[Kosmo]

I mean, come on, please for the love of God, somebody write a good browser for OS X. IE has some good points bought over from OS 9 but can't multitask, can't copy & paste, and it's slow and buggy...

OmniWeb look cool, but it's slow and every time you want to post you have to type in your username/password. But I love the total OS X integration.

Wasn't Omni supposed to release a new version this week? I swear, if they could deliver a good browser I would pay for it just like they want us to, but it has to deliver..

200,000 OS X users right now and all of us need a great browser. Come on Omni, now's your chance. Give us that great browser and collect your reward..


------------------

[Severed Hand of Skywalker]

Browsers are VERY hard to write. The richest companies in the world can�t even write them fast.
Microsoft with I.E and TimeWarner with Netscape 6. So don�t hold your breath..

[gnosis]

word is Opera will be working with OS X soon. this is great news. have you used Opera on a PC? on my PC at work (P3/450/128MB RAM) it's the *only* app that runs fast. and BOY does it run fast! here's for hoping it'll be worthy on OS X.

[Xeo]

I agree that a "good" browser would be nice.

I'm routing for OmniGroup. Look at OW now. They have done so many good things with the UI to make it just like the apps from Apple. It's even better than the Finder in some ways. (I suppose that's because it's Cocoa, unlike the Finder). OG has a ways to go with the coding, but they have done well. OW is and will be better than IE. Say buh bye to IE on the Mac.

------------------

[Lord Kronos]

Give some time to the Omni Group, OmniWeb is slow and buggy but it's the best browser I've ever seen.

I'd like to see the OS X version of Opera though, and something from Netscape too, but I believe there is not much to expect from these guys.

------------------
"Ein kleiner Mensch stirbt - nur zum Schein"

[Kosmo]

I think Netscape will die this year. Not that i care anymore yes, I'm rooting for OmniWeb too. Netscape got lost in the AOL/Time Warner mess, even before that. When they sold out to AOL i knew it was only a matter of time before it's demise..

I shed no tears to Netscape, they had their chance and blew it. Of course, Microsoft murdered it, but still....

------------------

[Lord Kronos]

To me Netscape is 'almost' dead, Mozilla/Fizzilla and Netscape 6 are complete failures, and they've apparently abandoned Communicator.

That's really sad, I liked Navigator/Communicator , I guess that gives me another reason to hate Microsoft and their lousy so-called browser.

------------------
"Ein kleiner Mensch stirbt - nur zum Schein"

[Severed Hand of Skywalker]

Originally posted by Lord Kronos:
and they've apparently abandoned Communicator.

Didn't they just update it 2 weeks ago?

[Lord Kronos]

Originally posted by Severed Hand of Skywalker:
Didn't they just update it 2 weeks ago?

That was three weeks ago , and it was a mere maintenance update, and actually barely an update to me.

------------------
"Ein kleiner Mensch stirbt - nur zum Schein"

[Severed Hand of Skywalker]

Well that is rare to update your old software when newer versions are out. So it shows that they know it is better.

[Synotic]

http://www.icab.de/

[zoloko]

I am using Netscape as my default browser since their last update (04/17/01) and I have to say that is the fastest browser for X. Yes, it have some bugs but give they time and we'll see soon a fast and SOLID browser. Give it a try (using it for at least one week) and you will then agree me.

------------------
--------
zoloko

[Lord Kronos]

Originally posted by Synotic:
http://www.icab.de/

iCab is great, and really fast.

------------------
"Ein kleiner Mensch stirbt - nur zum Schein"

[Kosmo]

Oh my God! Why didn't you post this earlier?? It is fast!! Cool! I took 30 bounces to launch but once it did was fast!!
Thanks for the tip, this will work for the time being...

I was quick to judge, I was wrong...now I hope they an OS X version...


------------------

[crazyjohnson]

RIGHT! Thats all you need to say Synotic . . . . case closed . . . we have iCab. If this thing goes Cocoa then stand back (it is prone to a few random quits every now and then).

Its fast as hell, really lightweight . . . what more could you want! I am all for the small guy.

Opera, if Cocoa, would be the only app that could top iCab.

Originally posted by Synotic:
http://www.icab.de/

------------------
Like the band TOOL? Want to stay up to date? Want to be sent news updates? Send an e-mail to [email protected] and put "subscribe" (without the
quotes) in the subject line of the email.

[osiris]

You're not kidding - IE is a joke. OmniWeb, yuck.
iCab is my current choice, but it does crash on some web pages and goes through fits of repetitive crashing.

I wish Apple would write a browser for X.



[This message has been edited by osiris (edited 04-20-2001).]

[Millennium]

It's sad, the browser situation on OSX. Currently, there are four major ones, and all have their problems. Going by my own experiences, here's my look at the standards support, speed, stability, OSX integration, and bloat of the four major OSX browsers. They're graded on a scale of Excellent (best), Very Good, Good, Fair (average), Poor, Very Poor, and Abysmal (worst). Note that resource consumption ties in with bloat.

IE5
Standards support: Very Good
Speed: Very Poor
Stability: Poor
OSX Integration: Fair
Bloat: Poor

OmniWeb
Standards support: Good
Speed: Fair
Stability: Good
OSX Integration: Excellent
Bloat: Good

iCab
Standards support: Poor
Speed: Very good
Stability: Excellent
OSX Integration: Poor
Bloat: Excellent

Fizzilla
Standards support: Excellent
Speed: Excellent (particularly surprising if you've only used it on OS9)
Stability: Abysmal
OSX Integration: Abysmal
Bloat: Abysmal

Opera
(while I've used the Classic and Windows versions of Opera, I'm not going to judge it here until I see it running on OSX. The drastically-altered experiences with IE and Fizzilla in OSX as opposed to OS9 are enough to warrant waiting).

My verdict: they all suck at the moment. IE5 is, well, IE5. Little seems to be moving to change from the OS9 version. If you like this, that's good, but if you don't like that, it's bad. OmniWeb shows great promise; its excellent integration with the OS (without being tied to it, like certain browsers on certain platforms which shall remain nameless) shows us a glimpse at what an OSX program should be like. It's a bits it still has so long to go in most of its other areas. iCab also showed promise, but seems to be falling seriously behind as of late. It's got a lot of catching up to do. And Fizzilla... well... it's the best at what it does well, namely standards support and speed. But it's awful in every other area, the only browser to earn more than one Excellent score but also the only one to earn any scores of Abysmal, much less three of them. I was very surprised to see that it was so fast on OSX, however I suspect that this may be do to the extreme resource-hogging it does at the moment. No browser (no program, for that matter) should be using 80+ percent of the CPU when idle.

Which do I think will win? Sad to say, IE will probably take it though it doesn't deserve to (OmniWeb should take it). What I'd like to see is for OmniWeb to adopt Fizzilla's Gecko engine (which isn't what's weighing Mozilla down; that dubious honor goes to the frontend, a buggy mass of pure, unadulterated fluff). The combination of the two would make A Damn Fine Browser, with OmniWeb picking up in speed and standards support without losing much if anything in the way of bloat.

The other one which interests me is the Q.Bati project on SourceForge. These guys are trying to wrap the Gecko engine into Cocoa (as I suggested Omni do), pack it into a Service, and then write a small frontend for it as a sample browser. That has some serious potential. But at the moment, we're going to have to make do with what we have. That, or surf in Classic mode.

[fmalloy]

Originally posted by Millennium:
OmniWeb
Standards support: Good
Speed: Fair
Stability: Good
OSX Integration: Excellent
Bloat: Good

Dunno how you can say stability is good for OmniWeb. I'm using the cf3 release and I very often get hangs (spinning color wheel) where I have to force quit, or it crashes and I send the core dump.



[This message has been edited by fmalloy (edited 04-20-2001).]

[Kosmo]

Although Netscape in Classic is running extremely fast I have to stop using it because my cursor keeps disappearing

Back to OmniWeb



------------------

[wclarkson]

I think that icab is awesome. So much faster than IE 5. I usually keep 2 browsers open. IE for video watching and downloading and icab for general surfing and e-mail. icab would rock if it supported more standards.

icab:7-9
IE5: at least 12

icab wins on the speed.

It also appears to load pages better and without some of the garble that IE puts in.

icab looks to be the best for my uses

[plaidpjs]

Two things:

1) I thought I read some where that Netscape had decided not to support the Mac platform anymore. I thought it was a MacCentral release but I can't find anything on it now.. anyone read anything similar?

2) Millenium - In your eview above, when you ranked "Standards support" what criteria were you envisioning? I'm curious because the worst feature of OmniWeb to me was it's standards support. i didn't visit one page that made extensive use of CSS that didn't send OW's rendering into a tail spin, and I encountered many Javascript hangs. On the other hand, it hasn't ever crashed on me, and its got some of the greatest setup feature I've ever seen.

------------------
G4/500 DP, 768 MB RAM, 40GB HDD, 32MB ATI Radeon OEM, 30GB VST Firewire Drive, and an Apple Cinema Display

[Bluebomber21XX]

Ugh! Why is everyone hating on IE? It's the most stable, most compliant browser on ther market. I'm a web designer, and I can tell you firsthand how much Netscape sucks. It's bloated, slow, and can't even support basic commands. OmniWeb is very fast, and compliant. IE is slow, but it'll be faster soon.

I just hope that Omni kills Netscape. Their browser is terrible.

------------------
For great justice!
http://bluebomber.darkmazda.com/

[gorgonzola]

Links is the fastest browser out there.

And Kosmo: next time in OS X Third Party Apps, if you please. Thanks (I'm not going to move it now, I don't like moving big threads once they've got going).

thanks again, you know how it is

------------------
the oddball newsletter
------------------
it's only after you lose everything that you're free to do anything

[Millennium]

Why is everyone hating on IE? It's the most stable, most compliant browser on ther market.

Dude, what were you smoking, and where can I get some? While IE5/Mac's standards support is very good, it's not the best at that (that honor goes to Mozilla's brood). And while its stability is very good on OS9, it's awful on OSX; only Mozilla's is worse in my experience.

I'm a web designer, and I can tell you firsthand how much Netscape sucks.

I do a not inconsiderable amount of Web-based work myself, though in my case it's for coding interfaces to Web-based apps. And yes, 4.0 does suck mightily. The so-called 6.0 release (which was actually even more beta than OSX's "final" is), sucks too. Gecko, though, flat-out rules, though it'd be even better if it had a real, OS-native frontend (witness Galeon on Linux, K-Meleon on Windows, and the Q.Bati project that's starting up for OSX).

It's bloated, slow, and can't even support basic commands.

Bloated I'll give you, though again that can be solved by a native frontend. Slow... not on OSX (though again, I think that may have to do with the ungodly amount of resources it grabs). But "can't even support basic commands"? What commands are you trying to give to it, and are they standards? Honest question here, because Gecko's been able to handle just about every standard I've thrown at it yet; I have no idea what you're talking about. Though I don't consider IE-specific stuff to be "basic," or even valid commands, any more than I consider Netscape-specific stuff to be such.

OmniWeb is very fast, and compliant.

It's compliant to a degree, but it's not great at that. There are a few things that will send it into an absolute tizzy.

IE is slow, but it'll be faster soon.

IE's likely to need a complete overhaul before it gets decently fast. At the absolute least it needs a port to the Carbon Events model, and that's not as easy as a simple Carbonization (though easier than a full rewrite). Even then, assuming Carbon's act doesn't get together in terms of OS integration, it won't be nearly as well-integrated as OmniWeb is. And even once those issues are dealt with, there's stability to worry about.

Originally posted by Bluebomber21XX:
Ugh! Why is everyone hating on IE? It's the most stable, most compliant browser on ther market. I'm a web designer, and I can tell you firsthand how much Netscape sucks. It's bloated, slow, and can't even support basic commands. OmniWeb is very fast, and compliant. IE is slow, but it'll be faster soon.

HAHA! Are you seriously suggesting that we believe that you are a "web designer" at the time as you claim Netscape is less standards compliant than Omniweb? Yeah, and Micheal Dell will join Apple's board May 1st.

[tie]

iCab is incredibly unstable. It rarely lasts more than ten minutes. Still, this is pretty good as far as OS X browsers go. I usually use OmniWeb, switching to iCab when I have to open a big web page. OmniWeb really can't handle web pages more than a couple pages long and it gets exponentially slower with the length of the page.

IE5 in Classic is another alternative. I usually don't have Classic launched, so I haven't tried this too much. But when I do, it works as it should, better than any OS X browser by far.

[Ken_F2]

The best browser for OS X is not for OS X at all; it's for Classic. Internet Explorer 5.0 for MacOS (running under OS X) is much faster and vastly more responsive than the "5.1 Preview for OS X" that came bundled with Apple's new operating system.

Try it...

[Todd Madson]

Thanks for the iCab tip. The OS X version is very fast indeed.

[michaelb]

Originally posted by gorgonzola:
Links is the fastest browser out there.

It's lynx

(Get with the UNIX, man, it's got to have an "X" in it!)

I used to use lynx to surf the web while telnet'd into a unix box over a 9600 baud cellular phone connection.

Quite usable in 1996, but now most web pages I visit have become so graphically rich (GIFs for buttons, framesets, tables, layers, image maps, etc) that they are almost unusable in pure text. I can't even get stock quotes from my online broker's web page, and stock quotes ARE text!

Still, lynx is worth compiling into your terminal.

[starfleetX]

Originally posted by michaelb:
It's lynx

(Get with the UNIX, man, it's got to have an "X" in it!)

Yes, there is linx, but there is also a program called Links.
Find info here...
Or try here...


[This message has been edited by starfleetX (edited 04-21-2001).]

[This message has been edited by starfleetX (edited 04-21-2001).]

[sadie]

Ok, hands up anybody who has useful ideas for a browser?

It's easy to slag browsers off. It's easy to say what's bloatware, what's standards-compliant, what's fast, slow, pretty, ugly or politically incorrect. It's easy to play with something for ten minutes and throw it in the bin.

But if any of you have any real ideas, any suggestions as to how browsers can be improved, we want to hear them.

Either post here, or come to the Q.BATi project and join the discussion there.



shrink_laureate

[Bluebomber21XX]

HAHA! Are you seriously suggesting that we believe that you are a "web designer" at the time as you claim Netscape is less standards compliant than Omniweb? Yeah, and Micheal Dell will join Apple's board May 1st.

Yes I do expect you to believe it. Whether you do or not, I can care less. Keep in mind that I'm also comparing OW to NS 4.x. NS6 has been, in my personal experience, dog slow, bloated, and unstable. I can't use it. And as far as the 4.0 series goes....don't even get me started. At least OW can correctly display my page, something NS can't do.

------------------
For great justice!
http://bluebomber.darkmazda.com/

[Ron Goodman]

My wife does some work in web design, and her complaint with IE is that it works with crap code that breaks everything else. iCab will not only complain about non-standard code(happy face/sad face in the task bar), but let's the user decide which standard it's enforcing. I would use it more if it was more stable. OmniWeb is by far the nicest looking on the screen.

[sordid]

Come on, really, whats wrong with lynx?

[Millennium]

HAHA! Are you seriously suggesting that we believe that you are a "web designer" at the time as you claim Netscape is less standards compliant than Omniweb? Yeah, and Micheal Dell will join Apple's board May 1st.

Actually, I'll have to go with him on that, as long as we keep the discussion to NS4. It doesn't have full support for any current Web standards, and the partial support it has in place for some of them is broken quite badly. It gets the job done -barely- but there's much nicer stuff out there.

Mozilla's another issue. As I said, easily the most compliant of the major browsers, and the fastest too. It's only real problem is the cross-platform, skinnable GUI, which has led to unbelieveable bloat, speed, and stability issues. That was the biggest mistake the Mozilla team could possibly have made. Gecko plus a small, OS-native harness interface can fit on a floppy. All of the rest is just for the GUI. Sad to see, isn't it? Gecko is, bar-none, hands-down, the best rendering out there that I've ever seen for any browser. But the fluff they've wrapped around it to create Mozilla and Netscape 6 holds it back so much that I can't count it as usable.

[Hash]

Oh I am SO SORRY that you feel that way, Kosmo.
Isnt it u, in whose home seven or eight macs are flying with OSX on unbelievable speed? Isnt it you whose applications open in "1 or 2 bounces"? Isn it you, whose happy family happily enjoys "fastest OS in the world" on iBook 333? I can not believe my eyes "slow..and buggy"? LOL

Wake up dude, its not browser fault, the whole system is slow as i already said you. Now u r pissed off that IE wont open in 1 bounce? Come on, it was you who told everyone how fast are macs on OSX? It is not even serious. I now can see that you are total liar and double-faced jerk (see another his thread "23 days and you still bitching?"

What happened, Kosmo, why you are bitching? and whining? Opened your innocent eyes of a liar and saw reality?

Best Regards, enjoy your "unbelievable speed".

Besides, on my Mac, IE, Netscape and Icab all are flying happily on OS9. I am totally satisfied.

[Brad Nelson]

Kosmo, I agree with your criticisms of IE. However, its just so darn stable and useful even I, the Microsoft avoider that I am, am using it. I want to love iCab for X (which I do in OS 9), but it's just too unstable - but better than OmniWeb.

So the answer is "no", you can't have a good browser.

[billybob]

Omniweb would be ok if it wasnt so freakin ugly. I hate how it anti-aliases everything. It does not display web pages how they are meant to be displayed. It gives everything a very artificial look and I absolutely cannot stand it. Even if you "turn off" anti aliasing (by setting the threshold to only fonts above a ridiculous size, say 50pt font), then all the text is jagged and unreadable. Why can't it just be like IE, displaying text how it is supposed to? I cannot stand omniweb and have never understood why anyone has been able to. IE 5 "preview" is still a piece of total **** , but its the only thing that works at all for me. iCab is fast, yes, but it crashes every 3 seconds and doesnt do CSS which breaks a good number of pages.

Our only hope is opera, and I'm praying to christ it's good for OSX. On windows, it is the fastest thing I have ever used, ever. For OS9, it was fast but not too stable (although its still a preview).

I wish MS would get off their ass and actually finish 5.1. The only thing that changed about it between the public beta and the "final" version of OSX was that it got worse. I dont understand. They had six months and didn't do a damn thing. Pisses me off because IE5 for os9 is a damn fine browser.

[This message has been edited by billybob (edited 04-21-2001).]

[Lord Kronos]

OmniWeb is beautiful, and I like the anti-aliased text. It's clearly the best (the only ?) browser for Mac OS X.

------------------
"Ein kleiner Mensch stirbt - nur zum Schein"

[Millennium]

I hate how it anti-aliases everything. It does not display web pages how they are meant to be displayed.

Most pages are meant to be displayed anti-aliased.

It gives everything a very artificial look and I absolutely cannot stand it.

I don't understand this one. How does it make the pages look "artificial"?

Even if you "turn off" anti aliasing (by setting the threshold to only fonts above a ridiculous size, say 50pt font), then all the text is jagged and unreadable.

Um, that's the whole point of antialiasing; without it, the text is jagged.

Why can't it just be like IE, displaying text how it is supposed to?

Um, I'm looking at this page in both browsers right now, and OmniWeb is the one that gets it right.

I wish MS would get off their ass and actually finish 5.1. The only thing that changed about it between the public beta and the "final" version of OSX was that it got worse. I dont understand. They had six months and didn't do a damn thing.

Well, they took out the Media Bar again, , but other than that you're more or less right. They must have gotten an IE/Windows developer working on the team a while back, and are now just plain trying to repair the damage the programmer must have done.

[Brad Nelson]

BillyBob, I'm using IE with the hack to turn off anti-aliasing. Try using Georgia as your display font in your browser. I find it very readable and far superior to anything anti-aliased (at least on my iBook).

[dogzilla]

Originally posted by gorgonzola:
Links is the fastest browser out there.

Lynx

[dogzilla]

Gotta agree that the current crop of browsers stink.

IE - would be great if it didn't lock up when downloading, could copy & paste, remembered cookies, and was about 100% faster.

Omniweb - is there an easy way to get this to import IE cookies and bookmarks, including toolbar? Seems like integration would be cool, but it's dog-slow. And standards-compliance is iffy at best. I *need* a fully standards-compliant browser, and so far IE is the best realistic one.

iCab - haven't tried it yet, downloading now. But I abandoned it under OS 9 because lack of standards compliance (No CSS, weak Javascript)

Fizzila/Mozilla - what a joke. A huge download for a digital billboard that crashes constantly. And occasionally does some slow web browsing.

Opera - Again, standards compliance. Plus, it has a really wacky interface (on the PC version I use, anyway).

Overall, I'll try out iCab for now, but once IE gets a decent version out, I'm going back to that. Everyone else abdicated and let MS create the best browser out there, and now they effectively control the standards for display of web information. Hopefully the Mac unit won't get infected by MS's "embrace and extend" virus and become fully compliant with the W3C standards.

[Millennium]

OK, to settle the whole Lynx/Links thing once and for all:

Lynx and Links are two different browsers. They both use the command line, so whole they can't display graphics they're suitable for using from an SSH session. Links has the advantage of supporting such cool stuff as tables and, apparently, colors (though I haven't gotten this one to work too well yet). Lynx is probably more useful for people using a screen-reader or other such accessibility devices, since everything's presented in a linear format.

But in any case, both browsers exist, and they're two different things. "Links" does not refer to Lynx, nor vice versa.

[dogzilla]

Originally posted by Millennium:
But in any case, both browsers exist, and they're two different things. "Links" does not refer to Lynx, nor vice versa.

LOL. My bad, and my apologies to Gorgonzola. I hadn't even *heard* of Links, though I use Lynx constantly to check my websites for compatibility/usability. Now that I've read a bit about it, I may compile it and check it out.

[foamy]

Why is everyone so insistent on dogging Mozilla/Fizzilla? In OS9, the newest mozilla builds rock. Fizzilla has some stability issues and is sucking up CPU like mad, but there's one guy working on making sure all the mac-specific code in mozilla is carbon. Even so, it launches faster in OSX than Omni by about 2 fold, it's a little slower at launching than IE, but in terms of compliance and browser speed...there is no comparison.

I have to agree that the interface is butt ugly. I like the Classic theme, but then it feels like... well OS9. Not good. It does look sharp with the unlined charcoal theme for OSX. It seems like some of the people out there who are hell bent on theming OSX could do wonders with Mozilla. I mean people like themexican have done amazing things with OSX... and they had to search around for every little widget and piece of chrome in the guts of OSX. Mozilla on the other hand, has an add-on (themebuilder?) which allows and helps you theme mozilla. If mozilla looked more OSXesque then I think alot of people wouldn't complain so much.

[zoloko]

Mozilla 0.8+ for X is THE FASTEST and THE BEST.

------------------
--------
zoloko

[Lord Kronos]

Originally posted by zoloko:
Mozilla 0.8+ for X is THE FASTEST and THE BEST.

I'd like to use Fizzilla, I like the modern theme and it's fast, but there are too many major bugs. I'm going to try newer builds and see if it's usable.

------------------
"Ein kleiner Mensch stirbt - nur zum Schein"

[MacmanX]

Lynx is the fastest. Why? Because it cuts the bloat out of the internet. Many designers fill their sites with useless bloat, commercial sites doubly so. Instead of putting up with this, Lynx just ignores it. All the rest just support it and make it worse. Instead of encouraging designers to work hard to do more with less, they encourage designers to over-bloat their sites, adopting a bunch of useless standards, requiring the rest of us to invest in broadband.

Web surfers of the world, unite! The internet is about information, not how fancy you can make your FLASH 5.000 graphics. Code smarter, not harder. Cheers,
MacmanX

------------------
10:00 conoc� a Apple. 10:30 trabaj� con Apple. Apple Computer�

[Angus_D]

I really like OW for OS X... Recently it's started randomly crashing a lot, but for a while it was running well.

Mozilla is making headway in the OpenSource market... Well, Gecko is anyways. It's used in lots of stuff like Nautilus, Konqueror, etc.

Opera looks pretty promising on Classic, I just hope they're good at carbonizing