[Spirit_VW]

Let me preface this by saying that I'm the biggest OmniWeb pimp around. I've also in the past not been exactly a big positive speaker about Mozilla.

I hadn't used Mozilla for a few milestone releases, and thought....what the heck, might as well give that ugly little non-UI compliant thing another chance.

Well, color me quite impressed with the progress.

I'm using the 0.9.8 milestone, and I'm quite surprised by its speed - it's darned quick! They've put quite a bit of work into this app lately, haven't they?

Seems to render everything very nicely.

Let me also say that TABBED BROWSING EFFING ROCKS. I had no idea of how cool a feature this was. It's so simple.......so obvious.......so brilliant.

So, what don't I like about it?

That interface. I HATE the themeable crap. HATE HATE HATE HATE HATE it. If I wanted to use a program with no UI relation to anything else on the system, I'd be using virtually any Windows app. HOWEVER, I am very happy that there's an effort to start putting this right, with Aqua widgets, however rudimentary they may be. Also note that I have now installed foamy's Classic theme improvements, and they have made Mozilla quite a bit more pleasant, UI wise. I can now use it without feeling hatred.....now I'm just looking forward to further improvements in this area and living quite comfy with foamyClassic.

That being said, I downloaded and tried out Chimera .11 - PERFECT! Well, not so much in the current version, as it's still VERY early and not really that usable, but the idea is PERFECT! Keeps what is great about Mozilla - the speedy, compliant rendering engine - and dumps the useless noncompliant theme junk for a slick (and interestingly OmniWeb-like) Cocoa interface. I could do without the purple buttons, though - doesn't fit with OS X. The tabs in particular are a lot nicer in Chimera than Mozilla. Can't wait to see this little app progress.

Also, I WILL BE OVER THE MOON when Mozilla gains Quartz font rendering. I miss that terribly from OmniWeb. It simply CANNOT get here fast enough - that one feature instantly elevates any OS X browser about a million points in my book.

So, in conclusion - I now will speak positively of Mozilla, instead of with a blinding hatred. Matter of fact, I'm posting this from Mozilla right now.

[Mr. Blur]

I pretty much agree....

I've paid for Omni and use it most of the time, but I am getting very tired of the instability (random crashes all the time....yes, I report them, yes, I've trashed prefs etc).

Mozilla is almost rock-solid now and once Chimera gets rolling a little further along...well....Omni will be relegated to back-up browser status.

[AKcrab]

Yay! More converts! Welcome to the club.

[Macanoid]

Omniweb wins the award for the most beautiful browser, hands down, but Mozilla is just more stable, renders more pages correctly and is a lot faster.

btw, one more thing...........Tabbed browsing!!!!

[me]

Here's my impressions using OmniWeb SP46, Mozilla .9.8 and Chimera .11.

Page render speed
Chimera - but crash happy

Launch time
Chimera - good thing too since I relaunch it every few minutes

Scroll Speed
OmniWeb - by a long shot

Interface
OmniWeb - Chimera is a bit crude and incomplete - but has potential.

Page Appearance
OmniWeb - I don't care if Chimera will have antialiased text someday, Omni has it now.

Stability
OmniWeb - it isn't perfect but I only quit OmniWeb to install new SPs. Compare that to hours of uptime for mozilla or minutes for Chimera.

Plugin support
OmniWeb - I can't even get Java working in Mozilla, much less anything else. Not sure about Chimera...maybe if it can stay up for a minute or more...

So OmniWeb SP46 is not quite as fast as Chimera, but I hardly see a case for Chimera overtaking OmniWeb soon. Remember both are under constant development, so neither is a sitting target.

Look at it this way, OmniWeb could use a bit more speed, tabs, and better CSS. Chimera needs interface work, major scrolling improvements, stability, and antialiased text. Even once all that is done, Chimera may still have those nasty Mozilla widgets. Oh, and Omni has spell check and support for languages I've never even heard of.

[ 02-22-2002: Message edited by: me ]

[Sharky K.]

I don't reallly agree
At my G4 533 dual:
- Mozilla crashes a lot (OmniWeb doesn't crash a lot on my comp)
- Mozilla is slow at starting up, commando's like new window, close window, quit etc...
- most ugly interface (but this is well known )
- Is not much (if not) faster than OmniWeb latest sp
- scrolling sucks really bad

Mozilla renders really great, I think better than Internet Explorer.

I hope chimera will fix these problems.

[Macanoid]

Originally posted by Sharky K.:
<STRONG>I don't reallly agree
At my G4 533 dual:
- Mozilla crashes a lot (OmniWeb doesn't crash a lot on my comp)
- Mozilla is slow at starting up, commando's like new window, close window, quit etc...
- most ugly interface (but this is well known )
- Is not much (if not) faster than OmniWeb latest sp
- scrolling sucks really bad

Mozilla renders really great, I think better than Internet Explorer.

I hope chimera will fix these problems.</STRONG>

Well, there you have it, each individual user experience is different.
For me, Mozilla provides an overal better browsing experience.

[malvolio]

I keep leaning one way and then the other. Recent OmniWeb SPs have not been very stable on my 350MHz iMac. The latest one (46) has a nasty habit of crashing if I close all browser windows (yes, I have sent in the crash reports). Mozilla's ability to render every page I throw at it and tabbed browsing are big pluses. But OW is so pretty, and it uses Services.
Every so often I will fire up iCab or Opera for a while, but it's been a loooong time since I last launched IE.

[Spirit_VW]

Don't get me wrong, now, I'm not saying anything bad about OmniWeb - I still love it to death. I'm going to download the very latest sneaky peek right now (thank you Southwestern Bell for finally fixing this crappy phone line - but BOOO!!! to you for saying you won't put DSL in my neighborhood, even though we're surrounded by DSL-ready COs....but I digress).

The way I see it, OmniWeb has it ALL OVER Mozilla in terms of pretty much *EVERYTHING* related to the user experience. OW has a VASTLY, VASTLY superior interface. It's not even funny how much better OmniWeb's interface is than EVERY other OS X browser. Mozilla, even with fellow MacNN member foamy's excellent Aqua-enhanced Classic theme, still has that infuriating themeable crap all over it. Ugly buttons and drop menus and all that. Odd scrolling effects (scrolling SPEED is great, but the weird artifacts at the top or bottom of the window as you scroll is a bit odd), etc. etc. Internet Explorer is virtually unchanged from OS 9, and despite a token "Aqua Blue" color doesn't really mesh with OS X. iCab, despite being a decent enough browser (though definitely a lightweight), just for some reason appears to me to have an unappealing interface. Chimera shows real promise in UI, but those weird purple buttons have got to go. Besides the general UI, OmniWeb has, IMHO, the very best prefs settings and all manner of things that work together to make it an absolute joy to use.

Mozilla, I feel, has perhaps the best rendering engine at the moment. Nice and fast, and renders pretty much everything well. This is the ONLY area, as far as I'm concerned, that OmniWeb really comes up short. The OW4.1 engine looks absolutely stunning, but does have compatability problems. Truth be told, only one web site I go to with any regularity doesn't work in OW. Mozilla does come up short - still - in Java. It simply doesn't appear to work. Perhaps I'm missing something, but I don't think they've got it going yet. OW 4.1 seems to be far better with Java than the other OS X browsers, but it still has an occasional problem. IE5, while it does handle Java, does it so annoyingly it's a pain to use - it still locks up the browser for an eternity on some Java stuff, just like in 9.

Really, in summary, based on my experience with Mozilla milestone 0.9.8 and OW 4.1 sneaky peek 41 (I'm off to download the latest after I get done typing this), I cannot make up my mind as to which I prefer. Their individual strengths and weaknesses seem to balance out. I can definitely say that I prefer OW and Mozilla over any other X browsers - I really don't like IE5, and have never found iCab to be that appealing.

We'll see if the newest sneakypeek has anything to recommend itself over 41. I also think that the all-new engine in OW 5.0 will probably put it on top once and for all - I'm not basing this on any evidence, since there isn't any, but just call it "gut feeling." That's a ways off, though.

[gheff]

I want to like OW. I really do. I keep trying it but I keep being disappointed in the number of crashes. (And yes, I have dutifully sent crash reports. Hats off to Omni for its slick crash handling mechanism.)

Mozilla just doesn't crash for me. I've been using the nightlies for some time now. I took a break from them at one point to give one of the OW SP's that everyone was raving about an honest shot, but I found myself gritting my teeth as the stylish bomb icon bounced in my dock time and time again. I found myself going back to Mozilla.

The post .98 nightly builds have had a pretty decent use of the pseudo-Aqua widgets. (This is being entered with a 2/20 build.) I guess I'm easy to please but I don't find the user experience to be that jarring. OW is slicker, true, but I just can't abide the crashes.

The real biggie for me though is that Mozilla just renders pages better. True, they aren't prettily anti-aliased, but I rarely look at a Mozilla-rendered page and say that it is rendered incorrectly. I can't say that of OW.

I too, hope that OW 5.0 is all that Omni promises. But 'til then, it's the lizard for me.

#gheff

[lavar78]

Somewhere on these forums, there are instructions on how to get Java working in Mozilla (it's simple and works pretty well). Also, as has been said by many others, Mozilla's interface has it all over OW when it comes to tabbed browsing. You just don't know how addicting it is until you're forced to use another browser.

[AKcrab]

Mozilla Java, get it here.