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" ...
Interesting Source they chose (Score:4, Interesting)
I run OS X, and I don't have any issues with browsing the internet.
Open Source? (Score:3, Interesting)
This looks like the opensource motto `release early, release often'.
Post Script Acceleration (Score:3, Interesting)
Alot of the issues surrounding OS X's percieved speed will hopefully be resolved with the 10.2 upgrade. There should be some components that will have hardware acceleration support. So, as already stated in the article, apple wanted the user experience first and the speed second. As we have seen each revision of the os has provided better performance. The good news is it can only get better.
Re:Stability over Speed (Score:5, Interesting)
The dual PII is now a fast, stable linux machine, and my Mac has not crashed _once_. Each time I allow it to download and install the latest OS update, it gets faster.
In theory I always agreed with the stability over features idea, but I really had no idea how satisfying it is in practice. It's the most stable workstation under $5000 I've ever used, and not once have I bothered to read anyone's benchmarks on the system.
The best part is that if the web browsing may be slower, I have not noticed at all, because the overall experience is much more satisfying.
Re:No problem here. (Score:3, Interesting)
That's what I am talking about! I have tried about every build of Mozilla since the beginning for OS X. The Chimera builds show some promise with more incorporation of native widgets but the interface is still ugly. Looks like it was designed by a Windows user.
Re:MSIE for mac (Score:2, Interesting)
Then came IE6. Slow. Frequently jumps to 100% CPU usage on even the simplest flash animations (a big problem now that so many ads use those rather than animated GIFs). Crashes frequently.
Unfortunately, uninstalling IE6 isn't exactly an easy task...maybe they'll make 6.5 soon and it'll be as good as 5.5 again.
Browsers differences and UI responsiveness (Score:4, Interesting)
On the topic of browsers, MS IE is definitely the worst in terms of stability and speed in OSX. The other main contenders, Omniweb and Mozilla (and especially the Cocoa based Mozilla derivative Chimera) have improved enormously over the past year, from the point where Omniweb could not render any css or do any javascript and Mozilla crashed just about every 5 minutes to the point where Omniweb renders Hotmail better than IE itself and Mozilla now supports native UI elements and almost never crashes. IE improved a bit from the first beta version last years but has since only had the odd security upgrade and no feature or performance improvment whatsoever.
My personal two winners in the future will be Omniweb when it is fully CSS and DOM compatible and Chimera when it gets to version
I have also noticed that the UI has improved to the point where it is not that much slower than the Classic MacOS anymore and I presume that with 10.2 and further on it will get even better.
Usability & Stability over Speed (Score:5, Interesting)
Apples market isn't the hard core geek (not yet anyway) they are trying to puncture the home PC market with the iMac, not the corporate desktop. So far I think they have done suprisingly well.
I just bought a G4 and it comes with: mp3 software, dvd / cd burning software, video editing software, email software, web browser, and a VERY intuituve interface.
Another nice feature is the DVD playback isn't sketchy (I had a creative DVD Player in my old Win2000 machine and could never get the DVD Window to size right.) and you can even tile applications without having any wierd show through from the DVD window.
Straight out of the box, you can do more than any WinXP/2000/ME/98 Box ever did. Then throw on any of the available apps Office / Photoshop / Illustrator / Mozilla / FTP (for those who don't like the command line) etc.
The set up is easy and the "iTools" that mac provides (free for mac users) are actually quite nice.
I have been using intel based machines for a little over 12 years and have always regarded mac's as odd. But now that OS X (BSD) is at the core, its a truely robust system. The only thing I use my PC for is work (we are married to some microsoft technologies like SQL Server.)
I will sacrifice speed for two things:
Mac has them both now. And without the need to reboot the machine due to memory leaks if an application crashes. I have this problem all the time on my Thinkpad.
Re:No troll, but the WHOLE UI is slow (Score:3, Interesting)
Apple knows if they turn their hardware in to commodity hardware (with constant upgrades needed to use the latest), their users will be less loyal, since that is one of the selling points for die-hard Mac users. Their users love backwards compatability and long machine livability. Think - FireWire and gigabit ethernet standard.
Also, Apple knows that a good interface will sell more machines. Mac users are likely to think that OS X is really pretty and simple to use when they try it on their G3, and will think less about its lack of speed. But in the long run, users will eventually realize the need for a new upgrade, and will of course pick something running OS X. That happens to be another Apple machine.
It's as much IE as OS X (Score:5, Interesting)
While others have made this observation, I'll second (or third or fourth) it--when you use a web browser that's fully Cocoa, it's a lot snappier. I've given up using IE except when I have to; I primarily use OmniWeb, but I have to say that Chimera's rendering speed is pretty stunning.
I don't doubt that OS X's speed can be improved, particularly particularly in the "subjective performance" category. Very few people seem to have learned what was (IMHO) the real lesson from Amiga: if you make your UI quick and responsive, your entire OS will seem quick and responsive. BeOS figured that out. OS X, well, hasn't. It's great that they're pushing stability, but in my experience OS X has been the least stable Unix I've used (and I say that as a committed OS X fan). I'd like to at least have gained speed from that tradeoff, but that isn't there yet.
Here's hoping OS X 10.2 has that missing hardware acceleration.
Incidentally: when it hits 11.0, what are they going to do? Call it OS Y?
I think it's a matter of interp... (Score:2, Interesting)
Mac OS X on a G3 isn't "painfully slow," but it isn't a speed demon (haha) so to speak, either. Mac OS X on a G4 rocks all over, and anyone who thinks otherwise might want to install an OS X native browser and stop whining. =)
jrbd
I think it's Carbon vs. Cocoa (Score:3, Interesting)
But -- since it's pretty obvious that Microsoft just Carbonized the existing IE for Mac OS 9, and since everything else OS X is real fast (I threw in a gig of RAM) -- I think the real problem lies with IE. A true Cocoa version oughta rip whenever Microsoft comes up with it.
Duh, try a different browser (like Chimera!) (Score:2, Interesting)
Mozilla RC1 is noticably faster than IE on my TiBook 550 and Chimera is at least twice as fast as Mozilla.
I've never used OmniWeb which most Mac users swear by, but IE on the Mac is a good bit slower than IE on Windows - but I would easily say that Chimera is the fastest browser I've use on ANY platform.
Perspective from an early adopter (Score:5, Interesting)
They're right. Almost. It feels a little slow to me, but not unbearably so. Perhaps my tolerance is too high, but I don't feel like I'm sitting around waiting for the system. Or perhaps (since I've been using Mac OS X since the first day of the public beta and Mac OS for several years!) I'm so impressed with the overall improvements to my "computing experience" that have come with Mac OS X that I don't notice *all* of the warts. Frankly, I've had my performance complaints, and the browser hasn't been one of them. Don't get me started on the Finder...
My system is an iMac DV G3/400MHz with 512MB RAM and a 27GB internal HD. Certainly not a performance champ... in fact, except for the RAM it's rather low-end. My point of reference for Wintel is my work PC, an IBM thinkpad 1GHZ, 392MB/32GB running RedHat 7.2 and occasionally booting into Win2k (when I need to edit someone else's MS Project or Visio files). For most operations (checking e-mail, running MS Office, browsing) I don't find that the iMac *feels* slower. Most days, I work from my home office with the two machines sitting side by side. I don't find myself turning to the Thinkpad for browsing; in fact, it's rather the opposite. I do much of my office correspondence on the iMac due to the superiority of the Office implementation for Mac OS X.
Perhaps the reason I don't find it so slow, though, is that I seldom use MSIE. I am not morally opposed to MSIE; I do use office after all, and actually like office V.X. (It's the first version I've liked since the version with Word 5 (Office 4.0?), though I found Office 98 tolerable.) MSIE is just not the best browser for Mac OS X. Its rendering engine is buggy, and it's *SLOW*. By that, I mean that it feels significantly slower than the other browsers I use. I find that I use 3 browsers:
All that said, though, IE is the default, and it's IE that the Mac will be judged on. I think the Moz crew has proven that the performance hit is not all apple's fault, though. Even so, Apple and MS would be well served to ensure that IE and Office are really snappy on Apple's newest hardware and OS combinations. I don't doubt that they will, now that OS development seems to have stabilized somewhat.
Re:haven't noticed (Score:2, Interesting)
Link to auto reboot info: CNet Win XP Nightmares [cnet.com]
The causes may be bad drivers etc, but the point of a solid OS is to keep humming and allow you to kill a process gone wrong in most cases.
Can you say "mach" ? (Score:2, Interesting)
OS X is implemented on top of the Mach microkernel. This (mach) is slow. So slow that OS developers (excepting QNX) have essentially given up on microkernel designs, convinced that they added unavoidable latencies. How bad? IIRC, a null-IPC (the shortest inter-process message you can send) in mach took on the order of 30,000 cycles. Every call to an OS service requires at least 1 such round-trip, and 2 or 3 if it goes to a driver (program -> mach -> driver -> mach -> program).
Recent work (esp. by the late Dr. Jochen Liedtke) such as the L4 -Kernel [tu-dresden.de] has shown remarkable improvements in IPC speed and bandwidth -- on the order of 150 cycles on a Pentium-1.
If I had enough spare time, I would port Darwin (the OS X kernel) to L4/x86 and see how much faster it goes.
...
Of course, having said that, I should note that Microsoft was probably not motivated to make IE on OS X run very fast or reliably. So the answer is probably "it runs slow because of both the OS and the browser"
Slow web browsing? Funny (Score:1, Interesting)
Admittedly OSX has some serious overhead in the graphics department and gobbles down RAM, but it is also a very new and very stable platform with some great features and even greater potential. Speedwise, it is still more responsive than my Win2K box and I don't have to reboot it every 2 days to clean up all the memory leaks. Also working in OSX every month or so I'll be sitting there, working away happily and think to myself, "wow this kicks ass." Two nights ago was one of those times when I realized that I was simultaneously running:
a OSX mail program, web browser, and chat program
a OS9 video game
a java Peer-to-peer client
a pentium II emulator installing a copy of windows
an X-windows based graphics program
and all the while a command like distributed computing project was using up the remaining 30% or so of one of my processors. Try that on your windows box
My advice to OSX users concerned about slow web browsing would be to do what I did. remove execute permissions for IE (but leave it in place so when apple sends you yet another security update for it the installer is happy) and download a decent browser. Omniweb is fast and clean. Netscape will render most of the 2.5% that omniweb chokes on.
Finally! Here is my story (Score:3, Interesting)
With all the praise heaped on OS X, everyone seems to forget to mention how slow it really is. They are right - it is really nice. But it is SO SLOW!
Due in large part to positive comments I read on Slashdot, I purchased an Apple iBook with OS 9/X, however, I wasn't interested in 9. I only wanted to use X.
Took it home, very excited to play with my new toy. Up comes the "Welcome to your new Mac, please register" window. It's all pretty and aqua-like. I click in one of the fields to enter my name and (this is not a joke) the computer was already lagging! I couldn't believe it. When I clicked to pop down widget for "state" there again was a noticeable lag which continued as I went through the fields! Keep in mind, this is just the "welcome" screen - I haven't even started using the computer yet.
And yes, before you ask, this computer had 640 MB of RAM, so that wasn't the problem.
The situation did not improve as I began to install the applications I wanted to use. Dragging and resizing windows is an exercise in frustration. Switching between browser windows or applications is very slow. The bundled mail.app has a noticeable lag when I switch to a different email message in the preview pane. (Even a crummy client like Outlook is lightning fast when switching between locally stored messages.) Opening the system preferences window takes 5-10 seconds.
I think one of the greatest inventions is the wheel mouse. When I'm reading Usenet or web pages, I like to use the wheel to quickly page up or down. On even a 'slow' wintel, 400mhz let's say, this is a very smooth process. A few clicks of the wheel and the screen smoothly scrolls to the bottom. On OS X is sputters and lags, and takes 3 to 4 times as long to reach my destination. It's not just the wheel mouse, if you just click and hold the window scroll arrow there is the same problem.
Apple says the G3/G4 is suppposed to be far faster per mhz than Wintel, and I bought into that when I bought the iBook. However it simply IS NOT TRUE. In fact, I feel the G3 is actually SLOWER than a PIII of the same clockspeed. Keep in mind you can buy a Wintel with double the clock for the same price and you have an ugly situation.
After a while, I just couldn't take it anymore - it was constant frustration everytime I booted up. It was just not acceptable, especially considering what I paid for the computer. For what I paid, I could have bought a 1 ghz AMD laptop, which I can assure you, does not lag in the slightest when running Windows 2000.
I ended up selling it, just 8 weeks after I bought it, and I don't miss it. Right now I'm shopping for it's replacement.
You don't hear any Mac users warning you about this - instead, they recommend that you purchase the computer! I'm under the impression that either they just don't realize how much faster Windows/Linux is (maybe they haven't used x86 in a few years) or maybe they are just in denial as a way of trying to defend the platform that they love. (i.e. they know it's very slow, but deny it when asked because they want to preserve a favorable opinion about Macs).
This is the dirty little secret that no one wants to admit. There is a thread on MacSlash about how attractive the Mac is supposed to be for Java development. I tried some java programs like Jedit and NetBeans and they ran at about 1/2 to 1/3 of the speed of running them on Wintel.
Hello! The emperor has no clothes! It's okay to say so!
Speed! (Score:2, Interesting)
ps. Chimera is lightning fast, too bad there's not plugin support, yet.
not /var/run/cron.pid (Score:3, Interesting)
Not having a mac (yet) I can't tell you which file to edit, but it isn't that one
A note about hype (Score:2, Interesting)
When was the last time you saw a rumor site about Dell, or Gateway, or even AMD? No one really cares about what new stuff their developing. Partly because we already know. AMD will turn out faster chips, Dell will turn out crapier machines and Gateway will market more windows boxes.
But what will apple turn out? Will the next computer from apple litteraly be a notebook type of computer (anyone remember watching inspector gadget?) Will they revisit their handheld with a Newton II? Will they make a iCorder, the newest digital camera? We all enjoy the hype of apple, even when they let us down. It's fun. We expect nothing less of apple.
Re:Stability over Speed (Score:2, Interesting)
Most of the people I've talked to that complain about speed under OS X turn out to: a) be running lots of Classic applications (which I don't own any of); or b) trying to force OS X to work like what they're used to.
Personally I think it works just fine the way it is, it's the coolest BSD laptop you can buy.
In my opinion... (Score:3, Interesting)
It's 2002 now... and the web, moreovere, webbrowsers, have had over five years to mature. Yet there isn't a single browser out there that is a respectful mix of standards-based compatiblity, ease of use, and speed. Why?
Don't feed me that line that you can't have everything in one package because once you add-in all of the features, things must slow down. Phooey. We can get Quake to run @ 92837423947fps, but can't get a kickass browser in the market. WTF is *that* all about?
And looking upon the IE alternatives...
-Netscape 6.2? Get real. I would probably look upon it more favorably if it were coded to take advantage of Quartz/Aqua & Carbon/Cocoa in OSX. I'd also like to mention that its scrolling bar is *way* too narrow...
-OmniWeb? They want me to pay them ~$30 for an incomplete browser... yah right. Try fixing your java & CSS support, guys.
-Opera? You're kidding right? It's in the same class as Omni, if you ask me.
-IE? It has wronfully become the litimus test for web-development. Yet... is a necessary evil. The majority of browsers out there are IE. Why wouldn't your site be geared towards it?
I've said it before, and I'll say it again... the *ONLY* competition IE has is Netscape.
What really boggles my mind is that this [w3.org] likes to render in a variety of ways depending on which os, browser, and platform you use. That to me is just pathetic.
Stupid as this sounds... I'd rather build a webpage based on PDF. Then I'd at least know it would look the same no matter where it loaded. And would scale so it wouldn't be tethered to a set screen resolution.
Everything you need to know (Score:3, Interesting)
I bought an iBook (500mhz, 640 MB RAM) with OS X, 10.1 and updated it to the current stuff using the software update control panel.
The new iBook is signifcantly slower (switching between applications, moving windows, resizing windows, scrolling) than a PowerMac 7100/66 that we keep around for testing. (It must be 6 or 7 years old.)
Now I don't know (and frankly, I don't care) about cocoa vs. carbon, display postscript, window managers, OpenGL, UNIX, C++, java, or any of that. But I do know something is wrong with the speed of OS X.
It just sucks and it's not acceptable. I no longer own the iBook.