[sidecar71]

I have always been a big mac fan (i just sold my CRT iMac and PowerMac 6150, but I currently have a flat-panel iMac and iBook) but I am seriously disappointed in the difference in speed that i've noticed between my brother-in-law's browsing capability on his pc (bought about 6 months ago) and my iMac (bought 1 year ago). i just upgraded to cable on the same system as my brother-in-law's and his computer seems twice as fast in rendering pages. I think I'm considering buying a pc for the first time. The increase in speed on my iMac from dail-up doesn't seem to justify the $60/month we're paying for cable (and I can't go back to dail-up....)

[Anand]

What browser are you using? I switched to a cable modem and find things fly. The funny thing is that when I bought my FP iMac (800) in the spring of 2002 my brother bought a 1.8 Ghz PC. His PC was a cheap Dell and a lot cheaper. However, the Mac and PC are similar in speed. Browsing speed is a little faster on the PC but with Safari and Camino/Mozilla, the Mac ain't bad!

[Vinnie_O_Toole]

Many things can affect your browsing speed please don't blame the mac for that ...

and the PC is no contest as many of the sites are espcially created for IE 6 for windows ...

[Commodus]

It can really depend on the browser. I like Safari, but check out something like Mozilla 1.5b. It (and the later nightly builds of Firebird) are supposed to be quick.

What I want to see is how Panther (and/or Safari 1.1) affects browsing. The OS itself is supposed to make your system feel like it's brand new.

[jambajooz]

I use PC at work running both windows and redhat. I own both a Ti and an iMac and browsing speeds on my mac under Safari compared to PCs are the same if not faster. I also run on cable modem at home and a 10mb connection at work. Since cable modem speeds vary by area, that is something to consider. I do admit though that Safari still needs more work on compatibilites. I still use IE on the Mac for certain websites which requires special authentication, for example my work webmail and my school portal.

[cSurfr]

When I had my iMac 800 earlier this year, I too was disappointed with the speed overall. Now that I am in the market to purchase a new powerbook for school, I must say once you have had the mac experience, it is VERY hard to go back to windows. In fact, I don't see how anyone can stand having to update their OS every week. Not to mention the Fisher-Price interface. I'm not trying to bash windows, and if it gets taken that way then I guess you must feel the same way too. MS is set to release a new OS in a year or well...sometime, and they haven't even fixed the one that is currently out. Replace old bugs with new ones. The microsoft way. I personally will never abandon my new mac just because I think a windows pc will be faster again. Safari does have some growing pains, but even a slower browser on the mac is better than running IE on windows any day.

cs

[robby818]

I bought my first mac (imac 800) just over one year ago. I too immediately noticed a subst. diff in browsing speed. At the time, safari had not been introduced so i tried the various 3rd party browsers hoping to see a speed gain. some were indeed a bit faster than ie at drawing pages but they were all far slower than my PIII system. safari has done a lot to address this problem, which btw was publicized in a wired mag article. i dont know if the problems are nec w/ the app. or with the OS- OSX has always felt a bit slow to me- even when i use it on the high end systems at the aapple store it never really flies like a windows xp machine does.

After one year of use I can say that i still prefer my PCs for web browsing and working on my office apps (word, powerpoint, etc). The Mac however is excellent for editing video (final cut express) and i really love itunes, esp. since i got my ipod.

[Link]

I dunno but frankly, even if the PC's IE6 is a little.. note.. a LITTLE faster, it's hard to notice.. at least for me O_O

The difference is you can actually see a status bar for a second on OS X. Doesn't really mean the computer is slower, that's just the way the browers are.

Anyone who has to use a totally different computer just for webpages that load 0.25 seconds faster seriously needs to make up better time management

As for you, my friend, get more ram for your imac if you haven't already. I think that'll boost the speed a little

[robby818]

The "get more ram" advice is the most common advice given for slow running macs. Unfortunately, it really doesn't address the problem. It's good advice if a person is experiencing frequent page outs from running mutlitple apps, but if one is running a small app like safari and it feels slow I doubt if having 1 gig of memory available will be any better than 256 megs. Mac users tend to overload on Ram in order to compensate for lower CPU + bus speeds. Ram is good but the benefits are marginal esp. if you are running relatively simple apps. BTW, the imacs also lack L3 cache which would give a noticable boost in performance esp in OS X. Panther promises improvements in speed, even for older G3 hardware, so I look forward to its release.

[Link]

Safari is a ram hog, believe me on this.

If you want to see how much memory your imac has free, open your applications folder, go to utilities, and double click terminal

in the terminal window type in:

top -us 3

it will show all sorts of info, including memory usage. To exit top you hit command and period (command + .)

Processes: 72 total, 2 running, 70 sleeping... 190 threads 17:06:17 <-- total 'scripts' and programs running.

Load Avg: 0.87, 0.57, 0.43 CPU usage: 17.7% user, 10.4% sys, 71.8% idl <-- CPU

SharedLibs: num = 124, resident = 19.3M code, 1.71M data, 7.08M LinkEdit <-- etc

MemRegions: num = 6423, resident = 69.3M + 6.44M private, 56.2M shared <-- more RAM info

PhysMem: 42.8M wired, 127M active, 53.0M inactive, 223M used, 33.3M free <<< Free ram.

VM: 3.07G + 78.7M 300880(52) pageins, 952584(0) pageouts <--- How many Pageouts you get. Anything over 50,000 is bad.