Mac OS X: State Of The Browsers 72
NetCurl writes "Ars Technica is running a Macintosh Browser Smackdown feature. We've come a long way in the OS X browser experience, and the article delves into the details like only Ars can. This is a great breakdown of nine browsers in all. Let the browser war reignite..."
No Lynx (Score:4, Funny)
Re:No Lynx (Score:2)
The best part about this (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:The best part about this (Score:4, Informative)
Re:The best part about this (Score:5, Informative)
One thing that Ars Technica didn't mention is that MS does still have a browser for OS X. It just isn't available for free download - you have to subscribe to the MSN isp (I think) to get it.
According to this report [macedition.com] MSN Explorer/Mac actually has the best support for CSS 3 selectors of any current browser. Too bad it's only available to paying customers.
But it's not a war (Score:5, Insightful)
But it's not a war. No browser is trying to squeeze the others out of business. None is using dirty trick, sly marketing, or deliberate incompatibilities to gain market share. None is linked to other software - and most importantly, none is linked directly into the OS. Even Apple's own browser is merely a straight option from those available, with no special advantages. The browsers compete - inasmuch as they compete at all - on a completely level playing field, the only differences being that of cost and technical merit. These are great days.
Re:But it's not a war (Score:2)
Re:But it's not a war (Score:2)
Re:But it's not a war (Score:2, Informative)
Re:But it's not a war (Score:4, Informative)
Real world experience (Score:5, Informative)
1st point - IE for mac is dead. dont tell me my only choice is to use a dead browser
2nd point - Netscape for mac is dead. dont tell me my only other choice is a dead browser.
After clearing this up I mentioned that Safari is now the default browser for Apple computers, that it works flawlessly with both my banks, and that if you want to include netscape in the list stick with Mozilla. If any browser besides Safari survives on the Apple platform it will be Mozilla based (sorry OmniWeb, I pray the switch to WebKit keeps you guys going).
And ill be damned they actually wrote me back, asked a few questions, and updated the site.
Re:Real world experience (Score:5, Informative)
- use one of the utilities that plays around with Safari (check versiontracker)
- use the defaults command from the shell: "defaults write com.apple.Safari EnableDebugMenu 1" or something like that
- use vi or another editor to edit Safari's XML preference file (while it's not running) and add a key called "EnableDebugMenu" with value "True" (this is the same thing the above command will do)
Next time you launch Safari it'll have a Debug menu on the right, from which you can set the reported user-agent.
One problem... (Score:5, Interesting)
It is good to change on a site-by-site basis if the person is having a problem (only after emailing webmaster@, obviously...).
The problem is that some sites track user-agent strings to determine what their users are using. If Safari users start declaring themselves to be one of the big two (IE or a Mozilla-based), then the companies keep writing just to those two browsers, meaning using Safari with the user-agent string might perpetuate companies writing only for the big two.
On the article: I was disappointed that the author did not touch on the level of control offered by iCab. The rendering engine might suck, but iCab offers more control over your browsing experinece than anything else. It is not even close.
I keep bringing this point up whenever an OS X browser article comes up, but so far no author has really come up with a decent way of doing it in another browser.
[I use Safari+PithHelmet currently, but I paid my $29 to iCab]
Re:One problem... (Score:2)
It is good to change on a site-by-site basis if the person is having a problem (only after emailing webmaster@, obviously...).
it _IS_ on a site by site basis, and ontop of that, it's on a session by session basis.
Re:One problem... (Score:2)
One problem with changing the user-agent string is that I am afraid that people will change that permanently and never look back.
This is not an issue with Safari. If you change the user-agent in the Debug menu, it is not remembered between sessions. The next time you start Safari, it reverts back to the default.
Re:Real world experience (Score:2, Informative)
% defaults write com.apple.Safari IncludeDebugMenu 1
Lesson learned: Make noise, make noise, make noise (Score:5, Insightful)
On the other hand, if *everyone* in that 3% complains when a feature on the site doesn't work on anything except IE, suddenly their support inboxes are dominated by demands, and that 3% doesn't seem so small and ignorable anymore.
If you go to a website that doesn't work right in your browser, e-mail them (without being hostile) and explain to them your displeasure with the incompatibility and implore them to support web standards and non-IE browsers. Feel free to toss in a little "we don't desire a Microsoft-only Internet" rhetoric if you so wish, but keep it brief and understated. Even if you can get into the site by using a header spoof trick or whathaveyou, please still take the time to fire a quick email their way.
You can even have a "form" email that you keep saved just for such use, which is probably a good idea. Do have a place where you can specifically mention what part of the site doesn't work correctly (assuming it's not the whole site, a la BuyMusic).
It's important to start making noise now, and let the noise grow as the non-MS browsers gain more widespread use.
This isn't a case of "Microsoft == bad". This is a case of web developers needing to think beyond "Microsoft Browser on Microsoft Platform". IE will work with standards-compliant pages just fine.
Re:Real world experience (Score:2)
Re:The best part about this (Score:1)
It almost feels "NCSA Mosaic"-like to do so.
Its fantastic that there are alternative browers!
Camino! (Score:3, Interesting)
I too am on the Safari bandwagon. It's almost as fast as Camino, and crashes far less often.
I am particularly interested to hear how Firebird is coming along. It seems to me that Camino and Firebird should be merged together (they do use the same engine, right?) for the "good of the community". Fast, beautiful, standards compliant, and stable? A dream come true!
Re:Camino! (Score:3, Interesting)
I feel like I'm beating the dead horse, but people's choice not to use IE is the reason we still have web standards. It's a good thing we have 7 choices for browsers on Mac.
Check the nightlies. (Score:5, Informative)
There's also been an immense amount of improvements to Camino since 0.7--if you download one of the nightlies you'll see big speed improvements and stability. The nightlies are building on Moz 1.4, as opposed to 1.0 for the 0.7 release. Makes a big difference.
Re:Check the nightlies. (Score:4, Informative)
Per your advice, I just downloaded the most recent nightly for Camino, and I must say I'm quite impressed. The UI is much snappier (changing tabs doesn't lag anymore), and the rendering speed seems a bit improved. I thought that Camino was going to get swallowed up by Safari and Firebird, but it is thriving.
Re:Camino! (Score:1)
Actually, it's people's choice not to use IE for Windows that helps web standards. IE/Mac is a pretty compliant browser, & was the most compliant non-beta browser on any platform for quite some time (until Mozilla 1.0 finally appeared). Of course it's now dead & won't be improved, so it's probably time to move on.
Re:Camino! (Score:2)
Re:Camino! (Score:1)
Re:Camino! (Score:3, Informative)
Sigh.
There is nothing to "merge" between Firebird and Camino--both are built off the same code base, but one has a Cocoa-native wrapper (Camino) and the other uses XUL (Firebird).
Camino rocks--try one of the nightlies since 0.7 if you want to see a big improvement.
Re:Camino! (Score:1)
Although I have gotten lucky with many of the builds, they still are crash prone IMHO. There have been many times when I was browsing with six or more tabs open and brought the program down. I know that is a lot of strain, but Safari seems to handle it well most of the time (I did crash it today though).
What I meant by "merge" was merge the talents of the programmers. Why have two different versions of the sam
Re:Camino! (Score:1)
As the parent mentioned, they're not the same program. Camino is Cocoa on top of Gecko; Firebird has the whole Mozilla XUL thing squeezed in, which is either great if you want all the Mozilla customizability, or terrible if you want a small, sleek browser.
The nightlies are more stable (Score:2)
Re:Camino! (Score:1)
If Firebird and Camino get mushed together, I'm guessing the results will be disappointing. Mozilla (the OS X version) is bloated and will never grace my machine again. Firebird runs nicely, but doesn't really have much on Camino in terms of UI re
It's amazing how much things have improved (Score:5, Interesting)
iCab (Score:3, Informative)
This is an incomplete browser but I use it for pages I know it works on because of the ad blocking.
Re:iCab (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't use iCab anymore (it used to be my default browser in OS 9) but I still remember fondly its unique feature, the built-in HTML checker: the little face in the upper right of the window that would turn green and smile if the rendered HTML was valid, and red and frowning if the HTML was not valid. Great for checking and validating your own pages in one go. Also, it was sad to see (while browsing) that so few pages were standards-compliant. Almost none, actually.
JP
Re:iCab (Score:2)
Re:iCab (Score:2)
iCab's checker is also a bit behind the times: it can't check anything beyond HTML 4.01, if it encounters XHTML the face turns 'neutral' and says ( when clicked): The iCab error report doesn't support XHTML yet. Therefore no errors can be reported.. Many recent pages will probably be XHTML and never make iCab smile, even if valid.
JP
Firebird + AdBlock (Score:2, Informative)
Firebird extensions:
http://texturizer.net/firebird/exten
Re:iCab (Score:1)
Re:iCab (Score:2)
Re:iCab (Score:1)
Runs on your (windows) machine. I'm sure you can find something similar for your OS. I use it, its really good - and free.
Re:iCab (Score:2)
Also, many sites serve ads from legit domains but in sub folders on their domain. If a proxyserver can do this, I'd like to know about it.
On a mac BTW.
What about the codeless browser? (Score:5, Interesting)
With Cocoa and Webkit, you can make a fully functional web browser without writing a single line of code. Check out the codeless browser [livejournal.com] From the same wonderful apple engineers who brought you the 13 line text editor.
I'm hoping this kind of ease of creation will lower the bar to making your own browser, and encourage independant programers to innovate in the interface department 'since they don't have to worry about rendering unless they want to.
There are allready some cool applications using webkit, like the live preview window in SubEthaEdit (the amazingly cool text editor formerly known as Hydra), or the japanese NagaraBrowser a webbrowser that can replace your desktop picture.
Re:What about the codeless browser? (Score:4, Funny)
Next week, I'll be demonstrating how even a complete idiot can create their own operating system, using a simple hex editor and a copy of Windows.
Re:What about the codeless browser? (Score:5, Funny)
Next week, I'll be demonstrating how even a complete idiot can create their own operating system, using a simple hex editor and a copy of Windows.
Creating an operating system, using Windows as the basis? Wow, that *would* be impressive. Microsoft's been trying for years, and still hasn't quite managed it.
Window of Opportunity Across Platforms (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Window of Opportunity Across Platforms (Score:1)
Marketing free stuff (Score:2, Offtopic)
I suppose the question is, how do you market something that's free?
By making it compulsory?? Here in the European Union measures are contemplated against Microsoft abuse of its monopoly. One is to force Microsoft to include other media players. Why not require it to include other browsers. For that matter, why not require PC manufacturers to have another partition on the PCs they sell with some Unix/Linux on it. After all, they support Microsoft's monopoly by including only that
Re:Marketing free stuff (Score:2)
This looks good initially, but there a
Making Mozilla/Netscape More Mac Like (Score:5, Informative)
It is available at:
http://kmgerich.com/pinstripe/pinstripe.html [kmgerich.com]
The best feature of Moz 1.4, though, is type-ahead-find, or whatever they call it now. Just start typing to have the typed text highlighted and that part of the page jumped to. Great for pages you come to from a search engine.
Re:Making Mozilla/Netscape More Mac Like (Score:1)
Image loading -- Safari vs IE (Score:4, Interesting)
Am alone in this, or would others also like to see Safari implement better control over image loading? As a rule, I do NOT want all images to load on a page, as I am still using dialup from home, and graphics-rich pages take forever to load. IE allows me to load individual images as necessary (contextual menu or double-click the 'missing' icon), to load them all as a menu choice, or by a widget in the toolbar.
Safari, on the other hand, can either load all inages, or load NO images, and the setting is buried in the preferences, so it is not convenient to change often. To then load images requires reloading the entire page.
Also, I think that IE has done things correctly in regards to managing history. I like how it stores visited sites chronologically. On more than one occasion this has been a tremendous help when I was trying to recall something I had seen. I was able to find it by searching through the history for the approximate timespan.
Does anyone else think that these are useful and/or necessary features? Or am I just a crank? (For the sake of this particular discussion, read 'or' as 'xor'.)
Re:Image loading -- Safari vs IE (Score:2, Informative)
Lee Joramo [joramo.com]
Re:Image loading -- Safari vs IE (Score:3, Interesting)
It's probably more intensive, but I'd love to see a URL autocomplete function like IE5 Mac's - you can grab a URL by typing any fragment of it, not just the beginning. It's completely invaluable when I'm trying to remember where something I recently visited is and I'm too dumb to have bookmarked it.
Re:Image loading -- Safari vs IE (Score:1, Flamebait)
The main IE feature that I miss in Safari is the ability to tab to other form elements, including pulldowns, check boxes and radio buttons. IMHO, the less I have to reach for the mouse while I'm generating input, the better.
Re:Image loading -- Safari vs IE (Score:1)
I appreciated Mozilla's ability to permanently block images (typically ads), but installing squid with a 19-line adserver blacklist file fixed that. For every computer in my household.
The History menu in Safari lists visited pages in reverse chronological order with
Don't forget X11 browsers (Score:5, Informative)
Dillo in particular is amazingly fast basic browser that supports graphics unlike Lynx. Even Mozilla running under X11 is surprisingly fast. Must faster than any Aqua based browser I've used. (Mainly due to no AA and other such considerations)
I use Safari 99% of the time because I like all those Aqua frills and because I think its tab handling is the best on the market. But one shouldn't neglect the rest.
Major problem with Safari (Score:1, Informative)
My Browsers (Score:1)
Camino, iCab, Opera, Netscape, OmniWeb, Safari, Mozilla, Firebird, and IE.
My own browsers, developed using WebCore:
Hammerhead, Misery
I use Camino for the majority of my browsing, Safari to double my keychain for convenience, and IE for the occasional site that doesn't follow standards. I experiment with the others, as well as using them for testing of my own sites.
Java and Mozilla (Score:3, Informative)
More Safari gripes (Score:3, Informative)
- SSL doesn't work through a proxy that needs authentication.
- Sometimes with web sites that require authentication and have lots of graphics, authentication boxes just keeps popping up - over each other. Like it expects you to enter your auth info for each and every graphic file. This is so crazy it makes me want to throw my iBook out the window sometimes.
- Integration with keychain is really very lame. I don't know why they have an option to remember authentication info, it just doesn't work.
And lastly if any (ex) Camino developers are listening, it's a great browser, and almost there. If you can just fix the occasional crashes it would be my default browser. Especially with 10 tabs open at a time you really can't afford to have a browser crashing. (btw Safari also has this problem about once a week...).
Re:More Safari gripes (Score:1)
Safari (Score:1)
Safari rendering errors (Score:4, Informative)