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" ...
A simple solution (Score:2, Insightful)
The trouble is that the OS has to be backwards compatible all the way back to the early days of Multifinder et al. If you're compiling directly for OS X, you don't need to worry about the cruft.
Re:A simple solution - Fizzilla? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:A simple solution (Score:4, Informative)
The latest betas of OmniWeb [omnigroup.com] also beat IE by a nice margin.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:A simple solution (Score:3, Insightful)
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)
Stability over Speed (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Stability over Speed (Score:5, Insightful)
The slowdown is much more apparent on G3 systems, such as my iBook, where everything just seems to kind of crawl. I bought an iBook thinking it would have plenty of power, but I've come to find out that's not the case. For example, compiling programs takes forever (I'm a CS major, so this is a large reason I bought a laptop.) I don't fault OS X (the user experience is unmatched.. plus Apple's dev tools just rule;) I fault the machine. I'm planning on selling the iBook this summer and purchasing a PowerBook G4.
A dual 1 gHz G4 is a poor representative of average performance. The dual G4 machines are absolute behemoths, most people look at them and say "Oh, only 1 gHz CPUs, can't be that fast." They are VERY fast. By comparison, my 500 mHz G3 iBook is about 1/8 the speed of your system. My Athlon XP 1800+ is probably about 2/3 as fast as your system. It's hard to judge the speed of an operating system when you have that much raw power at your disposal.
Re:Stability over Speed (Score:4, Insightful)
there's a bit more to "user experience" (Score:4, Insightful)
on't really care which _computer_is faster. I want a cmmputer that makes _me_ faster, and if that is a slower computer, then that's fine by me.
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:5, Funny)
You think that's good? That's only, eh, say 14 updates? I use Windows and I've had hundreds of free updates!
You rock Bill!
- Ois
MSIE (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Try another brower (Score:2)
Oh, and slashdot reads just find under Omniweb 4.x as well as iCab, I should know, I use them at home for Slashdotting all the time.
Re:Won't be default forever (probably) (Score:3, Insightful)
I would take $5 x 100,000 month (im just guessing) compared to $20 x 1,000 a month.
See, the cool thing is, omniweb is free, it just reminds you everyone once in a while that it would be nice if you paid the people who make it. I bought mine with an education discount.
Pay for good software, because then they write more of it (with the exception of microsoft).
Re:Won't be default forever (probably) (Score:3, Insightful)
They can by giving them some money, like they do with the current PowerBook software bundle (OmniWeb and some other Omni stuff is in there, licensed for you by Apple).
Sure they do. Everyone who buys Windows pays for a browser. Even in the sense that you meant it people do pay, I did for example because I really like OmniWeb a lot and had $30 (or $25?) to spare.
Then consider paying for it. Either that or realize that you just posted "I'm too bloody cheap to fix something that irritates me, but I'm upset enough about it to complain in an international publication..."
New PowerMacs already bundle some Omni Software (Score:3, Insightful)
Omni would probably be tickled to death to have OmniWeb bundled. I wouldn't be surprised if it happens eventually, but there are still bugs to iron out and incompatibilities to fix.
I don't think it's unreasonable for Apple to say that they'll start bundling it if it is at least as compatible as IE.
The big problem now is that IE has name recognition among Windows users, and of course OmniWeb has none. So if they took out IE and put in OW, the average person on the street would think they were cheap and chintzy for not including the better known product.
That's why I don't think IE is going any time soon - but if OmniWeb could be added to the default install, I think that would be a Very Good Thing, since it sure does make MacOS X look fantastic.
Final point: I happily paid for OmniWeb, since I think the browser is worth the $30. It's a great product and deserves the support of its users. This is not a big company like Microsoft that can afford to work for free because it gets revenue from Windows. If you want independent companies to survive, you should support the ones whose products you appreciate.
D
Interesting Source they chose (Score:4, Interesting)
I run OS X, and I don't have any issues with browsing the internet.
Re:Interesting Source they chose (Score:2)
I wouldn't exactly call them competitors.
Their software doesn't even run on the same platform.
S
Re:Interesting Source they chose (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Interesting Source they chose (Score:2)
S
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:No problem here. (Score:2, Offtopic)
What, as opposed to deliberate pr0n?
Anyway, what is accidental porn? Is that when the guy misses the, er, lets just stop here....
Re:No problem here. (Score:2)
Re:No problem here. (Score:3, Insightful)
When's the last time you downloaded a new one? Mozilla for OS X has had an "Aqua" style appearance for like three or four months now.
Sheesh, people, quit judging Mozilla based on stuff before 0.9.5. There may have been a few regressions here and there, but there has been a lot of progress since the start of the year.
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:No problem here. (Score:3, Funny)
I have never meet someone that only web surf besides corporate executives (dig). But I guess if that is your only reason for using a computer, my statement would be incorrect. Most people I know do more than click links. They are using digital cameras, scanners, video cameras, printers, mp3 players, web cams, etc. Mac OS X does a great job of making those items easy to connect and interface with the Mac. Its what my Dad and I gave my mother so she would stop calling me and let him sleep at night about the expletivedeleted, expletivedeleted, expletivedeleted, expletivedeleted, expletivedeleted, expletivedeleted, expletivedeleted, expletivedeleted, expletivedeleted Windows computer. My mother tends to curse like a sailor when she can't get the computer to do what she wants.
Reverse Slashdotting? (Score:5, Funny)
MSIE for mac (Score:2, Insightful)
cheers,
jl
---
In those days spirits were brave, the stakes were high, men were real men, women were real women and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri.
Re:MSIE for mac (Score:2, Informative)
Re:MSIE for mac (Score:3, Informative)
tim
MS IE for Mac & Wintel: The Details (Score:3, Informative)
- Win IE & Mac IE have completely different codebases. If there's overlap it is only in snippets of code shared between the development teams.
- Aside from knowing the product history this is easily demonstrated by looking at the errata for each browser. They have very different feature sets / CSS implementations / rendering issues / etc.
- Win IE 5.x is a "Carbon" application; this means it is running using a set of libraries based on the old MacOS. However it is not running in the old MacOS itself (a "Classic" application). Indeed in spite of being a Carbon application the IE 5.x for MacOS X cannot run on MacOS (though there are IE 5.x for MacOS.)
- This is in line with MS Office v.X which hasn't been code-synched with it's Wintel cousin for years, is also Carbon-based, and also does not run on MacOS.
- So, in point of fact, you've got every one of yours wrong.
Mac IE is not a port of Win IE, is not running in an emulation layer, and has no excuse not to be faster.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: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.
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
Hmmm thats strange (Score:2)
In my experience you optimize for performance and sacrifice optimization for user experience.
Mac OS X IE is not the same as in Windoze (Score:4, Insightful)
Here's something interesting though:
IE in Mac OS X follows the standards a lot better than IE in Windows.
When we constructed our new company webpage we had to customize it for both IE/windows and IE/Mac.
Ciryon
Re:Mac OS X IE is not the same as in Windoze (Score:2)
Slashdot is the most painful of all... (Score:3, Insightful)
On my Win2K machine at work, a /. article with 200 replies render within seconds. On my G4/400 at home, the same page could take 30 seconds or more to render. What's worse, I get the "spinning CD cursor of doom" while it renders, so I can't even click on Stop or Back.
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
Open Source? (Score:3, Interesting)
This looks like the opensource motto `release early, release often'.
Re:Open Source? (Score:2)
Actually, it's more like a real-world application of the common programming aphorism: don't optimize too early.
use xfce (Score:2)
honestly i switched to it from kde, and am really happy. the filemanager r0x0rs, the way minimised windows get iconified to icons, is really neat, you can drag them around, and handle them like desktop icons.
for example icon view of directory "devel" for example.
desktop menu is great, that lets you minimize all windows at once etc.
it even supports antialiasing if you want to. and is no resource hog. xfce is the working environment, that gtk is built for, not gnome.
i say working environment because i mean it, you can really get work done, whereas the desktop environments i know mostly try to mimic commercial gui's like apples macosX and windows.
fighting the eyecandy
Speed is relative (Score:4, Insightful)
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:Post Script Acceleration (Score:2)
Re:Post Script Acceleration (Score:2)
Re:Post Script Acceleration (Score:3, Informative)
haven't noticed (Score:2)
I really don't notice a speed difference in page loading.
Now my room mate has a 1.6 GHZ AMD with XP on it. That is faster but it crashes at least twice a day. I'll take the extra 10 seconds (more like 2-4) over a crash or a two a day.
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:haven't noticed (Score:3, Funny)
What is your roommate doing? Ripping out PCI cards while the machine is running? Clearly this guy has some kind of hardware problem because I have three machines running XP and the one thing they almost never do is crash. Clearly your roommate needs to take his machine back to the store or -- if he built it himself -- learn how to do it properly.
(Seriously) not trying to troll here, but an XP machine in proper working order shouldn't crash twice a day. Did he forget to attach the heat sink? Did he drool some hummus onto the motherboard? Does he have back issues of Gent piled up on the cooling vent? Something is clearly wrong with that machine.
Been discussed in Apple's forums (Score:3, Insightful)
The mac zealots (not unlike linux zealots) get all defensive about such issues, as you can see.
Why Does Web Browsing STILL S*ck On the Mac? [apple.com]
S
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:Over-emphasised as usual. (Score:2)
even when I use the preview button, I get crap wrong.
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).
GPUs (Score:2)
I have heard that Apple is trying to (essentially) port Quartz/Aqua to OpenGL, so they they, too, can take advantage of hardware acceleration for drawing their eye candy.
The days of 2-D GUI acceleration, where fills and bitblts were 90% of the solution, are quickly passing. 2D hardware acceleration does not help with alpha blending, for instance.
I wonder how X/QT/Gtk will keep up with this next round of WIMP: WIMP-3D. Perhaps the Gnome Canvas could be hardware-accelerated using GLX. Rasterman is working (supposedly) on EVAS, a 3D-assisted rendering mechanism for X.
Re:GPUs (Score:2)
I wonder how X/QT/Gtk will keep up with this next round of WIMP: WIMP-3D. Perhaps the Gnome Canvas could be hardware-accelerated using GLX. Rasterman is working (supposedly) on EVAS, a 3D-assisted rendering mechanism for X.
"Supposedly" eh? Check the evas module from enlightenment CVS. It looks fairly complete.
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.
I don't know what these guys are talking about... (Score:5, Funny)
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: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.
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?
Re:It's as much IE as OS X (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:It's as much IE as OS X (Score:3, Funny)
Hope that helps.
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
The reason why (Score:3, Insightful)
You're better off using Mozilla, especially the rapidly developing Mach-O version which has an multithreaded Unix backend and is very fast.
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.
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.
It's time to change!!! (Score:2)
A fast browser for OS X (Score:2, Informative)
Regards,
proclus
Mach-O Mozilla (Score:2, Informative)
Mac OS 1.1 (Score:2, Insightful)
Of course it's a little slow. It's new code. That's why they can make it faster with each revision. It's probably going to continue getting faster and faster as the coders get more comfortable with the code base.
So yeah, it's slow. Is anyone really surprised?
Comparisons Don't Wash Yet (Score:3, Insightful)
It's a simple way to say that Mac OS X is really a "1.0" product, folks. NOTHING like this OS has been put together to do the things it does. Other posters indicated that many of us would trade speed for stability, and I fall in that camp, too.
The original Mac OS became quite refined and swift from the OS level after many years of development. Windows 95 wasn't all that optimized at its introduction but its successors do well in this area. Yet Microsoft sacrifices stability AND security for speed.
Mac OS X is pleasing to the eye, but graphic pros know a slug when they see it. Still, time will fix it. Now that Apple has solved most of the serious feature deficits and bugs (or at least knows of them), they can concentrate on optimization--big time.
How much performance and happiness did you get out of Windows 1.0? Linux 1.0? Cut the new kid some slack. It's doing good for a 1 year old.
Oh...OmniWeb rocks for general viewing. Loading 200+ posts from Slashdot is much faster than IE, which has to load ALL the posts before you can view them. Cocoa also adds antialiasing to text that makes web browsing great.
In comparison to web browsing in Windows and Mac OS 9, things a little slower in OS 10.1. But then, IE won't kill my OS when it crashes, and my OS X system has never suffered an OS X kernel panic for over a year. I'll take that over the speed thing any day, for now.
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: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!
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.
User Experience (Score:3)
I am happy to defend Apple sometimes, but statements like this are totally silly. Speed and responsiveness is an important part of "user experience." That's why us Amiga nuts stayed with our 50 MHz machines for so long: the 500 MHz machines weren't able to keep up! (But today's gigahertz machines are able to, which is why Amigas are finally fading away even among the diehards). Responsiveness is part of the user interface! No amount of newspeak, rationalization, and Gnome/Microsoft/Apple apologism will convince me otherwise.
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.
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
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 /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
Re:Browsing not slow on THIS mac (Score:3, Informative)
Triv
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.
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!
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.
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.
Re:No troll, but the WHOLE UI is slow (Score:2)
IOW, they left compatabillity in 'cause you would have had the 'million man march' on apple headquarters if they hadn't. (Apple did take forever to support their video card cards in the g3's - long enough to get some upgrades to g4)
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.
Re:No troll, but the WHOLE UI is slow (Score:3, Funny)
yes. Rooted and rootless.
You could just get rid of that whole icky Aqua nonsense and run an X server with something nice and minimal like icewm.
Yep. This must be slashdot.
Re:No troll, but the WHOLE UI is slow (Score:2)
Once I download and install KDE it might slow a bit but the difference has been so amazing under FVWM95 that the slowdown might not be significant.
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:Why exactly does it run slow??? (Score:2)
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.
Re:Why exactly does it run slow??? (Score:3, Insightful)
Similarly, applying filters in Photoshop doesn't use 2D graphics accelleration at all -- it's all raw FP or integer (or AltiVec) depending on the filter.
The Photoshop speed difference is almost certainly the result of OS X not allowing apps to completely monopolize the CPU -- IOW, it doesn't demonstrated any OS X inefficiency whatsoever, it's just the cost of modern multitasking.
Re:My favourite line... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:VM (Score:4, Funny)
/Pedro