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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
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
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
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.
What the summary said is Chimera is the "browser to watch". As in, if it ever becomes reliable and supports plug-ins it will become a contender, but not until then. The summary also said Internet Explorer is "the browser to beat". IMHO this comes a lot closer to "winning" than the "browser to watch".
...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!!!
Don't get me wrong. I have some problems with Chimera. Its history is weak. It has few features. It doesn't support most of the nice Cocoa features that Omniweb does. (i.e. spellchecking) But it is very fast and renders pages better than Omniweb. What I've heard about the new Omniweb makes me excited. But that is still likely about two months out.
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.
Yes 0.6 could be 1.0 in my book. It does everything so well.
Karma: The shiznight, mostly because I am the Drizzle.
It doesn't support most of the nice Cocoa features that Omniweb does. (i.e. spellchecking)
It goes deeper than that. Chimera doesn't use Cocoa text widgets at all. Not only to you not get services like spellchecking; the text rendering itself is screwed up. It's unbearable, and so absurdly unnecessary.
I use Chimera only when I have to. For everything else, it's OmniWeb all the way-- and yes, I paid for my OmniWeb license, thank you very much.
I write in my journal
You are right that text input fields still use the Gecko code which is oriented towards crossplatform abilities. Supposedly that will be changed, but because of the difficulty will be one of the last things finished. Hopefully by then Apple will have made more Cocoa features available to the Carbon API.
It's all about the Pentiums baby
omnia tua castra sunt nobis
The problem only really occurs with some fonts that the Carbon anti-aliases handles differently than the Cocoa anti-aliasing.
That's not what I'm talking about. Open up Chimera and go to a page with a big textedit box. Start typing. See how it redraws the entire textedit box contents every time you strike a key? I have a dual gigahertz machine, and I'm only a moderately fast typist; Chimera can't keep up with me. It lags behind as I type. That's unacceptable.
I write in my journal
--"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
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*
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
Has Omni web improved it's load speeds though? I remember with early versions of Omniweb, the pages were amazing in terms of rendering, but it took forever to do anything, even worse than other browsers under OS X (the original release)
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
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.
Regarding what some others asked about anti-aliasing. This is a real problem although there are modifications you can make to Chimera to limit the smallest font displayed and also the font used. Various hacks have been discussed on many message boards and Version Tracker even has an application to modify them without editing the pref file by hand. Some of these the nightlies have added interfaces for.
To see the problem check out this MacNN Forum thread. Be aware that it is based off on Chimera 0.5 and not the more recent version. But the same basic problem remains. It also demonstrates the display differences between Omniweb and Chimera on ESPN.
I'd have to say that I've modified my position somewhat since that thread. I find that CHimera 0.6 is improved enough that I now use it more than Omniweb.
What version of Chimera are you using? Something sounds wrong.
A nightly build from a week or so ago. It's definitely wrong, but the question is whether it's wrong in all cases, or only wrong in the build that I (occasionally) use.
If-- and this is a giant if-- the Chimera guys can get their act together and actually release a finished product, it might, someday, end up being a better browser than OmniWeb. But if it goes the Mozilla route, that is to say they just take a given build that's not even remotely feature-complete or bug-free and stamp it 1.0, then it's still going to be OmniWeb all the way.
I write in my journal
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.
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.
It's lynx and it's links.
The person here was referencing the more powerful links as opposed to the still useful standby, lynx.
-- There is no sig line, only Zuul.
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!
> Need I say more...
Some supporting comments might help.
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.
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.
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.