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.

Comments

Make AppleScript Work For You

[pudge]

The story includes this:

Launch the Script Editor application (located in the Applications: AppleScript folder) and type the following:

try
tell application "Internet Explorer"
GetURL "http://apple.slashdot.org/"
Activate
end tell
on error
end try

To use a browser other than Internet Explorer, enter its name within the quotation marks after tell application. To open more sites in separate windows, add new GetURL commands with the other pages' addresses.

Bleah. You shouldn't need to know the browser name, or what events are understood by the app, or what arguments it accepts. Just use this:

open location "http://apple.slashdot.org/"

It uses your default http handler, and should work fine with all the browsers (and if not, send in a bug report to the maker of browser you're using).

iCab...

[singularity]

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.

Problems with Article

[WatertonMan]

There is something wrong with this article. For one it says all the browsers pretty much rendered ESPN right. However Omniweb, my favorite browser, does NOT render ESPN right. The speeds seem slightly off from what I see on my system as well. Right now Chimera renders about as fast as my PC while the others are far slower.

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.

Make _Terminal_ Work For You

[ChrisDolan]

Try this on the command line:

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 /Applications/Mozilla.app "http://apple.slashdot.org/"

*shrug*

Re:Netscape 7.0...

[TiMac]

I'd say that my order is: Chimera, Mozilla, IE, OmniWeb.

Why would anyone use a browser that obviously pauses for each character I enter into a text field?

How slow is your Mac? Or how the hell fast can you type? Because I type ~65-70 words a minute (fairly fast) and I'm typing this on Chimera 0.60 and I'm not seeing any "pauses" between characters. IE is fast. Mozilla is slow. But Chimera is definitely miles ahead of Mozilla. There really isn't significant delay. Maybe you were using an older version of Chimera?

Expecting me to use stuff like Chimera, which offers a "Cocoa" interface with all non-Cocoa widets for interaction, is also insulting.

What are you talking about non-Cocoa widgets? Are you high? All of Chimera's widgets are Cocoa...or rather, they are "Aqua," which is the proper name. The close, minimize and whatever-the-official-name-for-the-green-button-is buttons are all Aqua. The scroll bars and arrows are Aqua. The tabs are Aqua. You can test these by going to the "General" System Preferences and selecting the Graphite theme. Chimera's widgets turn graphite! They are real.

The button bar is true Aqua. You can test this by Command-clicking the White button. The buttons rotate through configurations as Aqua does. The Sidebar is Aqua--it's actually called a "Drawer." Its alerts are real--they are "Sheets." Even form elements (buttons, etc) are Aqua-sized.

So yeah...Chimera is definitely Cocoa, and definitely Aqua. And it's fast and renders perfectly (in my experience). I never use another browser anymore. Mozilla used to be my browser but it was way too slow.