Chimera, the Gecko-based browser for OSX, reached version 0.5. Read its release notes.
Chimera 0.5 Released
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Another step forward! It gets better and better!
Hello everyone, I’d like to present to you a fascinating new technology I call TrollVision. This allows you to read stories through the eyes of a troll. Just look at the way TrollVision radically alters the text of this story:
Chimera, the blatent OmniWeb rip off which is wholely inferior to the browser it pathetically tries to copy, reached version 0.5. Read the latest list of features it stole from OmniWeb in its release notes.
Blind open source zealots everywhere rejoyce as they use their featureless crappy browser and celebrate each and every time it crashes, because hey, at least they can claim it has better standards compliance than OmniWeb!
Mozilla (that Chimera is based) is far more featured and compliant with OmniWeb.
I do not know if you are talking about the GUI of Chimera being similar to Omni. Maybe.
But the capabilities of the actual browser of Chimera, is worlds away better than Omniweb.
On another note, both Omni and Chimera are EXTREMELY slow on resizing and scrolling. Mozilla is better on this respect.
>On another note, both Omni and Chimera are EXTREMELY slow on
>resizing and scrolling. Mozilla is better on this respect.
You’ve got to be kidding. IE for Mac is 10x slower than either of those at resizing windows. Chimera used to be slow at these, but version 0.5 is significantly better. OmniWeb, though, flies at both of these tasks compared to any other browser for Mac OS X. I can’t believe you claim that Mozilla is faster – in my experience it’s horrible on Mac OS X (though great on every other platform I’ve tried). I would use OmniWeb exclusively if they got their rendering engine up to speed.
>Chimera used to be slow at these, but version 0.5 is significantly better.
It is not the case for me. I have QE enabled btw.
IE resizes “faster” than both Chimera or Omniweb here. Not that it’s fast though. Just “faster.
Mozilla is the fastest of all though.
Scrolling is even worse.
Is anyone else having problems getting the new chimera to work in the dock? It doesn’t load for me when I try to run it from the dock. Never had any problems with chimera 0.4.
I have a DP 1Ghz box, with the default gfx card shipped, and 1 GB of ram. I use both IE, Chimera, Mozilla, Omniweb etc. (Yes, I am a webdeveloper
). None can be claimed to fly, if you by that definition mean “something going fast”. I have never seen anything fly when I resize or scroll at least…
If you just mean “something going forward”, then I am willing to accept that resize posting above. Not else. All browsers are equally bad at this IMO.
When speaking of this, I have a hard time understanding why Apple sticks to live resizing when the performance is so DOG slow. At least we should have the opportunity to turn it off somewhere.
>None can be claimed to fly, if you by that definition
>mean “something going fast”. I have never seen anything >fly when I resize or scroll at least…
I meant that it was a lot faster than the other web browsers at resizing, which it is. I get around 1-2 fps when resizing with IE. I have an 800 MHz Powerbook G4 and 1 gig of ram, btw. No other application I’ve seen has this abysmal performance problem when resizing.
As for scrolling, I never really had a problem with scolling speed in OS X, except for the previous releases of Chimera. OmniWeb definitely does not have scrolling problems on my computer, and it’s faster than IE. Scrolling is definitely faster with QE enabled, though. Why would you want it to scroll any faster? It’s not like you can read it as it goes by at that speed — it makes more sense to type in the first letter of what you’re looking for in the directory anyway.
Well, Nonamer. I would certainly like scrolling to be more like under Windows 2k with apps like Opera. And no, I dont need it to scroll faster, but smoother. When you scroll in the browsers now, the text “chops” by, not flows by like when you use Opera/IE on windows.
One very nice feature on Windows (at least in Opera) is to start a sloooow scroll when reading a long article. I like that. Its amazing even how fast you can scroll and STILL be able to hold track of where you are when the scrolling is smooth.
Well, Nonamer. I would certainly like scrolling to be more like under Windows 2k with apps like Opera. And no, I dont need it to scroll faster, but smoother. When you scroll in the browsers now, the text “chops” by, not flows by like when you use Opera/IE on windows.
Well, I’ll definately say this, XP sucks in this department. The chopping is visible, noticible, and highly annoying. This is on a 2.0GHz Pentium IV system, with a GeForce4 MX and the Nvidia 30.82 drivers. (the latest available WHQL certified drivers, see http://www.nvidia.com/view.asp?IO=winxp-2k_30.82) For some reason this sort of thing isn’t an issue under 2K with similar hardware.
http://fails.org/xp/xp3.gif
Try dragging it off the Dock and dragging the new one into it. You might still have the old version in your dock.
I’m not sure what the problem was, but I tried dragging it back onto the dock after a few hours of not messing with it, and (surprise) it works fine now. Thanks.
“Hello everyone, I’d like to present to you a fascinating new technology I call TrollVision”
“Blind open source zealots everywhere rejoyce as they use their featureless crappy browser and celebrate each and every time it crashes”
Pot meet kettle, now go back to your Bill Gates shrine and worship your copy of windows.
KaythxByeBye Troll
Well, I’ll definately say this, XP sucks in this department. The chopping is visible, noticible, and highly annoying.
I totally agree. XP the operating system isn’t the only problem either. Word XP (or whatever they call it) can’t seem to draw the screen correctly when you have even the smallest graphic embedded in the page. The only way to view the graphics is to maximize or restore the windows. If have had this problem with it running under Windows 2000 as well. Prior versions of Word only had problems if the graphics were larger than would fit on the screen.
Yeah Microsoft!
If have had this problem with it
I mean I have had (stupid f).
It seems that your gfx driver is really buggy, or there is something else that makes ALL the Windows apps having that terrible non-updating effect on your machine. I would try another gfx card (non-nvidia) just for a test…
Word XP (or whatever they call it) can’t seem to draw the screen correctly when you have even the smallest graphic embedded in the page.
If you meant that graphics with transperant backgounrd, whose backgrounds isn’t the same as the background of the page, Microsoft did this on purpose. It is for use to differiciate between graphics and WordArtc, Shapes, etc.
On Windows XP’s choppy scrolling, yeah it is annoying for me. I wonder what happen at Microsoft? Apple paid them to do this? Note, I never got this problem since SP1.
Try re-sizing iCal if you wanna see something much more painfull
On a related note…
Anyone have ideas as to why Mac OS X is so slow/choppy at scrolling the contents of a window (in ANY app) ?
The situation improved slightly with 10.2, it’s still painfully slow though.
With the fancy and smooth genie/scale minimizing effects the windowing system does, it seems scrolling should be much faster.
I’ve learned to live without smooth-scrolling, i’d just like to know why os x can’t keep up.
> I’ve learned to live without smooth-scrolling, i’d just like to know why os x can’t keep up.
It might be because it is based on PDF… I really can’t think of any other real reason scrolling and resizing would have to be so slow as they are still today…
I’ve downloaded 0.5, and it doesn’t crash as much as the previous versions(actually it hasn’t crashed yet). I think OmniWeb was more stable overall(although Chimera may have just caught up), but Chimera has a far superior rendering engine, so I use it. I’ve used Mozilla and Netscape, but they just seem sluggish, and they don’t fit in well, although my copy Netscape 7 with the classic theme almost makes it feel like a real OS X app. For some reason Opera isn’t the fast, stable browser it is on other platforms. Then there’s IE:mac with is even worse than its Window counter part, it was even less stable than Chimera 0.3 and 0.4.
Didn’t nextstep/openstep use a similar windowing system based on post script ? I’d be curious to see how they handle things.
I also can’t figure out why apple wouldn’t consider fixing this issue more of a priority. My athlon is currently non-functional, so this extra-chunky window scrolling on my mac is _really_ pissing me off. I’m about ready to sell it, or install OS9 over 10.2.
I use both OmniWeb and Chimera…I hadn’t thought of Chimera as ripping off OmniWeb.
OmniWeb has come along, but still has kind of a long way to go. From the beginning, it rendered sites beautifully (those that it could render <g>), but was terribly slow (and the early versions of OS X were really slow anyway). They have done a good job of speeding thing up. Chimera, of course, has a long way to go, but it’s going to surpass OmniWeb if this rate of improvement continues.
NeXT used Display Postscript I believe. Not sure what the speed was like being I never used a NeXT machine before. I heard there were some licensing issues with Adobe for it so they created Quartz, for MacOS X. Which is based on more current versions of PDF. As far as the overhead of the resizing we all would like to know that one. No one has ever given a true answer to that one. One more Mystery in Apple HQ there.