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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..."
What!? No Lynx?! Lynx would of blown all the other browsers away in load speed!
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.
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
But it's not a war. No browser is trying to squeeze the others out of business. None is using dirty trick, sly marketing, or deliberate incompatibilities to gain market share. None is linked to other software - and most importantly, none is linked directly into the OS. Even Apple's own browser is merely a straight option from those available, with no special advantages. The browsers compete - inasmuch as they compete at all - on a completely level playing field, the only differences being that of cost and technical merit. These are great days.
Ceterum censeo subscriptionem esse delendam.
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.
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
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++; } ?>
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.
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.
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
On the other hand, if *everyone* in that 3% complains when a feature on the site doesn't work on anything except IE, suddenly their support inboxes are dominated by demands, and that 3% doesn't seem so small and ignorable anymore.
If you go to a website that doesn't work right in your browser, e-mail them (without being hostile) and explain to them your displeasure with the incompatibility and implore them to support web standards and non-IE browsers. Feel free to toss in a little "we don't desire a Microsoft-only Internet" rhetoric if you so wish, but keep it brief and understated. Even if you can get into the site by using a header spoof trick or whathaveyou, please still take the time to fire a quick email their way.
You can even have a "form" email that you keep saved just for such use, which is probably a good idea. Do have a place where you can specifically mention what part of the site doesn't work correctly (assuming it's not the whole site, a la BuyMusic).
It's important to start making noise now, and let the noise grow as the non-MS browsers gain more widespread use.
This isn't a case of "Microsoft == bad". This is a case of web developers needing to think beyond "Microsoft Browser on Microsoft Platform". IE will work with standards-compliant pages just fine.