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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.
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
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.
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.
You are incorrect. The order goes Mozilla, Chimera, Netscape 7.0, IE, Omniweb, iCab. This is because only one thing matters: accurate rendering and standards support. Omniweb and iCab are pretty terrible at this.
Lowmag.net
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
if you want accurate rendering I'd point you to IE 6 for Windows - seeing as that's the standard.
I choose Omniweb (yep, I even paid) because the UI is outstanding, all my online banking works flawlessly, it renders Slashdot more readable than ANY other browser, it's filtering is top notch and it's bookmark management and deadlink checking is unsurpassed. Chimera may yet develop into something good, and Netscape 7.0 is a fine internet "suite", but I'd rather lose an arm than go back to IE from Omniweb - it's that simple.
That was classic intercourse!
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!
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.
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.
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!