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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..."
I think the best part about this article is that it's even being written -- that a browser war actually exists after so many years of an IE-only field (since Netscape 4 sucked so bad). Yes, IE still dominates, but at least we now have very good options besides IE. Thanks to all the Mozilla, KHTML and other developers for their hard work and giving the browser consumers a choice again.
I have to agree with the author, Camino would be my choice if it didn't crash so often. It's speedy, and has a Mac like interface. It does have problems with rendering some sites correctly, but for the most part works well.
I too am on the Safari bandwagon. It's almost as fast as Camino, and crashes far less often.
I am particularly interested to hear how Firebird is coming along. It seems to me that Camino and Firebird should be merged together (they do use the same engine, right?) for the "good of the community". Fast, beautiful, standards compliant, and stable? A dream come true!
There are two kinds of people in the world: those with loaded guns, and those who dig.
The difference between browsers on the mac today, and a year or two ago is like night and day. And I have to credit alot of this to the widespread adoption of open source rendering engines. KHTML and Geko have really saved the day for non-windows browsers everywhere.
"The worst tyrannies were the ones where a governance required its own logic on every embedded node." - Vernor Vinge
Ever felt like programing your own web browser, but don't feel like writing the code? Well, now you don't have to!
With Cocoa and Webkit, you can make a fully functional web browser without writing a single line of code. Check out the codeless browser From the same wonderful apple engineers who brought you the 13 line text editor.
I'm hoping this kind of ease of creation will lower the bar to making your own browser, and encourage independant programers to innovate in the interface department 'since they don't have to worry about rendering unless they want to.
There are allready some cool applications using webkit, like the live preview window in SubEthaEdit (the amazingly cool text editor formerly known as Hydra), or the japanese NagaraBrowser a webbrowser that can replace your desktop picture.
"The worst tyrannies were the ones where a governance required its own logic on every embedded node." - Vernor Vinge
The sucesses of Mozilla and Safari on the Mac show that there's a huge window of opportunity on Windows to start booting out IE. Microsoft won't be upgrading IE until there's a new operating system. However, there are tons of features in browsers like Mozilla that everyday users would love. I've been turning web developers in my company onto Mozilla. I suppose the question is, how do you market something that's free?
I don't use iCab anymore (it used to be my default browser in OS 9) but I still remember fondly its unique feature, the built-in HTML checker: the little face in the upper right of the window that would turn green and smile if the rendered HTML was valid, and red and frowning if the HTML was not valid. Great for checking and validating your own pages in one go. Also, it was sad to see (while browsing) that so few pages were standards-compliant. Almost none, actually.
JP
Am alone in this, or would others also like to see Safari implement better control over image loading? As a rule, I do NOT want all images to load on a page, as I am still using dialup from home, and graphics-rich pages take forever to load. IE allows me to load individual images as necessary (contextual menu or double-click the 'missing' icon), to load them all as a menu choice, or by a widget in the toolbar.
Safari, on the other hand, can either load all inages, or load NO images, and the setting is buried in the preferences, so it is not convenient to change often. To then load images requires reloading the entire page.
Also, I think that IE has done things correctly in regards to managing history. I like how it stores visited sites chronologically. On more than one occasion this has been a tremendous help when I was trying to recall something I had seen. I was able to find it by searching through the history for the approximate timespan.
Does anyone else think that these are useful and/or necessary features? Or am I just a crank? (For the sake of this particular discussion, read 'or' as 'xor'.)
Theory and practice are the same in theory, but different in practice.
One problem with changing the user-agent string is that I am afraid that people will change that permanently and never look back.
It is good to change on a site-by-site basis if the person is having a problem (only after emailing webmaster@, obviously...).
The problem is that some sites track user-agent strings to determine what their users are using. If Safari users start declaring themselves to be one of the big two (IE or a Mozilla-based), then the companies keep writing just to those two browsers, meaning using Safari with the user-agent string might perpetuate companies writing only for the big two.
On the article: I was disappointed that the author did not touch on the level of control offered by iCab. The rendering engine might suck, but iCab offers more control over your browsing experinece than anything else. It is not even close.
I keep bringing this point up whenever an OS X browser article comes up, but so far no author has really come up with a decent way of doing it in another browser.
[I use Safari+PithHelmet currently, but I paid my $29 to iCab]
- (c) 2018 Hank Zimmerman