My husband and I made it back from Europe just last night (after an adventurous trip back) so today I was finally having access to my G4 Cube in order to test Safari, the new Apple browser based on KHTML. I like what I saw on Safari. The browser is simple (I like simplicity) and indeed loads the web pages fast (even faster than Gecko browsers on my PC) by using some techniques on rendering the page almost immediately after receiving the data from the web. With Safari, MacOSX has now seven “native” graphical browsers. Read more and vote for your favorite OSX browser! Update: A relevant article is posted on News.com regarding the reasons Apple chose KHTML and not Gecko.I found a number of bugs (around 6-7; I filed bug reports) and missing features on Safari (tabbed browsing would be nice), but as I said, I liked what I saw in this second beta. It works, and it works pretty well for most of the users (resizing a semi-complex page is still an issue though – it’s slow). As it matures, I am sure it will become even better. But that’s just me… What is your favorite OSX browser?
Note: The poll is now closed. Thanks everyone for voting!
Is there any way to view the results without voting? I don’t own a Mac and don’t want to taint the results, but I’d like to at least see them…
I have been using Chimera for a while now and really like it.
Actually it’s my favorite browser on any platform.
For Linux I really like Phoenix too.
Adam P.
Thank you for your understanding Stug. Results can be seen here:
http://www.go2poll.com/cgi-bin/nph-pwrnet.pl?name=eugenia&id=11
Chimera is still the best brower on osx … but if safari only had tabs, i’d be there.
i rather like chimera… (my vote) the only things i really dislike is the fact it crashes a occasionaly.. not too much, but enough to irritate. i also really miss type ahead find, my other favorite mozilla feature.
i’m sure safari will pick up tabs quickly enough, i can’t imagine apple ignoring everyone on that (there have been too many pleas) Safari is nice and stable though, and it does not seem to suffer like chimera. i tend to use both atm, but i really do prefer chimera.
but what about favorite non-graphical browser? links? lynx? that oughta be the next poll
*j*
>but what about favorite non-graphical browser? links? lynx?
Definately w3m. And don’t forget that OSNews supports specifically all three text-based browsers when you load OSNews in them on this URL:
http://www.osnews.com/home.php
I was rather disapointed with Safari, and for the life of me I cannot imagine why they didn’t start with the superior Chimera and just develope from there! Safari is only faster on a cold start. Once the initial load, neither browser is really significantly faster, but Chimera is VASTLY superior in technology and features. Ad in the fact that Chimera is also still in beta, and could most likely be made even faster yet, and Safari has very little going for it.
No tabbed browsing? Disgusting. Perhaps the most obvious oversight. For a company that does so much right, I was quite suprised to see them get this wrong.
hhm… i’ve never heard of w3m. i don’t think its in fink. i’m gonna download this and try it out. thanks eugenia!
*j*
This browser really doesn’t get enough attention. It takes a few seconds longer to load than say Chimera or Safari but it renders pages wonderfully and has many great features that it more than makes up for the inital load difference.
You can dynamically search your history and bookmarks by keyword; fully customize the entire user interface; edit HTML and view it on the fly before you post changes to your webserver; not to mention its had pop-up blocking since before it was trendy.
You all should really give this browser a look. Just because its not one of the opensource communities pet projects doesn’t mean its not a great piece of software.
>i don’t think its in fink.
It actually is on Fink:
http://fink.sourceforge.net/pdb/package.php/w3m
Just use the exact above osnews link with Lynx, Links or W3M to get good page rendering on this site with these text browsers.
one of the reasons for using khtml was the fact that the code was so concise (sp?) – far simpler to maintain/improve, while still being a great base to start from.
this is good, as now gecko and khtml will have a significant number of full time coders.
eugina, i’m just curious to ask, you seem to like your cube and os x from what i’ve read, yet post a lot of bad reviews/benchmarks with little of the positives on the mac experience.
i don’t even own a mac, nor use one on a regular basis (unless you count windowshopping) – but here’s a recent one that has a different viewpoint http://www.visionengineer.com/tech/ibook_page1.shtml
Having in mind that it’s just beta is mind boggling. And the development cycle was sped up thanks to KHTML codebase. One thing is even more important, because it comes from Apple it will have much larger userbase than Chimera and on top that they put easiest possible bug filing feature.
Things I do like:
-Speed
-Open Source
-Progress bar (so cool)
-Snapback button
-Bookmark Management
Things I don’t like:
-No tabbed browsing
-Instead of standard compliancy they have chosen Konqui’s way, make it IE compliant
> you seem to like your cube and os x from what i’ve read, yet post a lot of bad reviews/benchmarks with little of the positives on the mac experience.
Not necessarily. I urge you to click the apple and X icons on OSNews and you will see that we have posted a zillion articles on them that are not “negative”. But not all articles will be prosperous, they can’t be (people are indifferent so they write different opinions on their articles we link). And this is not true just for Apple, but for all topics that we cover here on OSNews.
>but here’s a recent one that has a different viewpoint
Yes, I read it about 4 hours ago. Interesting read, but just a hardware review. When we report on hardware, we are mostly interesting on “platform” articles, not specific reviews of models. Articles that could show how strong or weak, good or bad, cheap or expensive a platform is.
w3m is really cool! thanks again eugenia.
just on a sidenote about safari. even though i rather like chimera, i’m going to be VERY happy if safari takes off. having another popular web browser in the fray will be a good thing overall, as it will (hopefully) keep standards afloat.
*j*
Chimera got my vote. My one big gripe with IE was that (if I remember correctly), the maximize button was not dock friendly, (ie, it sent the window down below/behind the dock). When I found out that Chimera could do this I was sold. Safari, imho doesn’t resize as well as Chimera does. It doesn’t use up the full width of the screen, many times leaving the website cluttered. This is especially an issue on a TiBook where there is so much screen width. I did find out that it is dock friendly and after you maximize it, dragging the window will not allow you to go below the dock. It still doesn’t behave as well as Chimera does.
Tabs are another thing I like about Chimera. I use them on my windows machine (in mozilla) and they are invaluable (I never have more than 3 browser windows open at a time, which clears things up). They are especially useful because I don’t much like the way that Safari (and possibly IIRC most of os x does new window placement (by putting them down and to the right of the old window so you can see both title bars). Its just a little thing, but its a pain to have to rearrange them, and tabs correct all that.
The major thing keeping me away from safari, is its CSS support. It (and I would assume all other kHTML browsers) has had trouble with css on one of the most important pages I have thrown at it (at least to me); my website (http://www.appendixa.com/ shameless plug). In every other browser that I have tested it on, (geko, ie (mac and pc), opera) the navigational element (grey box with text and links around it) is displayed with the exception of Safari. I just two days ago ran the css through the w3c validator and fixed a few things, but they were quite minor and should not make a difference (I have not been able to upload it because of server troubles). While I am not going to count it out yet (it still could be because of the invalid css syntax) I have heard reports from other people about Safari/kHTML’s less than optimal support of CSS.
On the bright side, things I like about safari:
small toolbar
snap back
address book integration
bookmark manager
brush metal (because it allows you to drag the window from places besides the title bar).
Keychain integration would be nice in safari as well (is it in there already?)
Please feel free to correct me on any of the facts I have stated here as there is a fair chance some of them may be wrong.
I like safari a ton. a lot lot better than chimera or any other. but it doesnt have tabs, so unfortunately chimera is still king for a little bit. i give it one month or so before safari gets tabs and fixes its small bugs
I forgot to mention one of the biggest features of Safari: Spelling Check in forms like this one
I am really impressed with Safari. I’m still ambivalent about the “brushed metal” look, but it looks really freaky all white and cocoa-y. As far as speed and whatnot, I have no complaints. I was never all that big on tabbed browsing either. I used to use Omniweb, (for some reason I could not get a stable version of Chimera… weird.) but it was too slow and couldn’t do a lot of security or Javascript. Safari handles just about everything right….
But I think the “easy to use” bookmark system is not easy. Maybe I’m just an idiot, but I missed the beginning of Steve’s keynote, so I downloaded Safari, and tried to figure out the bookmark system and just got lost. Even now, I don’t think it’s all that great. Lucky for me I don’t make new bookmarks all that often anymore.
Internet Explorer: Dog slow! ‘Nuff said. I have heard it is missing features, crash prone, and grinds to a halt when using more than one window at a time, but the speed turned me off fast enough to miss that.
Mozilla: A good port. It is Moz in all its huge bloated glory. My choice for OS X.
Chimera: Trying it every release but it still isn’t there yet. They need to work on stability and fix a few CPU usage bugs. Also I consider the lack of XUL to be a bad thing (no ChatZilla).
Safari: My second choice. It has lasted longer than any of the Chimera releases. It is still chugging along by Mozilla and is kind of fun to use.
Opera: Tried out the beta. Wasn’t too impressed. Never bothered with the real release.
OmniWeb: Fun to resize. Not good enough to be worth using full time, never mind pay for. I wish it was, though.
iCab: Never tried it. Having a built in validator sounds cool. Will probably give it a spin soon.
Other: Phoenix: ( http://www.kmgerich.com/misc.html ) Haven’t tried it on OS X yet, but it is my favorite browser when I’m stuck on Windows. These guys know a thing or two about what a browser should be.
I keep Chimera and Safari next to each other on my dock. I’m honestly using Safari much more, but there are plenty of pages that just work better in Chimera, especially multi-window sites that can take advantage of tabs. I’ve also found Chimera’s pop-up blocker to work more effectively. Cool thing is that both Gecko and WebCore are totally modular, so (in theory…) anyone should be able to use them in their own programs (Sherlock developers…take note! 8))
In fact, I think a really cool idea would be to make a web browser that allowed you switch back-ends on the fly (WebCore, Chimera/Gecko, OmniHMTL?). IIRC, there was some success to this method on QNX, although QNX used a client/server model for web browsing engines.
And as for text-based browsers, yes, w3m is (without a doubt) my favorite. Colors, SSL, Tables/Frames? I’ll take it!
I must say, my whole out-look on web browsing has improved in the past year or so. I had essentially given up on Mozilla for bloated-to-death, and rumors of an IE Linux port had me worried if there even would be any other browsers soon. Now, we’ve got choices galore, Konqueror came out of no where, Mozilla has been able to slim down and speed up, and (to my great suprise) 99% of web sites work on most browsers. Way to go, WWW.
I didn’t mean to use this as a story, just a different viewpoint for a change from a source not tied to one platform or the other.
The comment on the recent reviews is just from the articles recently (last few days or so).
I’d really like an article from someone such as yourself who uses a mac every day, the problems they have – the things that are easier/harder compared to other platforms from a non-typical mac user. There is plenty of material on light users (i.e. web, email, iapps only), and no end of photoshop benchmarks to fall asleep with.
I don’t know how long you’ve been using OS X, but experiences through each release would also make intesting reading.
I know that you’re taking it easy these days, but if you ever get bored it would definately be worth a look.
Thanks
BTW, what is the browser agent Safari is broadcasting to web servers? I surfed OSNews a lot with Safari today and such a string does not show at all on our logs.
>In fact, I think a really cool idea would be to make a web browser that allowed you >switch back-ends on the fly (WebCore, Chimera/Gecko, OmniHMTL?). IIRC, there >was some success to this method on QNX, although QNX used a client/server model >for web browsing engines.
Henry old boy, care to link me on this?
[12/Jan/2003:09:00:37 +0100] “GET / HTTP/1.0” 200 21254 “-” “M
ozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/51 (like Gecko) Safari/5
1”
Eugenia, Safari’s UA string is:
Netscape 5.0 Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/48 (like Gecko) Safari/48
IOW, it pretends to be Gecko, but has a unique ID if you choose to sniff for it. You can read why Apple chose to do it this way over at Dave Hyatt’s weblog (one of Safari’s developers) here:
http://www.mozillazine.org/weblogs/hyatt/2003_01_05_mozillian_archi…
I’ve been very impressed with Safari. Great UI — and shows great promise.
for a beta, its cool.
I wonder if not going with chimera had anything to do with AOL/time warner owning netscape ?
There is a great potentail in applescripting safari.
<http://www.apple.com/applescript/safari/>
The future is bright.
<http://www.apple.com/applescript/safari/>
You seem to be the victim of your own success. I started reading OSNews partially for its comprehensive coverage of every OS I have used, or know about (and quite a few I haven’t). The other big reason I read OSNews was for the inteligent comments of its readers/posters.
The quality of the former has stayed high (but don’t kill yourself over it, please), but the signal to noise ratio of comments has gone way down (and I’m contributing negativly with this off topic post).
As a long time Apple user I think the stories you post are fair. I read MacSlash regularly and see enough pro Apple stories each day, but OSNews seems to get the most interesting articles on Apple.
Thank you Eugenia.
In defiance against Eugenia’s order to try all browsers (I haven’t tried Safari, Opera 6 and iCab on OS X).
apple is putting developers on KHTML, so we can expect both safari and konq to get better! does the objc framework “WebCore” for web browsers work under GNUstep? it would be very cool if it did and GNUstep had a native browser now…
imho, the apple bug submit method makes it much less painless to submit a bug, which can only be a good thing. if users submit more bugs and the software makes sure the bugs are descriptive then it can only help developers.
unfortunately it requires 10.2, which i dont have… (it costs money and i am a PoorStudent(TM))
PS: the user-Agent string seems to be missing (not implemented) in the sources.
Actually, Safari is in beta too. The reason why Apple choosed KHTML over Gecko was time to market, and if they choosed Chimera, it would require a lot more hacking and hacking here and there to make it work.
As for technology, IMHO, KHTML and KJS are vastly superior to Gecko. And if they had more manpower behind it, as Gecko did, it would be above Gecko in every area. Not only is it fast, but also small.
One thing I hate about Chimera is the extremely slow start up time.
In the past year I have used the following:
Internet Explorer 5: Stable, slow, and Mordor$oft.
iCab: Fast and stable, but doesn’t handle CSS well at all. Since I’m editorial staff on a CSS rich rebsite, iCab was useless.
Netscape: I downloaded 2 different versions of this, and both claimed to be for OS X, but everytime I clicked on the icon after install, classic would start launching. I don’t do classic. If you can’t be bothered to carbonize or cocoa your software, I can’t be bothered to use it. Bye-Bye.
Chimera: Never tried.
Omni Web: Fast and stable, but did not play well with delphi forums, and CSS support was iffy.
Opera 5: Somewhat crashy, slow to load pages.
Opera 6: Has many of the virtues of Opera 6 for windows. Stable and speedy, but I really miss the “open popups in the taskbar” feature that the windows version has. And the bookmark management features are a PITA to use. However, it’s really easy to set up preferences. This *was* my preferred browser.
Safari: It’s close, but it beats Opera 6. It’s very fast, very stable, and I *love* the bookmark management tools. I wish it had all the powerful preference options of Opera, though. Also, the brushed metal look is … kinda bland. Even in beta is this is a very stable browser.
Chimera used to be my favorite browser hands down, but now with Safari, I’m torn between the two. The only real thing that keeps Chimera in the race is tabbed browsing(and maybe it’s non metal inteface, but I have fixed that in Safari)
Mordor$oft makes Internet Explorer? I always thought it was Microsoft… (Please, don’t refrain from a product *just* because Microsoft has their hands behind it. Not using it won’t change anything in the market, and you are the one that stands to loose…)
Like all of you I’ve beenexited by Safari, a new web browser taht will not be Microsoft barnded and that could get quickly up to 3% of the web market. This is good because apple is marketing Safari has a stanadrd compliant web browser – meaning site designers now have two browser’s market that way, they’ll be pushed to support standards.
Apple did a great job with khtml and Kjs, the kde developers have started to backport Apple’s change in their source code (the cvs is moving fast on that Front).
I prefer Chimera for the following reasons :
* Its supports more standard then Khtml.
* The code base of chimera is based on Mozilla 1.0 which has evoled over the time and if speed is what make you choose Safari then think that, one day Chimera will move from version 1.0 to 1.3 (and their is clues of speed improvment up to 15 %).
* Tabbed browsing – will imho not be implemented in safari because safari is beta (which means feature freeze), adn if you read david hyatt’s weblog you’ll understand that.
The web will be changing in 2003, since the introduction of Mozilla in 2003, my favorite site ( http://www.ubix.org ) has seen IE dropping and mozilla eating up web shares. In 2002 : Mozilla 1.0 web starts to be less IE only. 2003 : Safari even less IE. 2004 : most sites will be standard compliant , thank to the two browsers and the mozilla project and it’s Tech Evangelism bugs.
Ludo
—
http://homepage.mac.com/softkid
Eugenia could you create/make a graphics of the browser usage over the year 2002, on OS news ?
—
http://homepage.mac.com/softkid
Even though i am a big Mozilla fan, and have been using Chimera ever since getting this Mac, I might give Safari a real swing if they add tabs…
I was rather disapointed with Safari, and for the life of me I cannot imagine why they didn’t start with the superior Chimera and just develope from there!
Maybe because they decided that one chimera on a platform is enough and they should do something new?
To me it seems Apple wanted to make a fast, lean browser to give their platform a decent and impressive default option. They might have used GECKO but KHTML is smaller and a 3MB download is an impressively small size. Building on Chimera doesn’t make Apple look very innovative. If Safari does well they may well build it on Gecko in the future, if it has been made well it will be easy to swap out the rendering engine. Users may even have a choice.
Also bear in mind it is beta, maybe tabs will be availiable by v1.0. Also I’d be interested to see this poll again 3 months after official v1.0 release.
Is being held at mozillazine, the results can bee viewed here :
http://www.mozillazine.org/poll_results.html?id=2820
—
http://www.zob.org
There are some reports on Apple forums regarding a nasty bug (actually, a “potential bug”) with Safari download system, where it might lead to COMPLETE data loss (‘rm -Rf /Users/’, if you know what I mean)
I don’t have the link at hand, but will post it when I find it. I’d rather wait for it to go out of beta
They have posted an updated beta, but *of course* they don’t mention the bug nor if it’s fixed…
“by using some techniques on rendering the page almost immediately after receiving the data from the web”
So Safari does the same sneaky trick that IE does? (http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/01/05/2025254&mode=thread&tid…)…Not so good, Apple…
This is when you print and was present in the first beta /48. Latest beta is /51 and should have fixed this one.
Not to be picky, but I’d like an option for “they all suck pretty hard, and things don’t look like they’re going to improve anytime soon.”
As a switcher (from Mac, you guessed it!) I just got sick of Mac OSX (10.2.2, for the curious?). Nothing runs quickly. When a G4-800 feels like mud, something’s seriously wrong.
Internet Explorer – Biohazard, glacially slow and very unstable. I’m not saying this because it was Microsoft, I used IE on OS9 as much as iCab. If it was any good I’d have used it. But it wasn’t.
Mozilla/Netscape – quite nice. I prefer my web browser to be, well, just that and not attempting to be everything when other a specialist app might be better.
Chimera – really nice. All the web browsing goodness of Mozilla without the options that I don’t want. Fast, stable, and uses the X user interface standards.
Safari – again really nice. Very quick, good standards compliance. Safari sits just under Chimera on my dock and gets used almost as much. Not quite as polished as Chimera at the moment.
Opera – never used it.
OmniWeb – never used it.
iCab – This was my favoured OS9 browser as on that platform it was very fast, using less than a meg of RAM was a major plus point as well. The built in validator was a great idea, and something that I would like to see in Chimera or Safari. It needs better CSS surport to be back in the competion.
Other – used a few, like the CERN browser, but none was good enough to leave on my system for more than a few days.
i’ve used all the browsers from the list except for safari since i have not updated to jaguar, though i expect to do so within the next few days.
my favourite browser is iCab. it’s small, fast and has tons of useful features. it has the filter manager which lets you filter out banners (good if you’re on a modem) and change the id string on certain sites. the settings also lets you turn of some of the java script calls for such things as pop-ups. its only lack is the lacking css-support (as long as it’s css1 it works quite well). the author promises though that by the next version (3.0) iCab will have much improved css-support.
i also use IE since that’s the only browser my bank lets in. it’s slow, unstable and still the mac version is better than IE for windows.
finally i have to say a few words about opera. opera for windows is a great browser but somehow the mac version has never been that staggering fast – nor has it rendered pages as accuratly as its windows counterpart. i’m donloading opera 6 at this moment just to see if it has improved any. but still, even if they have, it’s still just another browser, it has no interesting features, as far as i know, to make it stand out.
well, first off, i was biased ever since i used it on nextstep. but thats good.
1.) its keyboard controllable, you can use almost everything in it with keyboard commands (apple+cursor for example to go forth and back, apple L for the nav bar – saves a lot of time on the iBook ikky touchpad).
2.) its fast (native nextstep^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Cocoa graphics API usage, parts of its sources are avialable through omnigroup.com source archives.
3.) fast, correct rendering. good java/js support.
4.) while we are at the support topic. the support is great !
5.) bookmarks is giving a better look and feel – also you can just drag and drop the url from everywhere – if you desire to drop the URL in the window top bar to the desktop,
be it. if you like dropping it into IE or NS for testing a website layout, be it. bookmarks/bolts just work. easily & intuitively.
6.) ease of configuration.
7.) because i am damn proud the old nextstep browser made it again ! and stuff like omnigraffle for jotting down information is also great to use.
(nuff posted from this crappy windows box at work, want my omniweb back)
I was rather sad to see OmniWeb losing so poorly in this poll, and rather surprised to see Safari winning.
It’s not that Safari isn’t a good browser, it’s just I’d prefer not having to use a haxie to make my web browser not look like high-end ’70s stereo equipment. I really don’t like the look of the brushed metal theme, so it angers me that Apple would use it for Safari when it definitely violates Apple’s Aqua Human Interface Guidelines. For more information, see http://developer.apple.com/techpubs/macosx/Essentials/AquaHIGuideli…
As can be inferred from above, my browser of choice is OmniWeb. It has all the features I consider essential: banner ad blocking, intelligent popup blocking, and all around incredible customizability.
Chimera is okay I suppose, just a bit bloated and lacking in features, although it does have better standards compliance, if that matters to you (for the web sites I view it really isn’t an issue)
OmniWeb is also the homegrown hero, being a child of NeXT, and for that reason I continue to root for it like a fan loyal to his hometown baseball team. I just hope for some speed and rendering improvements out of the OmniGroup in the future, or else I’ll find myself rooting for the underdog.
After trashing Safari for using the brushed metal look, I realized I forgot to mention precisely how it violates the Aqua Human Interface Guidelines. Here’s the relevant section:
Avoid using the textured window appearance in applications or utilities that are unrelated to digital peripherals or to the data associated with these devices.
when using mac os x i still prefer Chimera, as i preferred Mozilla over Konqueror on linux, but this changed since i tried Konqueror 3.1 (the one with kde 3.1) now i prefer konqueror over mozilla on linux (i don’t use galeon because i use kde) and i think i will like safary once apple switch to the new khtml codebase. Oh, of course konqueror 3.1 has tabs, so i think Safari will have tabs too.
I do not see the advent of Safari as a battle with Chimera. I think it’s great for Mac users – we have both a wonderful gecko based browser and khtml browser in beta – we can’t lose!
I too like OmniWeb very much and have also been using it ever since the OS X Public Beta. Unless I’m mistaken though, due to javascript probems, you still cannot use OmniWeb with .Mac. Same with iCab.
I would like to say, as a Mac user, that Internet Explorer saved the day for us. When Apple and Microsoft made their five year deal, all we had was a long-in-the-tooth Netscape 4.x and I.E. 4, which was horrible. Of course, all this was on OS 9. When Microsoft came out with I.E. 4.5 for Mac, things got fun again.
The great thing about iCab is that even the newest version that it optimized for Jagaur still supports old 68k Macs with System 7.1! I run it on a Performa 200 (68030, 16Mhz) and it works great.
All the other current browsers for the Mac require a PowerPC with at least Mac OS 8.6 (Opera, IE, Mozilla/Netscape), Mac OS X 10.1 (OmniWeb, Chimera) or even Mac OS X 10.2 (Safari).
There are already freeware and shareware add-ons for Safari:
To change themes, icons, etc.,:
http://www.waterfallsw.com/
To unlock some hidden features of Safari, there is SafariEnhancer:
http://gordon.sourcecod.com/sites/safari_enhancer.php
“Avoid using the textured window appearance in applications or utilities that are unrelated to digital peripherals or to the data associated with these devices.”
iTunes and the iPod (mp3 files) go hand in hand…
Safari is good, a little buggy, but it’s beta, Snapback is cool, and a shortcut to enable/disable popup blocking is great! But dont have tabbrowsing so it is close to useless.
Chimera cant change the text encoding.
Mozilla takes more time to open, but has everything that I need and remember my forms.
I keep both Safari and Mozilla opened, I surf with Safari, to find and report bugs, and change to Mozilla when something don’t work or when tabbrowsing is essential(pr0n).
I’ve got Safari loaded but without tabs it doesn’t have a chance. It also doesn’t render some CSS correctly and I can’t even access my .mac account with it. So I’ll stick with Mozilla. I don’t have any problems with it.
I love chimera and can’t live without tabs. But it does seem to have a problem downloading large files (100MB+) and will often “finish” in the middle. I still use IE for those tasks.
I can’t find much information on KJS…
http://developer.kde.org/documentation/library/2.1-api/classref/kjs…
# ECMAscript 262 support (JavaScript). We estimate that 90% of the web’s script work with Konqueror. A few bindings to connect ECMAscript and HTML are still missing to make the rest work, too.
OSNews actually did an interview with Harri Porten, the author of KJS a while back.
http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=259
Does anybody know of any KHTML-based browsers for Windows? Just curious.
I have to admit, it is kind of nice seeing the Mac users having all the toys for once. 🙂
i do not really use the tab metaphor. just not the way any other app works on my mac. i am used to opening extra windows, and minimizing or hiding the ones i don’t use. My only issues with safari are it’s quirky rendering of some pages (my.yahoo.com if you only have email in the sidebar) and the fact it crashes on my banks page. chimera did that once, when i turned on pipelining. apparently, some webservers don’t handle that so well over SSL. or, it would be the mix of SSL/non-SSL in frames.
Tabs are junk. If you need tabs then there is something seriously wrong with your WM.
It’s the window manager’s job to deal with windows, not your browser’s. I have quit using mozilla’s tabs altogether now. It was just too frustrating. I would end up with multiple mozilla windows open, each with their own set of tabs. Then while switching through a lot of programs I’d seek to close one of these mozilla pages by clicking the ‘x’ (standard windows procedure) and I’d unknowingly close all the tabs along with it.
Tabs are a horrible UI blunder. Sure I suppose I could force myself to adapt to their backwards functionality but that’s just one more unnecessary thing to work around.
I guess this is just more proof that mozilla is an OS on it’s own. I bet the next release of mozilla will have it’s own start menu.
>Does anybody know of any KHTML-based browsers for Windows? Just curious.
It is not ready yet. The project started a few days ago:
http://khtml-win32.sourceforge.net/
Why is it that even though OSX is based on Unix, it still has the annoying habit of freezing the system whenever you click on the menu bar? It makes absolutely no sense.
Did they fix this in 10.2?
One of the great aspects of OS-X is that you can leave a program running with no windows open. It saves time and energy use on a laptop when you decide you want access to that program.
I couldn’t do this with Chimera. For god knows what reason, about once a minute it would spike the processor use and stay there for 15 seconds or so. On a desktop, this wouldn’t matter. Maybe with a G4 laptop (i’m on a G3-Pismo), the processor spiking would be less intense. Maybe with a battery that’s more modern and not fading from 2+ years of heavy use, i could deal with the drain. In the end, though, this just meant that i had to quit Chimera every time i unplugged.
Safari never uses much of the CPU, and therefore is the browser for me.
JT
>Why is it that even though OSX is based on Unix, it still has >the annoying habit of freezing the system whenever you click >on the menu bar? It makes absolutely no sense.
Eh? You seem to be thinking of OS 9.
OS X doesn’t freeze the system when clicking on menus or holding down the mouse. Doesn’t and hasn’t, since the initial release. Perhaps you were using a fubared system…?
Apple lacks on hardware but its quality software development rate is impressive.
I use Opera all the time and can’t browse well without tabs (IExplorer), I guess Safari will have them soon. I think more people would use Opera if they knew how graphically compact can it be, the Google search (and other search engines) is embedded in Opera’s address bar, they were the first at doing this like two years ago, and you can set that bar at the top or at the bottom (I like the adress bar at the bottom and a text-only thin menu at the top). I have no icons, no eyecandy graphics in Opera (all text in light gray bars), that’s another one ’cause Opera’s default flashy blue look with cumbersome icons makes me want to run away. Opera is small and very fast, I wonder why no one has commented on the option Apple had of replacing IE with Opera. This Apple guys have gone open source, next they’ll show us all OSX code (;P)
There is one single technology that makes the Mozilla project unique: XUL (XML-based User Interface Language; http://www.mozilla.org/xpfe/xptoolkit/xulintro.html). I believe future graphical OSes will be built around a web browser, and in doing so the capabilities that XUL brings to GUI design are amazing. The only XUL example I know right now is OEone Homebase system (http://www.oeone.com), built using RedHat Linux and the Mozilla platform.
Of course, Apple has its own marvelous GUI and have no interest at all in the Mozilla platform as a whole, althought it comes as a surprise, fast and small KHTML seems a wise choice. Just don’t bring down so quickly Mozilla/Gecko because of that choice, Mozilla has more to give than a rendering engine or a browser, Cocoa is the past, something like XUL is the future.
just thought I would throw this in since the last few articles peoplewe saying OSnews was bias against MAC
LEAVE SPACES around the URLs for Christ’s sake!! The osnews boards the last few days are full of links and almost no one seems to read: LEAVE SPACES around your URLs.
>>Why is it that even though OSX is based on Unix, it still has >the annoying habit of freezing the system whenever you click >on the menu bar? It makes absolutely no sense.
>Eh? You seem to be thinking of OS 9.
I dont think even OS 9 did that. As a matter of fact, I don’t think even OS 8 did that. With OS 8 came a sudo type of pre-emtive multitasking that worked alongside the OSes cooperative multitasking system
A couple of things about tabbed browsing:
1. Switching tabs in Chimera is brutally slow (700Mhz iBook). If it’s going to be the same speed in Safari I could care less for the feature
2. If MacOS X had something more like the Windows task bar
and supported cmd-tabbing through _all_ windows rather than through apps tabbed browsing becomes much less of an important feature since the OS provides the ‘tabs’.
I know I speak blasphemy but lets face it some of the UI decisions in MacOS X seem iffy at best…
1. resize only from the bottom right?
2. What gives with the maximize button… every app implements it differently!
3. Tabbing through the dock is a joke… the visual feedback it gives is exactly wrong and causes you to fly by whatevery you want to get to (liteswitch X is _much_ better in this regard)
… anyway, I’m way OT by now so I’ll leave it here.
I’ve never used OSX until this week but it still seems to be a problem. I am using 10.1 but it looks as though the active application will not respond while its menubar is active or the user is scrolling. I sat there and waited with the mouse on the menu for about 20 seconds for a page to load. As soon as I canceled the menu, it came right up.
I tried out Safari at the Newport Beach Apple store and I was impressed with the speed of it!
What bothers me is that Microsoft and Netscape may stop making browsers for the mac if Safari really takes off. I don’t know why IE is slow on the mac. Must be either the market share of Apple or the competition between Microsoft and Apple.
I know this is never going to happen but I would like a version of Safari to run on 8.6.
– Mark
“[…]while KTHML has taken a slightly more expedient approach of shooting for a smaller
feature set, getting it right, and then making things fast.”
Maybe they should ask the KHTML team to make them an operating system as well then.
Its known as the “spinning beach ball of death”. It happens all the time. Apples own discussion boards are filled with people experiencing it. Google it. etc.
Stop lying about crap, Macs freeze up and become unresponsive, all the time. Even in 10.
Question is, if you Mac Liars would actually ask the question “Why do they still freeze up?”, instead of constantly defending Apple with “No they dont, they do not, No they dont”. If the zealots would just accept the truth, instead of being “At peace while rebooting”, Apple may actually start addressing problems.
As it stands, they are getting PHAT on hardware sales, while they leave their own support message boards ignored.
Man, no disrespect to the KHTML team but it’s rather short sighted using it.
I can’t believe how much the people in the article diss Gecko. They should really know better – Gecko was once small, light and fast as well. I remember them boasting proudly it’d fit on a floppy disk. Then it got technology, it got the ability to actually render most of the awful websites out there and it grew hairs, just like real world software does.
By the time they’ve made KHTML render as many pages as Gecko does, made it support XSLT, made it support embedded SVG gecko-style, XForms, and so on, and the world will have lost a rather fine embedded rendering engine.
Gecko is in fact fast, no, it’s not perfect by any means. In particular the cross-platform nature means it can’t rely so much on OS provided services so startup time is a bit higher (but really not much, galeon2 is so fast loading it makes my eyes bleed). Gecko has years of effort behind it and because of that it works. Or, what, did you think that actually the Gecko team wanted to make a large piece of code?
Man. I for one won’t be mangling my web pages to work in KHTML. I did try it once, but considering how few people appear to use it on Linux (about 4-6% on my linux site) it’s just not worth the effort. When I come across a problem that’s best solved using XSLT, I’m not going to stop and say “well hey, khtml doesn’t support xslt so i’d better not use it”.
Reinventing the wheel because you think that yes, this time, absolutely we’ll end up with a powerful, real world yet small and light program has been done SO many times – in fact the Mozilla project itself said that. It’s the classic bane of programmers worldwide. Hey, let’s start over, man we’re elite, we’ve got this small and fast code and it has like 80% of the features of the big and bloated nearest competitor. Then over a period of years they add the remaining 20%, all the edge cases get code to sort them out so it works on grannies wierd ass broken setup and eventually it ends up “big and bloated” too.
Oh well. It’s their problem, not mine. Hopefully they can keep up with Gecko.
“Stop lying about crap, Macs freeze up and become unresponsive, all the time. Even in 10.
Question is, if you Mac Liars would actually ask the question “Why do they still freeze up?”, instead of constantly defending Apple with “No they dont, they do not, No they dont”. ”
This is exactly the same crap that gets posted here consistently by the same dudes.
ONE PERSON replied that it might be OS 9, and added OS 10 doesnt do that.Which is what the vast majority of users have experienced ( myself included).
Then this dude (truth teller) comes back and claims all mac users are liars
What the hell is a mac hater doing hanging out on Apple’s boards anyway?
Get a new hobby, maybe something more productive.
BTW-Apples boards are not ignored, there are lots a folks who help out the ones having problems, and they plainly state its a user board.
But don’t let facts get in the way of your opinions .
PS, 10.2 finder is multi threaded, if the one app is frozen, everything else works, the spinning ball of death is in the past because the os is improving and evolving.
Mike Hearn — there are some fundamental architectural decisions that were made in Gecko that make it less than ideal for embedding on a platform that already has robust user-interface libraries and networking libraries (namely, it re-implements everything.) Dave Hyatt (who started the Chimera project, invented XUL and XBL, and is on the Safari team) had this to say way back in May:
http://tinyurl.com/4fza
See these links also:
http://dbaron.org/log/2003-01#l20030109
http://off.net/~shaver/diary/2003/01/#20030108
These aren’t “Joe Blow” on the street opinions, these are engineers who are intimately familiar with the code.
http://discussions.info.apple.com/[email protected]@.3bbb96…
A quick google turns up:
http://archive.develooper.com/[email protected]/msg03659.html
So it looks like one of those things that affect some people but not others for no good reason. I’ve heard a mac using friend talk about the beachball of death too, but never seen one myself.
I think truthteller is right in that if Apples customers were more critical of them they’d probably get better faster and make fewer mistakes. I mean Safari blowing away your home directory? Yikes. Yet people shrugged it off on the boards with a “well there wasn’t much info, hasn’t happened to me, so they’re probably just making it up” which was a dumb line to take (I saw it!).
I am not referring to the spinning ball. I am referring to the fact that when I am loading a Web page in a browser (on 10.1) the page will not continue to load if I activate its menu bar.
However, if the browser is in the background, the page will load fine.
It’s rather annoying but I haven’t in my small time with OS X had any crashing problems.
My vote for Chimera. I got spoiled by the tabs and the sidebar.
Safari really didn’t work any faster for me and I was really disappointed by the lack of tabs. It might just be too simple. I liked the downloads window, but Chimera works similarly now. I felt that Safari lacked certain features one can add to the toolbar in other browsers(source for one)but i really spent little time on it. Once I heard it can wipe your home folder, i erased it. I am not willing to take that risk at this time.
I will admit that Chimera does crash, but not as often as IE.
My other problem with Safari is that it is from the same company that makes my operating system. If M$ is criticized and attacked for integrating a browser into the system, how long will it be till apple makes the same move? I know that Apple is not M$, but who knows what future plans might be. It seems to be along the lines of what happened to Watson. I made the choice to buy a Mac instead of a PC at half the cost because I felt that I would have some choices as to what I could do with my machine, I don’t want that to change, so I can’t support this move on apple’s part.
Are u using IE?
It has an annoying thing that big portions of text dont load at first for some reason.But I havent experienced that particular problem u describe on other browsers (now I will be labeled a liar by –lol)
——-What I do object to is posters here bring up an instance of
one post on a web site and extrapolating that to include the whole realm of a subject.
Thats wrong.
Were you using IE this machine? Early versions of IE had terrible threading. Even the latest version of IE is nothing you want to use for very long.
I can’t comment with IE’s performance in OS X (if it was IE) as I haven’t used it full-time for some time now. But it’s not fair to judge an operating system by one poorly coded app. I recommend trying OS X again using Safari, Chimera, Omniweb, Mozilla, etc. 10.2 also provides distinctive improvements in speed.
Anyway. Rest assured, OS X should and will load the page in a decent browser while a menu is pulled down. It would certainly be crazy if it didn’t.
I just have to clear up some of these “Lies” That Mac users are “trying to cover up” for apple.
Yes, 10.1 is slow. 10.2 will probably double the speed that your machine and user interface will run at. The contextual menu in 10.2 has a bug and lags, but there are ways to avoid this. And there is a slight delay in clicking in the menu bar. The cmd-tab way of switching applications in 10 is not as efficient as in 9, you have to look at the dock and check which app you are on instead of just switching. Alot of this is due to the fact that it has a heavy graphical interface, but so does XP. Quartz Extreme(hardware acceleration) helps a lot.
But i found almost the exact same problems with windowsXP. THe Start menu has a lag and the contextual menus also lag. Then there is the lack of freedom in how you can organize you can organize your desktop and blah, blah, blah.
All os’s have their problems and maybe if we bitched more things would change. So why does windows still suck too? I guess it’s all computer users that let things go unchanged, not just Mac users.
I would like to point out that Windows users are never forced to use a Mac, so most don’t have any experience with a Mac and it’s OS. Most Mac users are forced to use windows pretty often, so we have that bit of experience and knowledge. We make a concious choice to do as we do. We are not sheep and we don’t just follow because it’s a majority thing. Most of the slanderous comments about the mac come from someone who has never touched one and just reads other people’s postings and see that as truth.
First of all jeebus, I am a Mac user, and a Mac deployer, not a Mac hater as you imply.
The Mac boards, sure they are user boards, and yes, there are lots of people who help out. Its a pretty friendly place. Yet, it is also filled with people *much like you* who constantly make excuses for the shortcomings and problems users are having.
The board is also filled with people who are having problems like this:
http://discussions.info.apple.com/webx?50@@.3bbacd15/0
Those people who feel very defeated by Apples lack of response to the many problems people are having. I was having the problem illustrated above, took advantage of the $250 dollar AppleCare the machine had on it, and two times in one day I was told by Apple that they did not recognize it as a problem and nor were they going to address the problem.
Despite the fact they have a technote fix for it, which doesnt work for anyone who is having the problem and tried the fix letter for letter.
I like X a bunch, I hate that its slow and buggy, and I resent Apple for not addressing issues they are having with it. At least say “Thanks, we will look into it…”
Sadly, this transistion is not going smoothly, and despite the marketing propaganda, its gonna help people switch *AWAY* from Apple. Read the board on their site, designers, educators, etc all feel very dissed.
Now as far as your multithreaded argument, I call bullshit. Sure it is, so was OS 9’s but guess what, A fresh install (3rd time), and updated up to 10.2.3, and I still get beach balls. Sure not as many, but how about NONE AT ALL?
Then talk to my fuckin boss who got gee whizzed into a +$3500 tiBook who after two week in the glories of OS X came to me and said:
“My Pismo is faster than this machine… What gives…”
He has been freshly installed a couple of times, all sorts of Mac voodoo performed on his machine, and he is still getting beach balls.
Dont even get me started on the Titanium affecting Airport performance… You can google that yerself, then I am sure, you will come to me with a thousand excuses as to why its OK.
Peace.
‘Its known as the “spinning beach ball of death”. It happens all the time. Apples own discussion boards are filled with people experiencing it. Google it. etc.
Stop lying about crap, Macs freeze up and become unresponsive, all the time. Even in 10.’
I’ve experienced this (in Jaguar)… in fact it motivated me to reinstall Jaguar, to no avail. It seems to happen if I leave my system on and idle for prolonged periods of time. This would also look to be some sort of kernel contention as well… when this is happening I can’t even ssh into the machine (although iirc it does respond to pings)
“Reinventing the wheel because you think that yes, this time, absolutely we’ll end up with a powerful, real world yet small and light program has been done SO many times – in fact the Mozilla project itself said that.”
Well, I wouldn’t exactly call KHTML “reinventing the wheel” due to its age.
“PS, 10.2 finder is multi threaded, if the one app is frozen, everything else works, the spinning ball of death is in the past because the os is improving and evolving.”
What he’s describing isn’t trolling, it’s entirely real, and appears to be some sort of kernel contention where the entire OS goes unresponsive.
” Yet, it is also filled with people *much like you* who constantly make excuses for the shortcomings and problems users are having. ”
WTF?
I gave a link to help the guy,not constantly making excuses.
And it turns I misunderstood his problem.
And jag finder is much improved, and you call that an excuse?
YOU called folks LIARS, dude, because ONE poster here suggested it might be OS 9.
I just tried Mozilla (CFM), IE, Chimera, and Safari. The first two froze with a menu down. The latter two didn’t. I’m not going to quit Mozilla to try out the Mach-O version (too many open tabs), but the pattern should be clear: Carbon programs act like OS 9 programs in this respect, but Cocoa programs work fine.
A second note is that programs using the more advanced event model in Carbon might work, but I don’t know.
Mozilla is hoping to transition to Mach-O as the main OS X build by 1.3, and Mach-O has been pretty complete for some time so IE is really the only browser with this problem. One more reason to offer Safari as a IE replacement.
Like I said to jeebus, I am a Mac user by day. I also have been deploying Mac solutions to education for over 10 years. I also deploy Linux solutions to education, use Linux as my main OS at home, but since I also do some design work as a hobby I have an XP machine for doing that. I would love to have a Macintosh for doing that work but until these speed issues get worked out, I aint going there.
That said I strongly consider buying an iBook, which I find to be a great value. I would most likely run Gentoo linux on it, so I would be trapped in the dual boot cycle for using my design apps.
To be perfectly honest, I enjoy/like/work with many different machines/operating systems. It is a joy of mine. I collect old machines as well as emulators as a personal history archive of the computers I have known and loved throughout my time of using them.
I feel that this gives me a unique perspective on the Macintosh, especially since I have been using Macintoshes since there have been Macintoshes.
So while I may come off as a Mac hater, I have a long long history with them. I am just not a Mac fanboy.
I am a Mac skeptic.
And my gut feeling is at this point in personal computing history, especially if Apple is going to tread into the realm of my favorite computing world: UNIX, I want then to own up to the faults, address the issues and stop hiding behind market hype.
Call me a romantic, but I want Apple to be truly “Insanely Great”.
calling a whole group of folk, “liars” is wrong.
Your “unique” perspective is not unique at all.
your troll like posts certainly are not unique at all, unfortunatley there are too many just like yours.
Of course, you’ll keep using the keywords- fanboy, liars, zealots, etc. to further your constructive criticisms.
Safari is working well for me. I really like the bookmark bar feature, lets me organize a few common bookmarks right there.
Two features missing that I really want:
1) Like everyone, tabbed browsing support
2) The master password feature. I loved that feature from Mozilla and I do miss it.
“but the pattern should be clear: Carbon programs act like OS 9 programs in this respect, but Cocoa programs work fine.”
Forgive my ignorance but I don’t know what Carbon is and how it is different from Classic and Cocoa.
That does seem to be the problem though. I was using Mozilla and IE btw and both have the problem. Is this because both apps are trying to support OS<10?
jeebus, I dont mean to single you out, but this is my frustration with mac users. Not all, but many.. Many in my inner circle of friends, as well as people who post on message boards like this one.
If I got you wrong, I am sorry, but I will stand by my conviction that many many Macintosh users are severely affected by Steves “Reality distorition field”, which I find to be (coming from Steve and marketing) complete lies.
Its not the Mac users fault per say, its just that yer typical Macintosh user tends to spit out the verbage verbatum from said field of harmoic disturbance. They do it with a bit of smugness, and what I feel is they are making excuses for a company that pretty much out and out lies about a lot of its products, doesnt truly support those products, then charges a premium for that.
Didnt mean to single you out, but stop calling me a troll.
are using keywords to disparage someone regardless of what that someone actually wrote.
safari will be my first choice once it looks as smooth as omniweb and uses tabs like chimera. speedwise, safari rocks for being a beta!
By the way, its been a week since I downloaded Safari, and like magic its the only browser used on my g4 at work.
I have some issues with some sites, but all in all its been pretty great for me on my machine.
I always loved Konq!!
Forgive my ignorance but I don’t know what Carbon is and how it is different from Classic and Cocoa.
Cocoa is Apple’s name for the NextStep API. Developing a Cocoa app is more similar to developing a *nix than a Mac app.
Carbon is a sort of a bridge API based off of the classic Mac OS API. It makes porting applications from OS 9 to OS X much quicker. An app using Carbon is still in some ways a Mac OS 9 app (but not backwards compatable) so things haven’t changed too much.
I used to use an Extension under Mac OS 9 which would allow applications to continue processing while a menu was open. I eventually stopped as many applications had major bugs with that, so Apple took the conservative road and just allowed Carbon apps to grid to a halt when menus are down. I had realized this months ago, but had forgotten it until you pointed it out.
That does seem to be the problem though. I was using Mozilla and IE btw and both have the problem.
As I said in my last post, don’t expect IE to fix that. I believe that all MS’ apps so far have been Carbon. The one caveat I kind of mentioned with carbon apps is that Apple has made a more advanced event model available to them which is optional. It could be that apps that use that event model run with menus down (I don’t know), and MS would be more likely to switch to that than rewrite their entire app in Cocoa.
For Mozilla the Mach-O (Cocoa) version is available for nightly builds. Get it here: http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla/nightly/latest/MacMozilla-MachO….
Still haven’t tested the Mach-O version, but it should work with menus down.
Look at that! I just held down a menu while loading a page in Mozilla, and sure enough — it ground to halt until I let go. My apologies, O.F.P. I didn’t realize that the Carbon event browser handled browsing so poorly. (I suppose that programmers have to program it into Carbon apps. Cocoa apps get better threading for free.)
You should definitely check out a better threaded broswer.
FYI:
Cocoa: Safari, Chimera, Omniweb, Mozilla (Mach-O version)
Carbon: IE, Mozilla, Netscape, iCab, Opera
Oh, and just for the record: just because something is Cocoa doesn’t make it amazing, and just ’cause something is Carbon doesn’t mean it necessarily sucks. You can create a great Carbon app — it just takes more work on the developer’s end.
Supposedly Apple is working on further merging the two APIs… but that’s a different topic…
Look at that! I just held down a menu while loading a page in Mozilla, and sure enough — it ground to halt until I let go.
I did the same and couldn’t reproduce the results.
You people are either lying or have a REALLY screwed up system.
(oops that was supposed to be in quites)
“Look at that! I just held down a menu while loading a page in Mozilla, and sure enough — it ground to halt until I let go.”
I did the same and couldn’t reproduce the results.
You people are either lying or have a REALLY screwed up system.
Mozilla 1.3a on an iBook running 10.2.3, holding down a menu in Mozilla appears to grind the browser to a halt.
AFAIK, nothing wrong with my system.
Holding down menus in Safari, Chimera, and Omniweb: no problem.
What’s your set-up?