Mac OS X Slow for Web Browsing? 728
Atryn writes "Wired News has reportedly confirmed user performance complaints in their own tests. From the article: 'That was a conscious decision Apple made,' Mac MSIE project manager Jimmy Grewal said. 'They optimized for user experience rather than raw performance.'" My hunch is that you can take care of many Mac OS X performance issues by logging in as user ">console" ...
No problem here. (Score:4, Informative)
Looking at just web browsing speed on an OS is not a great reason to choose one over an another.
Re:A simple solution - Fizzilla? (Score:3, Informative)
Chimera (Score:5, Informative)
Chimera is, of course, based on Gecko, the Mozilla rendering engine. It's mainly the work of Mozilla uber-hacker Dave Hyatt [mozillazine.org].
Gerv
Re:A simple solution (Score:4, Informative)
The latest betas of OmniWeb [omnigroup.com] also beat IE by a nice margin.
Re:DID anybody actually read the article? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Why exactly does it run slow??? (Score:2, Informative)
First, the current batch of PowerPCs are no longer the FP monsters they used to be. The 604e ran circles around the x86 chips of the day, but x86 has since caught up.
Second, up until very recently OS X relied on straight ANSI C for its math libraries (pilfered from one of the BSDs). That code was recently replaced with hand-tuned libraries written in assembler, which should provide a boost. I'm not sure if the new mathlibs have been released or not.
Re:MSIE for mac (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Why exactly does it run slow??? (Score:2, Informative)
So, to answer your question, 3D runs fine, 2D has no acceleration, so anything that uses considerable 2D redrawing will be some percent slower, while 3D should be as fast or faster.
Over-emphasised as usual. (Score:5, Informative)
Not to sound too much like an apple apologist, but they've done quite a bit to get OSX to where it is so far, and the more I use it, the more I appreciate where it's advanced over OS9. I don't mind waiting a bit for things to improve. Just like I don't really mind anymore waiting 5 seconds for IE to throw together the comment threads. Most of us could benefit from learning a little patience.
Although I would surmize that it's apple's fault that they get judged so harshly. Seeing as steve jobs claims that every time someone in their company makes a sketch on a post-it note, they've created a new revolution in the world, people are justified in being extremely critical.
Re:MSIE for mac (Score:3, Informative)
tim
OmniWeb, Chimera (Score:3, Informative)
Blaming Apple for IE's sluggish performance is a bit easy. Coming from the IE project manager, it's downright insulting.
For browsing outside a proxy, I sometime uses the new Chimera browser. It's a Cocoa (Objective-C) -based browser that's based on Fizilla. Fizilla is a Mac OS X version of Mozzila.
Chimera is astonishingly fast. It's render is better than Netscape 6.2, but like OmniWeb, it's JavaScript support is still lacking somewhat. Fortunately, javascript support isn't an issue for me, unless I require online banquing, where I'll use Netscape 6.2 (despite it's utter ugliness).
Re:No troll, but the WHOLE UI is slow (Score:1, Informative)
I've got a PIII 450 desktop sitting nearby. Several years old, 256 megs ram, ata100 card. It's blazing fast for an old machine like that.
Apple is supposed by some supporters to be a vanguard of new hardware adoption (OK, so they were quick to adopt firewire). Yet the first iBook2 has pc66 memory! And OSX, for all its eye candy, is useless unless you've got a completely new G4. Really, save your money and buy a 386 based system. You'll laugh as the OSX users watch that spinning ball and you blaze around on something as old as a pentium II.
OSX is a cynical exercise by Apple, where they think their users are so stupid that they'll take eye candy over performance and usability (oh wait this is supposed to be usable). Or, maybe it's a ploy to make everyone buy new macs. Whatever they're doing, this reminds me of how I felt about Star Wars Episode I, where Lucas cynically thought he could put any old crap out and his fans would love it. Well, not this one.
My GNOME desktop is hella faster than all of them (Score:1, Informative)
BTW the slowness of OSX has to do with the fact that they have heavy use of alpha blending and window effects. It has nothing to do with the unix core. Also the display is based on technology similar to Adobe's PDF.
Re:Slashdot is the most painful of all... (Score:5, Informative)
The problem is in the Tasmin rendering engine used by IE for Mac. But blaming Apple seemed to be the easiest thing for them to do.
There are certainly performance problems in OS X's UI, but let's give blame where blame is due.
-jon
Re:Post Script Acceleration (Score:3, Informative)
Re:haven't noticed (Score:2, Informative)
I have a 933 tower that surfs the web just fine and fast.
Same experience on my wife's iBook 600mhz. Both are networked to cable Internet.
Article is FUD.
Re:MSIE (Score:2, Informative)
I've switch to Mozilla full time and after I installed the carbonized java plug-in I can do everything IE 5.1 did and more. IE 5.1 also has some silly CSS bugs (like adding a horizontal scrollbar whether it is needed or not when positioning elements relatively)
I use Chimera or Opera every now and then for testing and both are WAY faster the IE. I believe Opera is carbon as well as Mozilla - which shows that carbon.. while slower can still produce quality apps.
This is Microsoft FUD at it's best.
A tip for speeding up page renders (Score:2, Informative)
I'm not sitting at my OS X box right now, but I believe that IE defaults to displaying a page only after all of its components have been downloaded. If you turn this off, you'll see text and placeholders displayed right away while the graphics are downloading, if you can tolerate annoying reformatting and redrawing as you go.
Re:Interesting Source they chose (Score:4, Informative)
A fast browser for OS X (Score:2, Informative)
Regards,
proclus
Mach-O Mozilla (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Stability over Speed (Score:5, Informative)
Make it stable, make it fast, sell it.
There is considerably less to be said for:
Make it stable, sell it, make it fast, sell it again, largely to the same people.
What Apple is doing is more accurately described as:
Make it stable, sell it, make it fast, serve up free updates.
I bought OS X when it was 10.0.0. This week, I upgraded to 10.1.4, and I have not had to pay a single penny for any update so far. All updates so far have been 100% free-as-in-beer.
Go peddle your FUD elsewhere.
Re:Stability over Speed (Score:1, Informative)
MS IE for Mac & Wintel: The Details (Score:3, Informative)
On the other hand Mac IE is more standards-compliant overall then it's Wintel cousin in spite of some glaring CSS deficiencies & other asst'd bugs. It has a notably better design in some areas, incorporates some nice features like the left-hand bar, and a much better cache (as in not-broken.)
Of course Win IE has it's own set of bugs and deficiencies so overall they're about equal with the Mac IE being somewhat more "right" & the Win IE getting more support from sites.
For the future I expect that Carbon applications like Mac IE will be eventually replaced (or superseded.) Though they've been pushed farther then Apple originally wanted (gotten more features, more support, etc.) they're still not as effective at taking advantage of MacOS X as Cocoa applications are. On the other hand they're a relatively easy port and work nearly as well so they're the obvious step for developers with large code bases and little familiarity with Objective-C & Apple's Next-derived OO development environment.
Re:For the uninitiated (Score:1, Informative)
J
Classic Event Model vs. Carbon Event Model vs. ... (Score:5, Informative)
The new "Carbon Event Model" allows you to associate events with handlers, and when an event fires that you'd like to pay attention to, your call-back gets fired. Much more effecient.
The cocoa event model is even more robust.
The problem lies in that programers were able to compile a "carbon compliant" application, without moving to these new event models. THIS IS GOOD. Imagine how PISSED off a developer was if they were told, "Yea, you have to move all your event code over to this new system, cause it's better." No. A developer would rather have a product up and running on OS X natively, and then move over.
Anyway, it's not that Apple has "buggered" up the system someway, the applications have exploited the API's that Apple has made available, but it was a necissary evil.
http://developer.apple.com/techpubs/macosx/Carb
Has information about the carbon event model, and high performance computing.
Re:No troll, but the WHOLE UI is slow (Score:2, Informative)
But maybe I am just not as demanding as everyone else, but I don't see any performance problems with the user interface. I don't find myself waiting any longer for things to launch on OS X than I do on my Windows or Linux machines. Now, I grant you that the five most used applications on my powerbook are mail, terminal, project builder, mozilla and StarCraft; and the five most used on my windows machines are behemoths like VisualAge for Java, WSAD, NetBeans, Mozilla and StarCraft. So I may not be the best judge of the snappiness of response time.
Double your OS X network speed (usually) (Score:4, Informative)
/usr/sbin/sysctl -w net.inet.tcp.sendspace=65536
/usr/sbin/sysctl -w net.inet.tcp.recvspace=65536
/usr/sbin/sysctl -w kern.ipc.maxsockbuf=524288
/usr/sbin/sysctl -w net.inet.tcp.delayed_ack=0
/usr/sbin/sysctl -w net.inet.udp.recvspace=73728
It literally doubles my web browsing and file transfer speeds. This will probably be of value only to folks with broadband or ethernet connections. It wouldn't do much for obsolete modem users.
Browsing not slow on THIS mac (Score:5, Informative)
The problem was that EVERYTHING gave me spinning beach ball. File operations, minimizing Finder windows, you name it...Even scrolling in MOzilla and IE were affected. Then I read on MacAddict [macaddict.com] that OS X needs to be left running all night so that various "cleanup" tasks can run.
Anybody who has OS X should consider leaving there machine up all night so these run... It will resolve a great many problems that you're having, and allow us to go back to bashing MS and Oracle instead of Apple...
Unix people familiar with cron should have no problem with editing the cleanups to run at a more reasonable hour than 3am, 4am, and 5am (like one when your machine will be running)... (I think the file to edit is
Alternately, if you're a regular mac user and don't feel like mucking about with the terminal, hit Version Tracker [versiontracker.com] and pick up MacJanitor. It's a friendly GUI that lets to schedule your daily, weekly, and monthly jobs, or trip them manually on demand.
Since I'd used the machine, it had never been awake all night (I close the lid when I go to bed, usually before 3am...) so cron had never done anything to optimize my machine.
Now? All better. Faster than I remember 10.1.1 being...
Not very computer savy (Score:3, Informative)
-as quoted from the article
Last I checked, the reset button worked just as well for desktop macs as it does for a regular PC. And for laptops, a simple control-command-power press will reboot everytime, no matter how badly crashed.
Re:Usability & Stability over Speed (Score:3, Informative)
An no, ksh and vim aren't slow in OS X. Not to overshadow your point, because I think it's a good one... For geeks this is a perfect system too.
Just another data point... (Score:4, Informative)
I loaded www.cnn.com and www.apple.com under both IE and moz (9.9) under both machines.
For cnn.com, IE5 and moz on the Dell were about the same, around 2s. (Moz was the fastest to get the banner ad up, maybe IE5 was fractionally quicker overall. Very hard to tell. IE5 had the worst outlier though -- one time it took 5s.)
Moz 9.9 OSX was around 2.5-3s, and IE5 on the Mac was slowest -- 3-4s.
All browsers loaded the Apple page pretty much instantaneously. I couldn't tell the difference.
Lesson #1: use Mozilla under OSX; it's been getting faster with each point release, while IE5's remained static. IE5 can be sluggish at times.
Lesson #2: there really isn't that much of a difference between the machines. I do a fair bit of surfing on both, and they're literally side-by-side, hooked up to the same monitor. Up until now they'd always seemed about the same speed, surfing-wise, to me. So I was taken aback by the article -- and after testing, I guess the OSX browsers are a *little* slower, but not so's you'd notice much.
Mind you, I do have plenty of memory. Perhaps the iMacs were hitting the VM a little hard? Or, the pixmaps for all those pretty alpha-blended graphics probably add up. I believe there's an option to store them compressed in memory to speed things up on low memory machines, probably mentioned on one of the numerous OSX hint sites.
A.
Re:Stability over Speed (Score:2, Informative)
From good ole CompUSA, Windows XP home costs $200. The upgrade alone is $100. I'm stickin with Apple thank you.
Re:Browsing not slow on THIS mac (Score:3, Informative)
Triv
Re:A simple solution (Score:3, Informative)
It took a healthy speed hit when it switched over to rendering ATSUI text rendering (getting pretty anti-aliased text) instead of Mozilla's built in services (this was after the benchmarks posted in another comment were made), but beyond that, the only other major changes to the rendering engine that are planned are using native widgets instead of XUL widgets, adding Java and Plugin support, and finally packing up the our Cocoa embedded version of Gecko into a framework for easy inclusion in to other applications.
None of those things should slow down rendering too badly, except for maybe native widgets. We'll burn that bridge when we come to it.
Also, I'm hoping with future versions of OS X that the ATSUI text rendering library will be faster, so we may regain some of the speed that was lost with that change.
And of course, Chimera is going to be a browser, and nothing more. No mail, no IM, or anything else like that. If I wanted that kind of bloat, I'd be using Mozilla (or the Windows Explorer)
Re:Perspective from an early adopter (Score:3, Informative)
As for leaving out all the composer and mail junk, I don't know of a way to do that. However, current builds of chimera [mozdev.org] are fast, have quartz rendering compiled in, and are browser only. As a bonus, it's got a nice native cocoa interface that gets better and better with every build. It's still got some bugs, but I find it pretty usable.
Hope this helps!
Re:Double your OS X network speed (usually) (Score:3, Informative)
OS X seems to ship with some of these variables optimized for dialup users, oddly enough. The series of variables I list basically increase the buffer space for TCP and UDP traffic. In addition, one of the variables adjusts an ACK delay to 0.
man sysctl for more information. to get a list of sysctl variables, open Terminal and type "sysctl -a". It's usually not a very good idea to modify anything unless you're sure of what you are doing. It's easy to kill your machine.
HTH,
gg