I used to keep Mozilla around just in case, but I just haven't needed it.
Something amazing that the reviewer missed is the fact that you can drive OmniWeb using speech recognition. It just works. Say page up, it goes page up. Say the name of a link, and even on a Slashdot page with many links, it works.
Persistant history (global and window-specific), bookmarks in a drawer, Services, spell checking in forms, and the most intuitive, invisible UI you have ever seen make OmniWeb great.
Plus throbbing Aqua Submit buttons!