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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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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
--"It's Bradford Company, slash your last name, dot your first name"
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
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.
Spoken like someone who hasn't used any of them.
I might rank Chimera and OmniWeb neck and neck, but probably not. Netscape 7 is completely, unabashedly unusable, and doesn't belong in any list of browsers people use.
IE renders more correctly than OmniWeb, but the user experience is sufficiently inferior that I only use it if it correctly handles something OmniWeb fails at (that is, one site a week).
I would love for OmniWeb to render websites more correctly. But, frankly, it does a good enough job. Does that limit web developers? Sure. I feel for them. But expecting users to use crap like Netscape 7 is simply insulting. Expecting me to use stuff like Chimera, which offers a "Cocoa" interface with all non-Cocoa widets for interaction, is also insulting. I'm using OS X for a reason.
Here's a quick test: is posting to Slashdot pleasant in these other browsers? No. Only OmniWeb can spell check my text as I enter it, and only OmniWeb and IE have text entry that is reasonably fast. Why would anyone use a browser that obviously pauses for each character I enter into a text field?
--Matthew
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.
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.