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Mozilla Businesses The Internet Apple

Apple Creating iBrowser on Mozilla Code? 91

Posted by pudge from the have-some-conspiracy-with-your-coffee dept.
louismg writes "The Register is claiming there may be a browser mutiny in Cupertino. The Mozilla-based Chimera browser was featured by many speakers during this month's WWDC, which may constitute a backhand endorsement, and could be used as a weapon in the 'negotiations' with Bill Gates and Co. over IE ..." Chimera is beginning to turn into a usable browser, favored by many Mac OS X users. Who knows? Update: 05/28 15:33 GMT by P : Chimera 0.2.8 was released today.
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Apple Creating iBrowser on Mozilla Code? More

Apple Creating iBrowser on Mozilla Code?

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  • it would be nice (Score:2, Insightful)

    by chabegger ( 232188 )
    I would like it if Apple produced something like this. All the software they produce is easy to use and works very good. I wouldn't mind an alternative to IE. I don't mind IE, but alternatives and competition are always good....right?

    • Re:it would be nice... But... (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      This would only contribute to the stigma that Apple is starting to pull the usual Microsoft tactics. I don't thinks Steve wants to do that. If you look at all of apple's "i" products, you can see that none of them were created to compete directly with any other specific product, they were unprecidented releases meant to bring usablitity which previously didn't exist and to inspire a greater base of developers to relize the viability of the mac platform. If apple had not made thoes products no one would of. They simply had to take it in their own hands to offer an incredible base level user experience because no one else was helping them. The Browser wars are somewhat different though. Apple see's that their is already a good deal of competition and that by making their own labeled product they will hurt that even more than by including IE as their default browser. If their smart apple will put support into the development of Chimera and will eventually, when it is ready, make it their default browser. I doubt they would persue Mozilla much considering it is so heavy, isn't based on cocca and would be a little confusing for many basic users who have already started using apple's basic mail and address book apps.
      • i was always under the impression that IE was the default browser by some sort of deal with M$ (that 5 year plan of cooperation). granted that deal is technically over now (or this summer?), but both sides have agreed to keep with the spirit of the agreement. i would think M$ would throw a fit if something else was default.
        it is also odd that over the last 5 years Netscape would sometimes install with the OS and sometimes not. it was never default, but it was sometimes there. when i installed 10.0 and 10.1, there was only IE. i do not know if they figured other browsers were not mature enough yet or what, but the IE that shipped with 10.0 was terrible. as general habit i delete all M$ software from my machine after a fresh install. these days in OS X i use Mozilla for browsing 99% of the time, if it fails me i revert to Omniweb or icab (my previous first choices for OS X). i have not downloaded Chimera yet, but i think i will later. so far i have heard really posi things about it (even with the early early releases).
        and totally off on a tangent... i really hope AOL dumps IE, i would be psyched to see lazy web site designers to have to revert back to the true standards. i don't know if it is coincidence or what, but in the last few months i have run into more and more websites that do not properly function with any browser i still have on my machine. to hell with the M$ plans to "streamline the internet when everyone uses our software".
        • In 10.0 Netscape wasn't really availible for OS X. I don't even think the beta was availible. iCab wasn't up for the task either, and I'm positive Apple didn't want Lynx as the default.

          There was Omniweb, but it was still in a beta, and had/has poor Java support.

  • iCyberdog (Score:3, Funny)

    by phillyclaude ( 215272 ) <claudeNO@SPAMclaudeschrader.com> on Tuesday May 28, 2002 @08:37AM (#3594472) Homepage
    its time for a cocoa-ized version of cyberdog
    • Ahhh, Cyberdog... I remember fondly this thing. I used it in spite of itself. Even tho it was unstable and had terrible javascript problems. However it was (one of?) the first to take the browser metaphor to you own desktop. OpenDoc would have been a nice technology to keep. Jobs didn't want a part of it, even though it would have been trivial to port it.
      • A thing it was. Barely housebroken. I loved its mail, though. I forget why I liked it so much, but it had no features, barely worked, but I left it kicking and screaming. I should dig up my old OpenDoc and Cyberdog CDs to see them running on Mac OS X (if OD even works in 9.2.2.) Aaah...those were the days.

    • Re:iCyberdog (Score:2, Informative)

      by Alex Thorpe ( 575736 )
      I used CyberDog for about two years, myself, both for email and web browsing. Of course, Apple stopped improving it a few weeks into that two years, so web site compatibility was never great. On the other hand, it had great disk caching, and could load frequently visited sites almost instantly over dialup. It also resized the pages to fit the window, so there was never a scroll bar on the bottom of the window. The mail client never supported html, but used a form of RTF instead, with embedded picture support. There was also separate FTP and Gopher tools.

      The Cyberdog web tool did speed up the back arrow by keeping recently viewed web pages in memory, but that became more of a liability as web sites became more complex. I have a feeling that it would have choked on today's Slashdot threads.

  • Sensationalism (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Dephex Twin ( 416238 ) on Tuesday May 28, 2002 @09:15AM (#3594646) Homepage
    I think perhaps the title of this article is a bit of sensationalism. There is no general knowledge nor mention in the article that Apple is making any browser whatsoever. The only "news" that the article mentions is that Apple _appeared_ to push Chimera in the WWDC, although it is a brand new application in very early developmental stages.

    Yes, there has been recent speculation that Apple might move to a different "default" browser, now that the agreement with Microsoft is coming to an end. But it's been little more than people wondering... no real evidence.

    I'd say it may very well happen, and the article brings up some good reasons why it might.

    But to imply not only that this is happening, but Apple is creating it or directly involved is misleading.

    mark
    • Of course. That's why the title has a question mark, the dept. line read "have-some-conspiracy-with-your-coffee", and the final sentence was "Who knows?" Those are strong hints that this is all just speculation. :-)
      • Well, I still think the title was misleading, as I thought there was a real development of some sort in this speculation that's been going on.

        I don't think this was a terrible untruth or anything. I more wanted to make it clear that this is really 99.9% speculation, just based on "if I were running Apple, this is what I would do now" ideas. And although there have been the tiniest shreds of evidence to indicate Apple might at some point go with a gecko browser at default, I don't know of any evidence that Apple itself is doing anything.

        So maybe if this was angled as "an interesting opinion piece at theRegister" instead of "this might be happening now, according to theRegister. Who knows?" would make it not be sensationalism to me.

        That's all. It's still an interesting thing to think about.

        mark
  • chimera also chimaera Pronunciation Key(k-mîr, k-)
    n.
    1.
    a. An organism, organ, or part consisting of two or more tissues of different genetic composition, produced as a result of organ transplant, grafting, or genetic engineering.
    b. A substance, such as an antibody, created from the proteins or genes or two different species.

    2. An individual who has received a transplant of genetically and immunologically different tissue.
    3. A fanciful mental illusion or fabrication
    • Hey my post is not "offtopic." Let me say it another way:

      Is Chimera...?

      An organism, organ, or part consisting of two or more tissues of different genetic composition, produced as a result of organ transplant, grafting, or genetic engineering. Is Chimera a piece of software made from Netscape and other odd bits?

      A substance, such as an antibody, created from the proteins or genes or two different species.
       Does it, like an antibody, cure the disease that is the current browser market?

      A fanciful mental illusion or fabrication
       Is it just a lot of hype?

      How's that for offtopic? Sheesh. I thought it was clever.

  • Apple getting antsy? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Nexum ( 516661 ) on Tuesday May 28, 2002 @09:20AM (#3594666)
    There are much wider implications involved rather than a simple browser here - IE means a lot psychologically to Microsoft, it's a product that it fought very hard (and very dirty) to have succeed against Netscape, and also to some extent the DoJ, and Microsoft is currently loving the fact it's the de facto browser shipping with both of the two most popular desktop operating systems on Earth (Mac OS & Windows). For Apple to devote time and money towards developing a competing browser is going to be seen as a rather aggressive move by Apple, and with the 1997 MS/Apple deal timed out now, Apple has to be cautious to maintain the support of MS as an ISV (take Office away from Apple and it's in trouble). But on the other hand, Apple is in an extremely strong position, it has 4.5 billion USD in the bank, it has award winning products that the world seems to be fawning over, it's FINALLY got itself an ultra modern OS, it's diverging at both extremes of the industry (iPod and XServe), and despite the tech slump with a combined worldwide economic slowdown, the company is amazingly still turning a healthy profit. The knowledge of this newfound stability is likely to fuel Job's fire for radicalism that has in the past produced both fantastically innovative products, and also almost ruined the company - what will it do this time? Who knows, but all the signs point to Apple getting back up for round two vs MS - starting with the little tremors such as the page dedicated to educating Windows users as to the superiority of Mac OSX that went live on the Apple site a couple of months ago, and recently Job's commented during an interview with the BBC on doubling Apple's marketshare in very positive terms. It seems the future is anything but certain, and only a fool would resign Apple to it's current position in the industry - if Apple does have new browser plans underway, you can be sure that it's part of a much larger move back into the limelight.
    • I think it isn't accidental. I think they are testing support of Chimera in house. Why? Chimera is Mozilla based, but uses direct plugs to the Aqua GUI in OSX (if memory serves). So they are really leveraging what is turning out to be a very good open source code base.


      Why would Apple do this? Because Macs have been slowly but surely marginalized by depending upon IE. It doesn't run half of the VBscript or even some of the server-based ASP stuff correctly--and if it remains the defacto standard, more and more users will have to get on a PC to do their banking (or whatever). For the average user it isn't worth the headache. Our website at our company can't run on a Mac--not that it couldn't, but the PC bigots write code testing for A Mac or Non-explorer browser because they don't want the hassle (or are mentally lazy) of supporting anything other than IE 5 on Windows. This situation is epidemic and the greatest concern for Macs as a platform in the future.


      What I would be doing if I were Apple? Helping to add IE/Win functionality or code-morphing to translate VBscript and other MS crap into something more useful, then let all browsers lie to the server and say they are windows IE based. Help the Mozilla/Chimera effort in the wake of the inevitable .NOT incompatibilities that will "accidentally slip in".

      I really hope they are worried about web compatibility. IE on the Mac is just an excuse to do very little on Microsofts part.

      • are doomed to repeat it.
        What I would be doing if I were Apple? Helping to add IE/Win functionality or code-morphing to translate VBscript and other MS crap into something more useful, then let all browsers lie to the server and say they are windows IE based. Help the Mozilla/Chimera effort in the wake of the inevitable .NOT incompatibilities that will "accidentally slip in".
        This is exactly what M$ wants people to do. It perpetuates the myth that if you make something compatible with windows that it will eventually work on everything else. Except that M$ will continually tweak things to "fix security problems". It is a losing battle. The end result is that M$ becomes the defacto standard.

        The correct thing to do is support a standard. That is what they are for.

        • The correct thing to do is support a standard. That is what they are for.

          Agreed. Also, have you noticed Apple is slowly developing products as replacements to office? Appleworks can do everything that I need out of a Word Processor. It's Spreadsheet is vastly inferior to Excel, but it's coming along. It's presentation isn't bad but is only feasible if you're using a laptop (good luck finding a mac in a presentation room). Mail is getting beefed up (and I just replaced Entourage with it in anticipation of an open contact list to work better with my IM clients) and Mozilla/Chimera/Omniweb are coming along very nicely. Did I mention AW can read .doc's? Oh yeah, let's not forget all the Linux office variants now making their way to OS X.

          These aren't good solutions to the no-office problem, but Apple is definitely aware of the possibility of office getting pulled.

          so what are the odds that some company can produce a product that does what Outlook/Project/Excel can do (plenty of products could replace word, nobody uses 90% of its features anyways) and not have all the gaping security holes it presents? I can't remember the last time a friend of mine upgraded Office to get more features. THey just upgrade because they save a file on the new office at work/school and then can't open it at home.

  • Well, yippie. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Big Sean O ( 317186 ) on Tuesday May 28, 2002 @09:21AM (#3594668)
    I for one can't wait for Chimera to be as good as Mozilla RC3.

    I know that people say that Mozilla is a failure because it didn't kill IE, and that it's big and bloated, but the good part about Mozilla is it's all open, baby. You want to build your own lean, mean browser? Have at it!

    That's the benefit of the Mozilla project. It's a big open pile of browser-related code that will drive projects for the next decade.

    Chimera is looking very good and has all the Aqua-ey bits. Ditching Mail, News, Composer, Chatzilla, XUL and the like is sure to make it smaller, faster and easier to maintain.

    MS doesn't do a darned thing for Mac's IE. Their Mactopia webpage [link intentionally omitted] says "If you want IE, go load it off your CDs that came with your Mac". As far as I can tell, they limit their support to bugfixes. Seems to me they're not real interested in updating their 'best of class' browser.

    I'm going out on a limb and guessing that Chimera will be as good as the current IE in 1Q2003. In the meantime, Apple is cozying up with AOL (iChat, advertisements with Netscape in the dock). The stronger OpenOffice and Chimera are when the deal is made, the better position Apple will be. Apple and MS will figure out their relationship in some backroom. If MS loses IE to an open-source iBrowser, it won't be a big loss for MS, but it will be a big win for Chimera (and by extension Mozilla)
    • I am eagerly looking forward to Chimera being as good as (and in platform-specific ways, better than) Mozilla. I can't really use it for now unless it gets faster (my G3/500 box that runs Mac OS X can't handle it well, and my primary G4/667 box runs Mac OS for now), but someday I surely will have a fast enough Mac OS X box to use it, and it's the most promising browser I see today. All the good things about Mozilla and Mac OS X. I love Mozilla in theory, and it's my primary browser on the G4 box, but it has a lot of platform-specific problems. I just wish there were a "Chimera" for Mac OS, based on Carbon instead of Cocoa.
      • I can't really use it for now unless it gets faster (my G3/500 box that runs Mac OS X can't handle it well, and my primary G4/667 box runs Mac OS for now)

        Chimera (0.2.7) is exceeindgly speedy on my G3/500 mhz iMac. It's as fast as IE in most things and far faster for some things. For instance, Chimera loads Slashdot stories with a lot of comments (yay for -1, nested!) a million times faster than IE, which just grinds and grinds.
        It has its problems, sure, and I wish it could download, but overall I've never found a browser I liked more.

        As a side note, it seems that browser speed varies hugely from computer to computer. A lot of people have gone on about the speediness of, say, OmniWeb, but it was really slow for me. Same with Mozilla. Maybe the page-rendering was quick in both, but I was too busy waiting for them to finally process the fact that I'd pressed to 'back' button to notice. =P

        dalamcd

      • I've heard everyone talk up Opera, iCab and the like. But there is always a caveat as to Javascript or CSS support or some functionality that would make me unable to use a web site. Speed of a browser is great if you are just surfing for news, but if you have to interact with a web site, then actually displaying and running code on that web page are primary concerns. Mozilla has been the best standards/code compliant Mac browser I have used. And by extension, this should include Chimera, as it is based on Mozilla.

  • Hyatt Responds (Score:5, Informative)

    by Johnny Mnemonic ( 176043 ) <mdinsmore@@@gmail...com> on Tuesday May 28, 2002 @09:21AM (#3594673) Homepage Journal

    From Hyatt's blog [mozillazine.org]:

    Monday, May 27, 2002 Posted 1:12 PM by David Hyatt

    Eep. Sometimes I forget that people are actually reading this thing and developing grand conspiracy theories. I especially like the part where I'm referred to as a "long-time Mac nut." Until about 3 months ago, my Mac desktop was a glorified paperweight, Cocoa was something you drank, and Objective-C... well, I would have just blinked and responded with "Objective what?"

    Just to set the record straight on this conspiracy theory... all Netscape employees who were hired before AOL took the company over are eligible for a six-week sabbatical after four years of employment. You also have to take the sabbatical within one year of becoming eligible for it, or you have to go through the hassle of filing for an extension. As of July 5, I'll have been working for Netscape/AOLTW for 5 years, so I had to take the sabbatical now. It also seemed like a good time to do so since Mozilla 1.0 is wrapping up (and in very good shape). This sabbatical has absolutely nothing to do with Chimera.

    Although an iBrowser would be an interesting development--IE is only one of three third party apps that ships with OS X, and the use of Mozilla in a Beta version of a Mac AOL client gives this some weight, I don't think Hyatt is working on it.

  • New version of Chimera released today (Score:3, Informative)

    by Eslyjah ( 245320 ) on Tuesday May 28, 2002 @09:37AM (#3594756)
    David Hyatt, Chimera's principal developer, said that since he was on sabbatical no new builds were in the works until July. However, the demand for more development was so high, and the rumors were so rampant, that he released a new build this morning. See [mozdev.org] for yourself. David has denied the rumors repeatedly, and I doubt that Apple will take Chimera and rename it iBrowser or (even better) iBrowse. However, I wouldn't be surprised if it eventually became the default browser and shipped with future versions of the OS.
    • David has denied the rumors repeatedly, and I doubt that Apple will take Chimera and rename it iBrowser or (even better) iBrowse.

      Just for the curious, iBrowse is one of the earlier Amiga browsers. I have no idea if it's still being produced, last I saw it was being written by omnipresence. www.omnipresence.com seems to not be there anymore, however...

      a grrl & her server [danamania.com]
  • Last time I tried a mozilla variant under OS X it looked nasty. However, for those wishing an alternative to IE there is OmniWeb [omnigroup.com], which is one of the prettiest browsers out there. It renders totally in Quartz and looks more beautiful than any browser I've seen. It totally spoils you.

    • Time to try Chimera 0.2.8. It's nice, fast and pleasant. I'm using it now.
    • I've never tried the full Moz on OSX, but Chimera 0.2.7 gets about 50% usage on my box. Its lite and fairly quick (well, quick for an OSX based browser). The feature set is a little light but I'm sure that's being worked on, and I see a little less flakiness than IE (which I use about 45% of the time and I think is a pretty good browser).

      OmniWeb is damn pretty and my third browser of choice, but man it seems to be one hell of a pig. It eats up cycles like there's no tomorrow. Granted I haven't pulled down the latest beta so it may have gotten better.
  • This is somewhat off topic, but I gotta say iCab [www.icab.de] rules. It renders quickly; has a nice, responsive UI; all kinds of customizable filters for javascript, ad banners, etc.; is relatively standards complient; and has a built in syntax checker. No email, newsreader, or composer to bloat the package. I prefer it to OmniWeb. Now let's see if Apple can produce something as flexible.
    • Tabbed browsing
      Pop-up suppression
      Anti-aliased text

      Not to mention page rendering that draws table-heady slashdot flamewar pages instantly. I've done side-by-side comparisons with IE and Chimera loading the same slashdot page. I can read a fair way into the Chimera version before IE gets around to rendering the main page table. It's a startling difference.
    • Chimera's tabbed browsing is severely flawed in term of UI. How do I close a tab when I'm done with it? My reflex is to hit the standard "close" widget in the window's titlebar, but that kills all of the tabbed pages I have open.

      So After a bit of research, I find that you hit Apple-y(if I recall correctly and it hasn't changed since last I tried Chimera). This is hardly obvious for what is going to be a common action.

      "Minimize", and "zoom" buttons hardly need to be duplicatd for each tab, but being able to close the tabs easily is a must. This means somehow giving each tab its own "close" widget, and I'm not sure how to integrate that into the GUI in a decent(aesthetically) way.

  • Unlikely (Score:4, Funny)

    by 4of12 ( 97621 ) on Tuesday May 28, 2002 @11:17AM (#3595529) Homepage Journal

    could be used as a weapon in the 'negotiations' with Bill Gates and Co. over IE .

    I don't think so.

    I can just see Steve on the phone with Bill now:

    "Bill, we'd like to dissolve our "strategic partnership" that places IE exclusively front and center on the desktops of Mac users and be able to customize our users' experience without being restrained in any way."

    "I'm really sorry to hear that, Steve. I had thought that our strategic partnership meant more than that to you. Much more. Beyond placing IE on Mac user's desktops, I thought that Microsoft went the extra mile in putting Office on the Mac. Am I mistaken in valuing this relationship?"

    "No, Bill. I think I understand better the great value of our special relationship now that you've made it clear. You've done your part keeping new versions of Office on Mac - we'll hold up our end doing whatever it takes. By the way, do you have another spare $150M to invest in "advanced projects"?"

    • "No, Bill. I think I understand better the great value of our special relationship now that you've made it clear. You've done your part keeping new versions of Office on Mac - we'll hold up our end doing whatever it takes. By the way, do you have another spare $150M to invest in "advanced projects"?"

      Why would MS "invest" another $150MM in Apple? They don't have any pending lawsuits to settle like they did last time.

  • Using Chimera at WWDC was just payback... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by frankie ( 91710 ) on Tuesday May 28, 2002 @12:01PM (#3595908) Journal
    ...for MSIE's product manager saying that OS X is slow [slashdot.org] when the truth is that table rendering in the Tasman engine is the real problem. Chimera shows that the problem isn't OS X, it's bloated browsers.

    Apple is obviously glad the Chimera project exists, and they're probably contributing code to it, but iBrowse is not an obvious conclusion. iSoftware is all about easy-to-use media tools that drive people to the Mac. iMovie, for example, set off a huge boom in personal filmmaking. But everyone already knows how to use a standard web browser.
    • I agree. I don't think Apple would waste time/resources with their own iBrowser. I do think, however, that they are doing more development work and support of thinks like Chimera/Mozilla and Openoffice to hedge their bets. They can't depend on Microsoft's tender mercies when even the justice department is trying their best to do what they want while pretending to put them on trial. (Excuse me, but exactly why is using Win98 Lite shareware to remove Internet Explorer not admittable evidence when it rebutts direct testimony?)

      So NO to iBrowse, yes to back door support and testing resources.

    • MSIE's product manager is half right. Alot if times for me, Chimera is faster that IE (For rendering HTML), others it's slower (GUI). But over all, they are all horribly slow on my iBook (The GUI is what's killing it). My PII 233 with IE 5.5 still feels like a speed deamond compared to anything under OS X on my iBook.
  • I think that a lot of rumours may be coming from Apple's work on the new and improved Sherlock. Although Sherlock is quite similar to Watson (correct me if I'm wrong, but Keralia is making use of OS X's built in handling of XML, did anyone really not expect aApple to take advatage of OS X's built in XML, AppleScript, and Services...? If you check out the pictures, video, and decsriptions of the new Sherlock, it is basically a Web Broswer with special interfaces (Channels) for what you are trying to look at on the internet (just as Watson does). With Sherlock's Indexing/Find features moving into The Finder, Sherlock is basically becoming an Internet search & find tool. Instead of going to a browser for movie times, TV times, maps, news, you go to a specialized channel of Shelock, and voila! I thought it was pretty cool how doing a phone number look-up for a listed business or residence could also display a map in another pane. Question is (as anyone who has used Watson will know) if it filters out ads and accesses information from someone else's site and presents it in a new format (1) Aren't the advertisers going to worry about whether or not someone actually saw their banner (2) Aren't the websites going to be a little PO'd about their info being highjacked. Unless of course Apple is going to form agreements with the affected websites (unlike Watson).

  • I for one hope this is happening, because the browser situation is (IMO) the most disappointing thing about OS X. As a professional Web developer, it drives me crazy, because I love OS X in almost every other way.

    I have seven browsers installed on my Titanium, and I basically use one until it pisses me off, and then switch to another. My current favorite is Netscape 7 PR 1, but it pisses me off now and then, too.

    OmniWeb is nice, and a cool idea, but these guys are crazy for trying to keep up with HTML/CSS/ECMEScript, and so on, in their own rendering engine. Every once in a while, it'll just hang, and it has problems with complex sites. But, it looks the best.

    iCab is the fastest browser I've used, interface-wise, but it suffers from many of the same problems as OmniWeb. In short, it's cute, and is a great browser -- for about three years ago.

    Similarly, Opera's Mac OS X effort is cute, but it's essentially a second-rate browser. It seems to display things quickly, but certainly doesn't live up to its claims of being the fastest. Besides, its font display and Java/ECMAScript support leave a whole hell of a lot to be desired.

    Then there's IE. I have to use IE when Mozilla botches a download (yeah, happens frequently). IE also has superior printing (which they debuted on the Mac OS 8 version, a couple of years ago). However, it's the slowest at displaying pages; the Tasman engine is basically a piece of garbage, and I don't have the patience to spend my days looking at spinning beach balls.

    Finally, we have Mozilla and Netscape 7. Netscape 7, on my system, actually feels more responsive than Mozilla 1. Mozilla 1 is the most unstable browser of any of them; it will crash on occasionm and certain commands, like "load into new tab" will just not work at certain times. The XUL framework, while interesting for other reasons, is just stupid. It makes Moz/NS not behave like a Mac application. It doesn't display OS-standard UI widgets, doesn't properly launch your preferred email program, and so on.

    I've been arguing in online forums for months that what Apple needs to do is just take Gecko and put it in a Cocoa framework. That's what Chimera is. Chimera is awfully promising, but for me, it's not really usable yet; lacks way too many features. Still, I have it on my machine as demo-ware, and check it out every so often. If Apple is doing either of: (1) expand on Chimera and make it feature complete; or (2) wrapping Gecko in a Cocoa framework themselves, then it makes me very, very happy. I'd like to see a solid browser supported on the level of iTunes et al.

    • The browsers in X are disappointing? I like the fact that there's so many choices now. MS dropped the ball with IE for X(slow, ugly, and full of rendering errors), and all these others are entering the fray. Seems like there's more choices than even 5 years ago. Browser War II!

      That said, I currently prefer OmniWeb, but I've been trying Mozilla, and may have to go look at Chimera sometime. My father still uses iCab under 9.x, so I've seen and used it, and the best I can say is that it has some nice printing features.
  • Has anyone noticed that bash is suspiciously absent from the default install of OS X?

    The reason-- and this is the official line-- is that bash is GPL.

    Guess what? So's Chimera.

    As much as Slashdot is a GPL-fest, it remains to be seen what companies can and can't do with GPL'd software. And yes, that includes whether they can ship it or not.

    Another issue is that they'd have to ship the code. A /src directory is not really something you'd expect to find in a consumer OS. Maybe they could mirror it online as a download, but that's been questioned before, too.

    So for now Apple has decided to err on the side of safety and not ship. I doubt that they will change their ways for a browser.

    I think what they're trying to say isn't "We can use this browser, so be scared Microsoft" but more "We have access to a vast amount of open-source code that compiles on our OS-- and looks damn nice-- with minimal development effort." And I support the latter more than the former.

  • The Register, opticians, OSX and Chimera (Score:4, Insightful)

    by theolein ( 316044 ) on Tuesday May 28, 2002 @04:17PM (#3597789) Journal
    I hate to say this, but the Register seems to have a real problem getting very much straight when it comes to OSX. They flamed it away for ages, rightly so, in the 10.0 era as being slow and buggy, but never bothered to actually check it later when the 10.1 series rolled around and give it some plus points. Likewise this article misses the boat completely - Explorer on OSX *does* have a Scrapbook and Bookmark managment. The clowns at the register seem simply not to have been able to move the mouse to the left part of the window.

    The Chimera story is amazing not only for the fact that it is *the* killer browser on OSX (or at least will be at 1.0 or sooner), lightweight, fullfeatured, standards compliant, and responsive. What is the most amazing thing about Chimera is that it has moved so fast. I think most of us will agree that we've never seen a product move ahead so quickly in the opensource, or closed source for that matter, world. And this is the work on just three or four people? I would *not* at all be surprised to learn that Apple has been lending a helping hand behind the scenes, given that the core code is not in the CVS tree and only Dave Hyatt sees it. The reasons for this would be obvious, but not those that the Register is trotting out. Apple has clearly no intention of bargaining with MS over something like a browser these days. MS has not advanced IE in terms of performance in over a year, apart from the occaisional bug fix, and Apple needs a browser that is native, looks good, is responsive and standards compliant and above all modern. IE is dying on the Mac OmniWeb looks good, but has terrible standards compliance and a development pace that makes your average snail seem like an F-15. Mozilla and Netscape are finally starting to work well on OSX but they are extremely bloated and contain far too many features that have no value whatsoever on OSX. OSX already has a simple but good native mail client and 10.2 Jaguar will also have integrated chatting. Pull those things from Mozilla, add a native interface and what do you get? - Chimera. I, personally am willing to bet money that it will be the future of web browsing on the OSX platform.

    I think the reviewers at the Register simply get confused and a little bit lost when something positive happens in the Apple world and don't know how to react, given as they are, to useing cynicism as a normal manner of conversation. (Or is it just a steady diet of Fish 'n Chips with too much vinegar?)
    • I just want to point out the fact that ALL the chimera code is available in the mozilla CVS tree - anyone with an inkling of curiosity can get the instructions for downloading it from here [mozilla.org].

      By applying the bugzilla patch #139682, you can roll your own 0.2.8 Chimera within about 8 hours on a 500 mHz iMac.

  • Could this just be a replacement for the internal web browser that Apple uses for displaying help, results in Sherlock etc.

    It seems like a silly ploy to create another browser when MacOSX seems to have more than enough (IE, OmniWeb, Chimera, Netscape, Mozilla, Opera, iCab). Which is not surprising seeming the original browser was developed on NeXT.

    However the internal HTML renderer (I wouldn't call it a browser) is pretty basic. I would not see it being to hard for them to replace there internal rendering system with Mozilla code. That way you get a top class compliant browser and if you put appriorate wrappers around it you should be able to upgrade it in future along with the main Mozilla releases.
  • ... why not start one hypothesizing a secret Apple Aquafication of Open Office? That would have a much greater impact that replacing IE with Chimera.

    IF there is anything at all to an Apple push to replace IE, it's probably only a means to get Microsoft to lighten up on its push to replace Quicktime with WiMP.

    But I like the idea of an Aqua front end on Open Office, something that looks as good as Microsoft Office X, has full document support, and is free. Now THAT's a rumor.

    There! Consider it done.

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