Chimera Developer Considers Dropping It

The Infamous Grimace writes "Chimera's developer is seriously considering dropping it, since 'Safari has already won.' This would be unfortunate, indeed. I still use Chimera at times, although it's true that Safari has become my browser of choice." I cannot use Safari regularly, it lacks too many features and has too many bugs. Of course, how long will this remain so? But even if Safari adds tabs and fixes bugs, will they add all the features I need from Chimera/Mozilla, like remembering form passwords, site navigation bar, more fine control of security and privacy? I guess there is always Mozilla if Safari doesn't fit the bill ... but Chimera is so much faster and Mac-like. Update: 01/22 19:54 GMT by P : The web site has been updated: "Chimera's not going [away], regardless of whatever I post on this blog."

Comments

unlikely demise

[ubiquitin]

Dave Hyatt's weblog, the Confessions of a Mozillian, indicates that there is a sizeable team working on Chimera, so I wouldn't expect everyone to just walk out the door all at once. Sure, development on it may become less of a priority, but that doesn't mean the fat lady has sung. Also, the overwhelming response to the safari announcement was for tabbed browsing. It is quite possible that Apple simply won't cave in to the demand for tabbed browsing in which case you can have my chimera when you pry it from my cold dead hands.

Re:unlikely demise

[Rip!ey]

...there is a sizeable team working on Chimera...

Even if there was only one person working on the codebase, it is open source. No one person/corporation/entity can effectively 'kill the code'. The code is free to live.

Re:unlikely demise

[Twirlip of the Mists]

Dave Hyatt's weblog, the Confessions of a Mozillian

If it tells you anything, he changed the name of his weblog to Surfin' Safari about a week ago.

Safari musing

[Matthias Wiesmann]

As for work on Chimera, I understand the feeling of the Chimera team. I agree that Safari is missing many features, it is overall more finished that Chimera. For instance Chimera does not support services well and on my machine it tended to crash a lot.

While some feature will certainly make it to Safari, others will not. It would be nice if Apple would open-source the whole Safari, but I doubt this. Instead, what would be smart from Apple would be to have the browser support plugins, not only for displaying content, but also for controling network operations and maybe some aspect of the GUI. This way people could customise Safari.

As for tabs (the topic of probably 95% of the posts on this post), I don't think is such a good solution. While they are usefull, I feel they are not complete, mostly because the relationship between tabs is unclear: are they at the same level? On the same site?

Most of the time I used tabs, it was to explore some hierarchy and load in parallel multiple branches (say multiple links). What I really would like is something that displays this tree structure, with some options like "pre-load branch" and "attach link as branch". This structure could also use the relationships defined by the link tags. In fact this thing would simply expand the notion of hierarchical history (and in fact include future links). If done well, Safari could use the same panel interface for the hierachy as mail.

Re:Safari musing

[octover]

I admit that I am not your average 'web surfer', I'm a web developer. I love tabs. Why? Because at any given moment I have three to four different pages loaded. Tabs make it very easy for me to switch back and forth without have to go up to a menu to see what is even open. It keeps my screen cleaner which is nice. The other great thing about tabs is that my mom can use Mozilla and never even see them. What is it with the whole tabs are too complex crap? Tabs aren't a default thing on any browser I've come across.

Oh and the relationship between tabs is that they are both 'documents' the browser has/is rendering. That is it. There is no other relationship than that, and I hope that no one gets it in their head to make it more than that (I'm thinking JavaScript and dom stuff).

Re:Safari musing

[Twirlip of the Mists]

My opinion on tabs is well known. I'm not picking a fight here; just offering a counterpoint. I'm well aware that lots of people disagree with me, so don't bother posting just to say that you're one of 'em. Constructive criticism, on the other hand, is welcome.

Because at any given moment I have three to four different pages loaded.

You accidentally point out the biggest flaw of tabs here: they're self-limiting. Depending on window size, you can only fit between four and eight tabs across the window before they have to be truncated. If you can't read the titles, the advantage of tabs evaporates.

With multiple windows, on the other hand, you can have as many pages loaded at once as you want. Multiple windows are not self-limiting.

Tabs make it very easy for me to switch back and forth without have to go up to a menu to see what is even open.

While the usability advantages of a menu over a row of tabs have been discussed thoroughly, it's hard to beat the ease of use of command-` for cycling through an application's open windows. Tabs are useful for up to 4-8 open pages; they are not useful for more than that. Similarly, command-` is useful for about the same number of open windows.

It keeps my screen cleaner which is nice.

On the other hand, it prevents you from looking at two pages side-by-side without jumping through hoops. (Choose the tab, control-click, choose "open page in new window.) Multiple windows can be used in a clean-desktop way (command-M for minimize), but let you arrange your pages however you want.

Oh and the relationship between tabs is that they are both 'documents' the browser has/is rendering. That is it.

That's not really good enough, in my opinion. For example, if tabs were implemented in some way that dealt with #1 problem (truncation), you really ought to be able to drag a tab from one window to another. That's a complicated thing; you have to implement your NSView subclasses as application instances instead of directly associating each NSView subclass with an NSWindow subclass. The current implementation, in which a tab is tied not to an NSView but to an NSWindow forever, kinda sucks. It would make more sense on a large scale for "tabs" (that name is becoming less and less appropriate) to be global network session objects, and for any window to be able to display the output from any "tab." But that poses huge usability problems; how does one instantiate a new "tab?" Should the application manage it for you, creating an autorelease pool of tabs automatically every time you open a new site (by clicking a bookmark or typing a URL or clicking a link that takes you to a new site)? Trying to implement "tabs" right opens more questions than it closes.

But basically my opinion can be summed up in what I've been saying all along: "tabs are a bad solution to a problem that we don't have."

Re:Safari musing

[SoupIsGoodFood_42]

If they understand the tab concept and they're using it, they're also well aware of which pages they've visited, and in roughly what order they opened new tabs. Then what's the point of representing different views as tabs? The point of tabs is to show you all the window titles at once. If you don't need to see the titles, then you're better off using windows

The point in tabs is not to show you all the titles at once, it to show you all the sites you have open at once. Titles are not always nessesary, Infact, I don't even read the most of the time. I go by were they are.

App...
NST...
NST...
NST...
NSP...
NSS...
NSS...
App...
Slas...
Goo...
Surf..

Quick! Which one of those tabs refers to the NSTextField documentation page, which one refers to the NSTableView page, and which one refers to NSToolbarItem?

My bet is on the 2nd to 4th ones. Of course. I would have a more accurate guess if I had knowen when that window was opened. In other words, you example doesn't work because we didn't know what you did. We don't have you short-term memory to examine.

This is not a contrived example. This is fairly typical for me. Tabs, in a word, suck.

Ah, yet another shining example of your ignorance. Maybe tabs suck for YOU, but they obviously don't suck for everyone. So just give it a rest ay?

Re:Safari musing

[drsmithy]

How do you waste screen space with multiple windows?

By having a toolbar, address bar, window widgets, status bar, plus maybe more in every window and by requiring all those windows to be suitable stacked for quick access if needed (the latter is more of a clutter issue than space, but IMHO the two go hand in hand).

If you want to use all of your screen for a single window, go for it.

Actually that touches on another one of my gripes with OS X - there's no quick & each way to make a window take up the entire screen.

First, the OS provides you with no fewer than four different ways of dealing with windows.

That doesn't mean any of them are _good_.

One, the Window menu.

So I have to move the mouse from where it is to the top of the screen, navigate to the Window menu, then read each entry and select the right one ? Sorry, too slow.

Two, the dock menu. Works the same as the window menu, but it's accessed by control-clicking the application icon in the dock.

Not to mention requiring another larger mouse displacement to get to and (this is the killer) having a built-in delay before displaying the menu. Sorry, too slow.

Three, minimizing windows to the dock.

Sorry, minimized windows in the Dock move around, thus meaning I have to actually look for any window before restoring it to make it useful. This requires mousing over each window to get a title, which is too slow (not to mention annoying). This is before we even get to the screen real estate problem with having a dozen minimised browser windows, along with probably two dozen _other_ windows from other apps.

Four, the command-` and command-shift-` shortcuts for cycling and toggling. Very handy, those.

Which require stepping through every window in the stack to get to the one you want, not to mention requiring ahving to examien each window to make sure you get the right one (since the order does not remain consistent). Stepping through a dozen browser windows every time I want to look at a different web page ? You have to be kidding.
The keyboard shortcuts aren't too bad, but break horribly when you want to move between applications, because cmd+tabbing to another applicationg brings *all* of that applications windows to the front, obscuring everything else. Very annoying, that (but in line with OS X's interface paradigms).

And finally, as demonstrated elsewhere tabs are completely unacceptable in large numbers. [...]

Maybe for the way *you* use them, but not when you've got a dozen monitoring web pages sitting in tabs that remain in a fixed order. I don't *need* to read the title of the page, because its function is associated with its location (you know, the same principle Apple espouses with its single standardised menu bar). To say tabs as demonstrated elsewhere tabs are completely unacceptable" is patently false when I, and others, use them in such a way every hour of every day.

And because applications like Mozilla have no tab-based equivalent of the Window menu [...]

Nor do you need it, if you keep your tabs organised by window as I do.

Here's a quick taste test. [...]

I stay organised by having one window for each type of browsing I do. Thus, tabs only get opened in the window they need to and don't need to be moved between windows. For my usage patterns your "test" is completely unrealistic and pointless - it's not something I do (or want to) rarely, let alone often.

With windows, on the other hand, I can make a pile in a corner of my screen or whatever, stacking and restacking to suit my purposes.

But you can't move between them quickly & easily if you have other browser windows open and as soon as you do their fixed order is lost. This is even assuming the screen real estate can be wasted (which it can't in the case of our monitoring pages that need a large chunk of a 1600x1200 screen to be useful).

I don't know what to say except, "maybe you were doing something wrong."

You mean, like trying to do my job ? I have around a dozen terminal windows at a _minimum_ open at any given time. They all need to be fairly quickly and easily accessible and, ideally, partly visible at all times.

That's simply bogus. Sorry, but it's true. As I said, the OS gives you no fewer than four ways of getting from one window to another, and that doesn't count the simple expedient of point-and-click.

If you can keep ~40 (at current count) windows visible, hence "clickable" and usable on the screen at once, I salute you. And, as mentioned, just because the OS gives me several different methods doesn't mean any of them are any good for what I want to do.

All of these methods scale to a practically unlimited number of windows [...]

What definition of "scale" are you using here ? The already slow methods of the Window menu and Dock menu remain slow. Minimising much more than about 20 windows to the Dock is unworkable and the keyboard shortcuts are simply broken if you want to move to a specific window of a specific app in a single operation.

Just because something is *possible* doesn't mean it is *optimal*. It's *possible* to have a large number of apps and windows open on OS X, but it is difficult and frustrating to manage them all.

I don't know why you have a problem dealing with open windows, but it's not the fault of the OS or the application.

I'm having a problem because the tools in the GUI to do this are inadequate. And it is a problem of the GUI, because I don't have the same problem in the Windows and KDE GUIs.

If you don't want to use the shortcuts, then done.

I do, it's just that they are poorly implemented.

So what you call a powerful organizational feature is really nothing more than the illusion thereof.

It's all in how you use it. I've explain how I use windows and tabs within to organise my browser windows in a hierachical fashion. I'm sorry if you don't understand, but trying to claim a flat, unordered and dynamic collection of windows is is any way *more* organised is just plain wrong.

[...] to a problem that we don't even have.

To a problem you don't have. I do, and tabs are, thus far, the best available solution on my preferred platform.

Ah, I see. "Your opinion differs from mine, so you must not be as sophisticated as I am." Very mature.

I fail to see how the "your opinion is different to mine, so you're wrong" attitude you have is any different. Not to mention your "I don't understand what you are doing, how or why, so you're wrong" attitude.
As I said, in complete honesty, the only conclusion I can draw from your comments is that you aren't dealing with large numbers of open windows simultaneously, because I simply cannot understand how you could be doing so and _not_ find the current methods limiting and frustrating.

[...] people who find tabs to be an enabling solution are handicapped by the fact that they don't know how to use the features that the OS already provides.

You've yet to inform me of any features in OS X I don't know about, haven't known of for some time and have already tried.

Your assessment of my criticisms is, unfortunately, not accurate. If you'd like to know what I'm saying about tabs, please go back and read my posts again.

Well, thus far I've read what boils down to "there is no problem", "it's a bad idea", "it's fiddly to view two web pages in tabs side by side". To which I answer "there is a problem", "there is no better idea yet" and "so what".

You seem fixated on not being able to read the title of a page and being able to manipulate multiple open pages so that they can be viewed simultaneously. I can understand why this would be useful and when, but I cannot understand your attitude that it is necessary _alL_ the time and that anyone who thinks otherwise is a fool.

How does Windows handle it much better?

Several ways:
It's faster.
It groups similar windows.
It allows me to move quickly to *any* window by either mouse or keyboard.
It allows me to order the tabs in the taskbar (only kludgily, but that's better than not at all)
The placement of things in the taskbar is almost completely static (resizing it can subtly change the position of tabs, but it's far from the wholesale it-could-be-anywhere of minimised stuff in the Dock).
It allows me to completely maximise windows.

The only method that even comes close is an Application's Dock menu, but that suffers from being annoyingly slow, even more so on slow machines and having to read the verious items on the menu to choose the one that's wanted.

Nooooooo!

[MacAndrew]

Of course, I find something I love and *Apple* of all companies threatens to kill it, indirectly.

I've been using Chimera Navigator for months, forgetting altogether IE (the real villain IMHO). I suppose the sole question for the Chimera team on whether to continue is whether *their* shadowy objectives are being met. The results in the time frame of the effort so far has been impressive -- no, stunning -- much more than a build-a-brower this weekend kind of thing. It really is Mac software.

The single best thing I can say about Chimera -- and there are many nice things, more so now that I've gotten around to poking around with 3rd party mods like SpeedChimera and "PDF Plugin" -- is that I've mostly forgotten about it. That is, it works like the Finder or some other utility that you take for granted and don't give much thought. That's what I've wanted, not the fickle and feature-encrusted IE, just something simple and clean and fast. Safari will learn (has learned?) a few things from Chimera, which tells you something about the latter's value and why it would be a shame to lose the lead-by-example prominence of Chimera.

Re:Nooooooo!

[usr122122121]

Of course, I find something I love and *Apple* of all companies threatens to kill it, indirectly.

Plain and simple: Apple does not have the power to kill off the Chimera project. Apple can create another similar product, but it is up to the end user to decide.

Plus, I think everyone is missing the mark a bit: both browsers are free. These organizations/companies aren't going to be shut-out financially... they weren't getting the users' money for these browsers in the first place!

If the developers choose to shut down the Chimera project, it would be a shame, but it would be their decision. To blame that decision on Apple is ridiculous.

Somebody's mad at Apple

[bill_mcgonigle]

It's obvious it will only ever be a marginal product on a even more marginal platform.

So, not only does Chimera suck, Mac OS X sucks harder. Am I translating that right?

I was very excited at first by Chimera, but by 0.3 I'd uninstalled it and stopped participating in the mailing lists. I thought Chimera was going to be the OS-X native (look & feel, native text widgets, services, full-on ATSUI, etc.) version of Mozilla, but instead it became the dumbed-down version of Mozilla with a nice OS X GUI but drastically reduced functionality (at last glance there was still no button to close a tab).

Now it seems this direction was chosen in order to lure Apple to use it as the default browser on OS X. Since they decided not to, what purpose does Chimera serve? For a dumb browser, we have Safari.

If I may suggest, there is a market for a non-dumb browser on OS X. OmniWeb still has a decent following but it can't compete with Mozilla for standards. Re-tasking Chimera to be the OS X -native version of Mozilla might be a good direction for the project - quite a bit of the hard work has been done already.

Don't take my Chimera!

[ahknight]

Please, please don't take my Chimera! Here's why:

Mozilla is bloated. It's slower than Chimera and includes a whole lot of things that are just not needed in a web browser.

Safari can't render well. For the time being, it's not a good solution for people who need standards-compliance or good CSS support. Chimera is.

Tabs, and Aqua-ness aside, it's really the best solution. Even after Safari came out I'm still clinging to Chimera. It still has it's uses and is still the best solution for the Mac right now. It's WAY too early to claim obsolescence.

Safari, shmafari - think about webcore.

[cryptochrome]

I don't think Safari should be the Chimera developers main concern as competition. What they should be worrying about is what's IN Safari - specifically, webcore. Because it's going to make it MUCH easier for people to create browsers with novel interface features for the mac. Including tabbed browsing, even if safari itself doesn't.

My advice to the chimera developers - either focus on bringing the unique features of the mozilla platform like XUL apps that are not so easily replicated, or quit and spend your time someplace else.

(And IMHO, the value of tabbed browsing is not so much organizing pages but preventing clutter. The main problem with the desktop metaphor is it doesn't take many open windows before it's practically unusable.)

Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

What kind of an argument is *that*? I mean, so far Mac OS came bundled with the 90%+ browser from Microsoft. How was that easier to beat than a (relative) newcomer browser?

Of course, if one actually reads the article ...

"I'm torn about what to do with Chimera. It's obvious it will only ever be a marginal product on a even more marginal platform. AOL and Netscape have no interest in supporting it. Who aspires to be number two in an already over-commoditized space? Working my ass off for 3% just isn't any fun any more. Safari has already won, the rest is just to see by how much."

This is not about evil Apple killing off independent developers, but about someone who just lost interest in his pet project, IMO ...

"Perhaps what is more disappointing is that my fifteen minutes of fame are just about up and I've really got nothing to show for it."

I know exactly how you feel *sigh*

b.

Re:Big Buttons

[Twirlip of the Mists]

Here's an idea for u devolpers - Try making a theme editor for Safari that ISN'T JUST CHANGING THE COLOR!!!!!!!

Ugh. Here's an idea for you developers: give up on themes. If you want to work on something, make it something that contributes more to the world or to your own personal enrichment than simply making my screen uglier.

Wait a second

[ethank]

People are saying "don't take Chimera!" because Safari doesn't render well and lacks tabs....

OK.

Safari is in beta release 1. Chimera in the .6 release (post). By the time Chimera is indeed "dropped" Safari should be upwards of beta 3 or 2 or possibly even release. The developers of Safari maintain their own weblog (http://www.mozillazine.org/weblogs/hyatt/) and from what you read there, its indicative that CSS compliance is of the highest priority.

I'll go with the best browser that provides the best user-experience. For me, I use Safari right now because its bookmark management rocks, its history view rocks and its fast as hell. I used Chimera from the time I bought my Mac (September) to when Safari was released. Sure, Safari has some CSS problems, and Chimera is still always running for that very reason, but it boils down to the typical mac idiom: what lets me do my work faster.

Ethan

GNUstep?

[Dimwit]

You know, the GNUstep Project would love to have Chimera working on their platform.

(For those who don't know: GNUstep is a free implementation of the OpenStep specification, of which MacOS X is a direct descendant. There's a very high level of source code-level compatibility between the two platforms.)

Is there any reason why Chimera could not be ported to GNUstep?

Funny...

[Cinematique]

Chimera looks more Apple-like than Safari! WTF? Am I the only one who thinks Safari is great, but looks like a puddle of puke?

Actually, Safari would be great if it looked like Chimera, but kept (and improved) its webcore stuff.

At the end of the day however, the lack of tabs in Safari, plus the hideous UI, are what helps keep Chimera out of my trash can.

Re:Funny...

[usr122122121]

Ah, the irony of Apple not following their own Human Interface Guidelines, then hearing about from their users :-)

Aren't they supposed to set a good example or something?

Why I use Chimera, not Safari

[Tor]

Chimera is a Free(tm) browser, and so will not be subject to a vendor's (Apple's) agenda. In practice, this means that features like popup blocking, selective cookie acceptance/rejection won't go away (the way they have in IE) whenever the vendor no longer blesses such "anti-commercial" features. It also means better code scrutiny, and ultimately, better security.

Please don't stop!

[Anonymous Coward]

I LOVE chimera. Tabs rock, it's fast, its stable.

And I love the interface, it's clean and unbusy. Shortcuts are reasonable and I don't get "surprised" by behavior like i do with explorer or opera or even omniweb.

The big reason to keep working on chimera though is that when chimera is in good enough shape it can be the basis for a wide variety of great open source projects and university research projects. With all the information available on the web a clean module for doing web browser functions will be invaluable to lots of people.

Another good reason, is that mozilla is the "2nd standard" web browser. Usually web designers code to ie and then mozilla, how many are going to code to safari too? This is a big problem with opera and omniweb, sometimes they just don't work on site X. Chimera is much much better for not getting scrambled websites.

And folks were questioning tabs. Hearesy!

The big reason tabs rock? It gets rid of waiting for the network. You're reading along and then just command click on what you are interested in. You mess around on the page a little bit and then switch over. It turns a click-wait-read-click-wait-read experience into click-click-read-read.

Another reason, they remind you of what you were interested in. So i can scan down slashdot and command click the 5 or so stories that interest me. Then I get to the bottom and i don't have can just look at each of the stories in turn instead of going back to the main page each time.

By the way, on the "fifteen minutes of fame" business, don't worry about it. You've got street cred now, that's worth tons here in Silicon Valley. You can get a nice job as the resident guru at a startup or write books or do consulting. You're in geek heaven man, don't sweat it.

Pushing Down Developers

[agentkhaki]

Recently, it came to my attention that MacAmp Lite X is no longer under developement either. Why?

"iTunes just got to be far too big, far too free, and far too bundled with the OS"

Granted, MacAmp Lite X wasn't freeware, like Chimera is, and it wasn't open source, like Chimera is, but it still begs the same question:

As Apple moves from a company that was all about selling their own hardware and an OS to run on it, to a company that is all about moving into every aspect of our lives - giving us not only hardward and a (very healthy) OS to run on it, but also software to take care of most features required by an 'average' user, as well as digital lifestyle devices like the iPod (and rumored things like PDA's, video iPod's, etc.,) - are they becoming more like Microsoft? Are they discouraging the independant developer? Will they continue on this path to such an extent that those people who have begun to raise Apple's market share - and who have begun to actually pay attention to the operating system as something actually worth using - away?

In short, will Apple invading all of the different types of software areas discourage developers to the point that it is no better than Microsoft, if only in terms of their attempted monopoly over all aspects of our computing experience?

Re:Pushing Down Developers

[Graymalkin]

You answered your own question. MacAmp Lite X's developers just gave up because they didn't think enough people were going to use it and buy it from them. That isn't Apple stifling innovation, it is a developer trying to sell a product in a competitive market and not having the wherewithal to keep up development in the face of real competition.

Apparently in some cases like MacAmp Lite X, Apple producing a competitive product will discourage developers. Whether that is their intention or not isn't something anyone but Apple can really answer. In other cases Apple's competition has spurned companies to work even harder. Avid is a pretty good example of this, their DV Xpress package is a direct competitor to FCP. With FCP's meteoric rise to popularity and OSX being a capable OS they decided that they didn't want the Mac-only FCP dominating DV XPress' market. Thus they released DV Xpress 3.5 on both Windows XP and OSX. Now video editing on OSX is at a great point because you've got DV Xpress and FCP competing for the same userbase, it is in the best interest to both companies to produce the mostest badass versions of their software they can to increase sales.

This point is what it comes down to, when you have competition you can either throw in the towel or try harder. Had MacAmp's developers made MacAmp Lite into a real powerhouse of a media player that picked up where iTunes failed they would have kept a decent sized user base. So to answer your question, no I don't think Apple is stifling innovation on anyone's part like Microsoft. It's up to people their programs compete with to make a better product. iTunes may be free but it isn't the end all be all of MP3 players. There's still room for an iTunes killer.

Re:Pushing Down Developers

[thatguywhoiam]

In short, will Apple invading all of the different types of software areas discourage developers to the point that it is no better than Microsoft, if only in terms of their attempted monopoly over all aspects of our computing experience?

In short, no. I'll tell you why.

There are three major differences between Apple's bundling of the iApps and Microsoft's value-add (uh, Plus?) software.

1. Apple's apps don't suck. Flame if you will. iTunes in particular, you'd be hard-pressed to find someone who didn't think it's really the be-all of music interfaces. iCal has a huge following already, Mail kicks ass, iSync does what it says it does. iMovie practically kickstarted the real desktop moviemaking revolution, iDVD was an industry first. I have nasty things to say about iPhoto, but since the 2.0 rev is 4 days away I'll reserve judgement.

2. Apple apps are uninstallable. This point is often lost on the Windows crowd. "Apple bundles a browser too! It's anticompetitive!" Microsoft tells you that IE is literally crazy-glued to their OS, as is WMP and others. Any Apple iApp is a single icon, that is tossable, without a fuss, without that wacky Install/Remove Programs nonsense.

3. Apple only extends itself where it feels it is needed. I could probably take some crap over that statement, but it seems to be true. The browser situation was sucking until Chimera came along, and Apple hired that guy. The iApps serve as proof-of-concept OS X apps, as well as fulfilling the 'what software?' problem of a new OS. Also, Apple is happy to point users in the direction of more powerful, flexible, paid applications if asked (i.e. Audion).

Besides, I think most people would agree that there are certain activities that a computer ought to do 'out of the box' that are more complex than users would have demanded in the past. CD burning, for example. Does including CD/DVD burning capabilities in iTunes and the Finder hurt Roxio's Toast? Probably not, Toast is more powerful.

Open Source to the Rescue

[phpsocialclub]

I do not see what the big deal is.
It is unfortunate that the developers are feeling the pressure of apples new browser, but as long as the source code the Chimera remains available it can still be developed and improved.
I use Chimera every day as my primary browser and download the daily builds every day.
Safari is nice, but there is still a place for Chimera.
New developers will step forward, I would if I had the time and/or skills, to keep this project moving forward.
Projects change hands all of the time,

Chimera will live on

I like Chimera

[Outland Traveller]

I like Chimera a lot. It's near perfect for my usage, and I prefer it over Safari. My only suggustion is to add "close tab" buttons on each of the tabs, like galeon does under Linux. I miss these immensely for the easy, one-step ability to close tabs that *aren't* currently active.

Thanks for the all the open source browser beasts :)
-OT

On the other hand...

[Anonymous Coward]

Tabs organize 5-7 windows very well with minimal mouse movement and single-clicking.

Maybe you like to browse the web 1 page at a time, but when I'm searching for something in a site it'll take me 5 times longer without tabs. It'll take 2-3 clicks or a click&drag (worse) to switch windows and then switch back, leaving a total of 6 clicks or 2 click&drags (probably would take me 5 seconds I guess.. find the menu, click, find the window title, click... repeat). With tabs, I see the title and click once and I'm there. My mouse is normally at the top of the page since most links are around there and that's where I tend to read. No moving my mouse to the absolute top or absolute bottom.

Just because you don't like them doesn't mean they're not good. I've never met someone who doesn't like tabs and most of the people I show this to are computer proficient but no where near the /. crowd.

Moving back and forth between two tabbed windows is just as easy as moving between two windows, so I don't see how you're possibly complaining about that.

Re:On the other hand...

[Twirlip of the Mists]

None of these is sufficient, but all of them together are.

1. Complexity. Tabbed browsing/MDI would add a set of features that most people wouldn't use, but the facilities for using it would still be sitting there in menu bars and such, making the application more complex for new users to learn.

2. Inconsistency. For a third-party to release a Mac application that works in a way that is fundamentally different from the way other Mac applications is frowned upon. For Apple to do it is completely unacceptable.

3. As I've already explained at length, and won't bother reiterating here, the tabbed browsing feature in Mozilla is shamefully incomplete and underimplemented. Apple would have to go back to the drawing board to produce a tabbed browsing interface paradigm that isn't fundamentally broken, as Mozilla's is.

4. Redundancy. Adding tabbed browsing, Mozilla-style, to Safari would necessarily involve having to reproduce most of the functions of WindowServer in Safari itself. There's no justification for reimplementing WindowServer's functionality unless the new way is better, and I've already explained how tabbed browsing is most definitely not.

5. Disproportionate effort. Safari is targeted, first, at the 5 million existing Mac OS X users, followed very shortly by the 20 million Mac OS 9 users that Apple hopes will make the transition this year. Of those 25 million prospective users, I think it's fair to say that maybe 100,000 of them would use tabs. Maybe. (Consider the ratio of IE users to Netscape users. IE does not have tabs. Netscape has tabs, and is freely available to anybody who wants it. Most people, though, don't bother downloading it. The obvious conclusion is that tabbed browsing alone is not a big deal to most people.) So when you consider that maybe a fraction of one percent of all Mac users might use tabbed browsing, it just doesn't seem worth it.

6. Finally, opportunity cost. Time spent implementing tabbed browsing/MDI is time that could have been spent fixing bugs, or adding features that everybody would use. Maybe even features that none of us have ever thought of yet. Consider SnapBack. I had never even thought of such a feature before I saw Safari, and now I use it every single day. To have tabbed browsing-- which, as I've already explained, only a tiny fraction of Mac users would even use-- you implicitly have to give up something else. And based on items 1-5, I'm simply unable to support making that trade-off.

Ultimately, UI is crucial differentiator

[macmurph]

I originally posted the following comment in response to a linux journal article about Apple's Safari. I feel the comment also applies to this discussion:
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.p hp?sid=6565&m ode=thread&order=0&thold=0

In summary, there are many good rendering engines but very few great user interfaces, and in the end, UI is the crucial differentiator b/w browsers.

In response to the whole rendering engine discussion I see here... IMHO Rendering engine/render speed is not everything... Of course, IE for the Mac is dog slow (its carbon, not naitive cocoa code)...and Apple was *forced* to create an alternative or fall behind. The IE for the Mac team was disintegrated long ago to make Web TV, Ultimate TV (a cancelled MS project),etc.

But for most people, more important than rendering speed is an efficient, productive UI (because rendering speed problems have largely been solved in todays best browsers).

Because the web has become so central to computing...UI is more important than ever in browsers. Safari beta (so far) offers a very nice bookmark manager but lacks tabbed browsing (or something like it).

For now, I like Chimera for OS X because it has tabbed browsing and lightning fast rendering performance. On a dial up connection, a user can open pages in new tabs and queue the downloads. This is a very very efficient method of browsing that Safari so far, have chosen to ignore. Tabbed browsing in Chimera is faster and more efficient than IE 6 for Windows. I use a technique whereby each new chimera window contains catagorys of tabs... ebay auction tabs in one window, news tabs in another window, stock data tabs in a third window. By managing topics of tabs by window I never find myself hunting for the correct tab (In IE for windows, I would find myself hunting for the right tab along the Start bar. With too many windows open the start bar becomes cluttered and useless as an interface.)

Chimera (Gecko based) is faster than Safari in my own independent testing...particularly at downloading and rendering JPEGs. When it comes to rendering raw HTML I can't tell the difference between Chimera and Safari but toss in a few jpegs and chimera wins. I imagine this is only noticeable on dial up connections.

I expect Safari will surpass Chimera and therefore all other browsers in UI and performance at some point in the near future because apple is so damn good at what they do.

PS. I should probably add that I think Chimera is the still the best browser and Apple's Safari is not yet very usable. I would hate to see the Chimera team give up so soon. I think Chimera has a lot to offer...especially because it uses a different rendering engine (great for checking standards compliance, etc). So keep up the good work Chimera! I want to see version .7 badly!

Well....

[Anonymous Coward]

I think what has killed Chimera as far as Pinkerton is concerned is that fact he had pretty much hit a brick wall development wise. The major issues people were complaining about were slow text box entry and the fact that font rendering was not 100% quartz native. Sadly fixing these problems would be far from trivial, and in the end I guess he devided it was not worth the effort.

Because Safari uses KHTML and because of the OS X QT port, it has 100% native quartz rendering form the get go, and access to services and other goodies.

Chimera, as the name suggests was never really anything more than a kludge, gecko would have to be substatially reworked to perform optimally on OS X, and with Safari taking all the attention, it would be a lot of work for little or no recognition.

Chimera will slowly putrify, and before long will be totally forgotten. Very sad to see it happen, but the work needed was beyond the capability of the developers involved, that's not an insult, that's just gecko.

Re:Safari musing/Tab pontification

[thatguywhoiam]

Twirlip. My man.

Here, I thought I was all alone on the tabs thing. I was going to keep my big mouth shut (er, fingers tied?) about it but you've graciously stuck your neck out - on Slashdot no less.

The problem with Tabs, is as you said, there's not really a problem to begin with. Browser window-switching accomplishes the same thing, with unlimited constraints, and equal-or-less number of keystrokes/mouseclicks. So why do people live and die by tabs?

I think it comes down to a few weird little reasons... like, you can see how many tabs you have open at a glance. That's sorta nice. The instant-load thing, that's nice. But you know what it mostly is? (imho?)

You don't have to re-size or move your new window.

Seriously. Most browsers just don't know how to open a new window, because you can't tell it. Even clever browsers like OmniWeb that allow you to 'save' a window position are still going to cascade the windows, down-and-right, so you can grab the last toolbar. Then you have overlap after 5-6 windows and things get buried (the limit on tabs too).

Really, it comes down to people not wanting to Mess With Their Windows. I'm happy messing with my windows. It would be interesting to know the ratio of tab-browsing freaks to those who run the browser full-screen, no?

Re: Tabbed Browsing's "faults"

[Twirlip of the Mists]

The series of images can then be looked at sequentially, and when you're done, you're back at your starting location.

Just like windows, huh? Or like using the SnapBack feature, for that matter.

Tabs are random access; windows are serial access.

Cycling through windows is not the only way of dealing with them. There's also the window menu-- all the advantages of labeled tabs without the truncation problem-- and the dock menu. You can also minimize windows to the dock directly and manage them that way. I would like to see a "minimize others" feature added to Application Kit, similar to the "hide others" feature.

Just because YOU don't have a certain problem doesn't mean others do not.

Sure, Windows has a huge window management problem: the task bar. XP improved the situation quite a bit, but it's still not perfect. And because most of your UI's for UNIX include a task bar, they share Windows's problems. But the Mac simply does not have the window management problems that tabbed browsing was implemented to solve.

even in Safari, opening a new window is slower and more resource intensive, as well as more distracting, than opening a new tab.

That's not really true at all. Opening a new window in Safari requires just barely more allocation than opening a new tab or tab-like structure would. You have to allocate and initialize the view and then render the contents in either case; opening a new window merely requires a some drawing to the screen, which on all modern Macs is offloaded entirely to the graphics hardware. So the trade-off of speed for functionality is just not necessary. We're back to that "a problem we don't have" thing again.

but please, whatever other arguments you may make about the abstract shortcomings of tabbed browsing, please try to remember that millions of people find them a useful method of organizing their webpages.

I absolutely do not believe you. I think if you took everybody who has ever even heard of tabbed browsing and put them in the Rose Bowl, you'd have room left over for a medium-sized football game. You've got to remember that there are 5 million OS X users today, and that the number is increasing very quickly. So the fraction of OS X users who would benefit from Chimera-style tabs is tiny.

Apple has the choice of not implementing MDI in Safari at all; implementing it badly, a la Mozilla; or implementing it well. Given that a bad implementation would be worse than none at all, and that a good implementation would require a great deal of effort for miniscule gains, the only reasonable course of action is to avoid implementing MDI in Safari at all. The time and effort to do so would be better spent on other things.

Those who absolutely must have MDI in their browsers are free to use Chimera, or to use WebKit (when released) to roll their own WebCore-based one.

Re:Safari musing/Tab pontification

[SoupIsGoodFood_42]

I think it comes down to a few weird little reasons... like, you can see how many tabs you have open at a glance. That's sorta nice. The instant-load thing, that's nice. But you know what it mostly is? (imho?)...

Those "little" reasons are are major reasons, they're basic GUI issues. Tabs are better than windows because all the tabs can be seen at once, and the user can see exactly what they want, and reach for it with a single click.
Cycling through each window, to see if it's the right one is a pain. If you fuck-up, you have to go though the entire cycle again! You cold always take it slowly, but that's even more of a pain.

...You don't have to re-size or move your new window

Yes, the user should not have to mess about with windows all the time, they should be using the app. When you find you self messing around with windows all the time, there is somethign wrong with the GUI. This is one of thing that I prefer on Win than Mac. All my apps open maximised, I never have to muck about with them untill I need to to some out of the ordinary.

...tab-browsing freaks to those who run the browser full-screen

What's so freaking about wanting to use all of you're screen space? Unless yoy need to view 2 windows at once, why waste space. What's freaking is people who have a 1600x1200 screen and have their windows so small that they have to scroll all the time.
Of course, if you mean full-screen as in the feature found on a few Win browsers which hides most of the GUI, then that is a bit freaky.

Re: Tabbed Browsing's "faults"

[Twirlip of the Mists]

Take a look at amazon.com or google.com or any other site that has been designed around users, most of them have tabs, because of the advantages they offer over things like menus. (menus are generally used for commands, not for navigation).

The purpose of a tabbed interface is to reduce complexity. With a tabbed interface, you can take a set of controls that are logically or functionally related and present them to the user all at once, but separately from other sets of controls to which they are not related. For example, consider the Network pref pane. On my computer, I see four tabs: TCP/IP, AppleTalk, Proxies, AirPort. (Yours will differ depending on whether you're using an AirPort interface or a wired interface or a VPN interface or what.) When I click the TCP/IP tab, I see controls related to TCP/IP settings: IP address, gateway, and so on. When I click the AppleTalk tab, I see controls related to AppleTalk.

I do not, however, have a tab called "Display" on which I see screen resolution setting controls. That tab is on a completely separate pref pane, the Displays pref pane. It would make no sense to put the Display tab on the Network pref pane.

So what's my point? That tabs are an organizational feature, not a navigational feature. When you go to Amazon's web site and see something that vaguely resembles a row of tabs across the top, what you are seeing is essentially an organizational structure. Clicking on the "Books" tab (assuming there is such a thing; I don't feel like increasing Amazon's site traffic just to make a point) shows you content and controls related to books. Clicking the "Underwear" tab shows you content and controls related to underwear.

Using tabs in a tabbed browser, though, is different. In that context, you're trying to use tabs as a document management feature. Tabs don't work well for that purpose, as discussed at great length elsewhere.

So, in summary, tabs as an organizational feature are fine, whether in a program UI or a web page or a day planner. Tabs as a document/window management feature are not fine; they don't work, and even in the limited contexts in which they do, the existing features work better.

Even so, I also don't understand your logic behide; that if a lot of users have never head of tabs, than they would not benifit from them.

I assert that most Safari users would not use tabs if they were available. Why? Because we have been writing document-based applications for the Mac for nearly 20 years, and never once has the question of an MDI-style interface, tabbed or otherwise, come up. MDI was the standard on Windows for many years, until they deprecated it around the time of Windows 95. (I don't recall precisely when Microsoft's position shifted from MDI to mixed MDI/SDI to don't-use-MDI, but it happened around that time.) During that time, did users clamor for MDI on the Mac? No. Web browsers have been around for more than a decade now; tabbed browsing only appeared recently. And where did it appear? On Mozilla, where the limitations of new window spawning are well documented, and on Windows, where the task bar makes managing several windows a challenge.

Has there ever been a native Mac document-based application-- i.e., one designed on the Mac, not designed on Windows or UNIX and ported, as in Chimera-- that had any sort of MDI interface? I don't know. But I can say with confidence that no major application had one.

The gist of my argument is that MDI, and tabbed browsing which is a specific instance of MDI, have been around for a long time. The Mac has been around for even longer. During all that time, has MDI ever been an issue? No. Will adding tabs to Safari suddenly bring out a hitherto unrecognized need on the part of Mac users to use MDI? No.

So if Apple were to take the time to implement MDI (tabbed or otherwise) correctly, a very small, albeit vocal, fraction of their users would benefit from it. Meanwhile, bugs that should have been fixed in WebCore went unfixed because the programmers were working on MDI instead. Idiotic trade-off, that.

Most people I know have never hear of linux, does that mean linux is useless?

Dear Lord, why dost thee tempt me this way? ;-)

The REAL point of Safari...

[Cerebus]

...isn't the browser, it's WebCore and JavaScriptCore. The browser is a convenient testbed for both cores that has the happy side-effect of producing a useful app (and thousands of eyes to point out parse and render defects).

Personally, I think Apple as a corporation could care less whether Safari lives or dies. But either way, OS X gains WebCore and JavaScriptCore, which will prove to be indispensible frameworks in the future.

Chimera is not dead! Pinkerton says so!

[lml]

Quoting from Mike Pinkerton's weblog:

"It's all about motivations. Why did we even start Chimera in the first place? Because we wanted to make something that sucked less. Safari aside, it stands on its own as a solid product with a good UI that is pretty damn bug-free for an 0.6 release. It's easy to get sidetracked on the "woe is me, we lost again" tangent (especially if you've been at Netscape for 5+ years), but it's time to get back to why we're doing this at all: because it's fun. It's fun making a product that more than seven people use. I wish that was 7 million, but I guess we have to set our expectations appropriately. Chimera's not going anywhere, regardless of whatever I post on this blog. Will this get picked up on MacSlash? Unlikely. I guess the damage has already been done.

I'd like to correct many of the emails that commented that I was the only developer working on Chimera. I'm not by any stretch of the imagination. While our unofficial "team" is smaller than Safari's, we certainly have a lot of coverage from the open-source community."

Check it at http://mozpink .blogspot.com/2003_01_01_mozpink_archive.html#8770 4137

Not Dead

[moof1138]

From: pinkerton@netscape.com (Mike Pinkerton)
Date: Tue Jan 21, 2003 10:46:55 AM US/Central
To: CHimera
Subject: [Chimera] Sigh
Reply-To: chimera@mozdev.org

Let me put this to bed once and for all: I'm not stopping work on chimera.

Yes, I'm frustrated and sick of being kicked around by apple. That's why I muttered that i was "torn". I never said I was stopping work or that chimera was dying. I can't speak for Simon or bryner or any of the other members of the team, but they're not stopping either.

I appreciate the support and all the emails. We're making a damn good product here, and we're doing it because we want to, win, lose, or draw.

--
Mike Pinkerton
Mac Browser Weenie
pinkerton@netscape.com http://people.netscape.com/pinkerton

_______________________________________________
Chimera mailing list
Chimera@mozdev.org
http://www.mozdev.org/ma ilman/listinfo/chimera

Do I have this straight?

[Aram Fingal]

If I understand the situation correctly, Chimera is a port of Mozilla from UNIX code base with a GUI written in Cocoa while the Mozilla that is called "Mozilla" on OS X is a Carbon port of the legacy Mac OS code for Mozilla. A Carbon Mozilla makes sense if you need to support both classic Mac OS and Mac OS X with uniform behavior as the priority.

Eventually, however, won't it be more important to use technologies like the UNIX base and Cocoa which make better use of OS X's abilities than Carbon does? Chimera may be marginal now but it's the method that makes more sense for the future.

Re:Safari musing/Tab pontification

[Yagotta B. Kidding]

I, for one agree with you on the tabs issue. Snapback just seems a better way of handling this problem of multiple windowing, you get one window, can set any point to jump back to instantly and away you go without worrying about keeping track of what tab is what, especially when you can't reorder them and you have so many that the tab titles are comperssed to "Goo.."; "Th..."; "Form.." etc.

Snapback made sense after less than five minutes - a total boon for goole searching and gave me that dawning "ahhh.. so this is how it should be done" feeling that is all too rare in modern computer UI design (outside of the Mac world that is ;)