Slashdot Mirror
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)
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
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.
--"It's Bradford Company, slash your last name, dot your first name"
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