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Mac OS X: State Of The Browsers
NetCurl writes "Ars Technica is running a Macintosh Browser Smackdown feature. We've come a long way in the OS X browser experience, and the article delves into the details like only Ars can. This is a great breakdown of nine browsers in all. Let the browser war reignite..."
One great point about iCab that I love is the potential for Ad blocking. The filter is easy to screw up but once you learn how to use it. It's great.
This is an incomplete browser but I use it for pages I know it works on because of the ad blocking.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
And it's a good thing those options exist since IE is no longer going to be developed.
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
Signing up for classes at uncc.edu my browser (Safari) was halted by a message saying that browserX was not accpeted and that I should try again with IE 5 for mac or Netscape 4.7. being that this is a brand new (as of this summer) site I felt it was early enough that my cries might be heard. So i dropped a letter catching the computing staff up on Apple browsers.
1st point - IE for mac is dead. dont tell me my only choice is to use a dead browser
2nd point - Netscape for mac is dead. dont tell me my only other choice is a dead browser.
After clearing this up I mentioned that Safari is now the default browser for Apple computers, that it works flawlessly with both my banks, and that if you want to include netscape in the list stick with Mozilla. If any browser besides Safari survives on the Apple platform it will be Mozilla based (sorry OmniWeb, I pray the switch to WebKit keeps you guys going).
And ill be damned they actually wrote me back, asked a few questions, and updated the site.
---- The real Slashdot is still here. You just have to browse at -1 to read the comments.
There's also been an immense amount of improvements to Camino since 0.7--if you download one of the nightlies you'll see big speed improvements and stability. The nightlies are building on Moz 1.4, as opposed to 1.0 for the 0.7 release. Makes a big difference.
Sigh.
There is nothing to "merge" between Firebird and Camino--both are built off the same code base, but one has a Cocoa-native wrapper (Camino) and the other uses XUL (Firebird).
Camino rocks--try one of the nightlies since 0.7 if you want to see a big improvement.
Installing the pinstripe theme would make the reviewer's opinion of Mozilla/Netscape better, I think. It gives the browser an aqua look.
It is available at:
http://kmgerich.com/pinstripe/pinstripe.html
The best feature of Moz 1.4, though, is type-ahead-find, or whatever they call it now. Just start typing to have the typed text highlighted and that part of the page jumped to. Great for pages you come to from a search engine.
<?php while ($self != "asleep") { $sheep_count++; } ?>
One thing that Ars Technica didn't mention is that MS does still have a browser for OS X. It just isn't available for free download - you have to subscribe to the MSN isp (I think) to get it.
According to this report MSN Explorer/Mac actually has the best support for CSS 3 selectors of any current browser. Too bad it's only available to paying customers.
Dillo in particular is amazingly fast basic browser that supports graphics unlike Lynx. Even Mozilla running under X11 is surprisingly fast. Must faster than any Aqua based browser I've used. (Mainly due to no AA and other such considerations)
I use Safari 99% of the time because I like all those Aqua frills and because I think its tab handling is the best on the market. But one shouldn't neglect the rest.
Firebird has a large number of "extensions" available, one of them being AdBlock. Right-click on an image, choose AdBlock, and you can add a filter for images (for instance http://ads.*.com/*). Flash Click to View is also handy; animations won't play unless you click on them.
s ions.html
Firebird extensions:
http://texturizer.net/firebird/exten
Yes, Safari should provide these features. In the mean time you should check out PithHelmet. PithHelmet provides just the kind of image filtering you are looking for, and is seamlessly integrated into Safari.
Lee Joramo
Safari cannot access https sites through a proxy server. This appears to be a major problem on the apple discussion boards.
Safari will be pre-installed with Panther...so...just wait.
The author forgot to mention that OS X does not support jdk 1.4.1 on any browser other than Safari, which is a bit annoying. Try it. If you use mozilla, you can only use applets that are 1.3.x compliant. The author's view is also biased towards only OS X users. I LIKE the fact that mozilla/firebird looks the same on every platform I use (I switch between XP, os X, NT, 2k, Linux depending on what I'm doing). So, the fact that mozilla looks 'ported' should be irrelevant to it's rating - not only that, one can change mozilla's themes, or create your own if you REALLY want to. Don't get me wrong, safari is good. The only REAL problem to me is that it's only on OS X ;-)
Excellent review. Glad to see an all the pros and cons of the browsers in one place. There's a couple of things that I would like to add. Although I like Safari, some basic stuff sometimes makes me want to toss it completely.
- SSL doesn't work through a proxy that needs authentication.
- Sometimes with web sites that require authentication and have lots of graphics, authentication boxes just keeps popping up - over each other. Like it expects you to enter your auth info for each and every graphic file. This is so crazy it makes me want to throw my iBook out the window sometimes.
- Integration with keychain is really very lame. I don't know why they have an option to remember authentication info, it just doesn't work.
And lastly if any (ex) Camino developers are listening, it's a great browser, and almost there. If you can just fix the occasional crashes it would be my default browser. Especially with 10 tabs open at a time you really can't afford to have a browser crashing. (btw Safari also has this problem about once a week...).
Well, Safari does have one advantage that no other Mac browser has. It has access to iSync's API which allows people to synchronize their Safari bookmarks across Macs. Hopefully Apple will make the iSync API public once it becomes more stable.
mbbac