Web Browser Developers Have Been Very Good to US

big mac

I'm typing here with Netscape 7 on my venerable 8600/300. This is a really wonderful browser - and the first good Netscape since 4.7.x, in my opinion. This browser renders pages quickly, is stable, has a much nicer, Mac-like UI than its Mozilla-based forerunners, and really behaves like a Mac application should. I haven't used it on my OS X machine yet, but I imagine it performs really well there as well.



We have Netscape 7/Mozilla, and we have OmniWeb. We also have iCab and Opera, two browsers I have yet to try. Finally, IE's still around, but it's a mess on OS X. With the exception of IE, Mac browser development has been stellar. (If only the PPC had progressed so smoothly...) Now, of course, none of the browers we have to choose from are perfect. Yet, I'm extremely happy with the progress of Netscape; Omni has promised great things for the future; so has Microsoft for that matter.



Mac browser development is stronger and more competitive than it has ever been. And, amazingly, we're talking about a software segment that promises very little financial return to developers (especially ever since IE came out). There is little profit incentive, yet the competition is so strong. We certainly are enjoying much greater support than the 2.7% quarterly Mac marketshare would normally afford us.



Is the market this competitive due in large part to Mozilla being open source? And can we expect the current trend to last much longer? I certainly hope so, but it's difficult to believe we'll have it this good for an extended period of time.

kelib

Don't forget Chimera. Still with all these browsers availible the situation is less than perfect. There's no 'killer browser' out there. They all have their pros and cons and most are slower than IE on a PC

big mac

I didn't forget about Chimera - it is a great app with lots of promise. I usually just lump it in with Mozilla, though. Furthermore, if Mozilla/Netscape 7 runs as well on OS X as it runs on OS 9, then Chimera has some worthy competition. I love Netscape 7! In any case, while I realize that our choices still aren't as fast as IE on Windows, they are fast enough for me. Even OW, which some deride as slow, is fast in my opinion. Perhaps I'm not very hard to please in that regard.



[ 09-28-2002: Message edited by: Big Mac ]</p>

junkyard dawg

Yeah, Chimera is going to rock when it hits the 1.0 release. It already has a good feature set at v0.5, so I can't wait for a final release to be completed.



Omniweb 5 also sounds very promising. If it's as good as the folks from Omni say, then it will render faster than any other OS X browser, and it will also have the best GUI, including tabbed browsing.



Netscape and Mozilla are too bloated and fugly for my tastes. I suppose they render quite well but they don't look very good while doing it, and based on my experiences Mozilla is very buggy and crash-prone. Not sure about Netscape because I haven't used it much yet.



Finally there's Internet Explorer. IE is actually a fairly good browser; it renders pages as fast as any other OS X browser, it looks nice, and of course it has the best compatibility with the internet because of Micro$oft's domination of standards. The main problem I have with IE is that it's so unstable, but this was back at IE 5.1, the last version I used regularly. 5.2.2 may be more stable but since I use OW4.1 all the tiem I wouldn't know.



But with all this competition among web browsers, and OS X's quick refminement, I can't help but think, "What an awesome time to be a Mac user!"

overhope

I have a browser bake-off every 6 months or so, and IE is still the one I fall back to: fits with my style of doing things, and it's reasonably stable: I had it up for 62 hours until, funnily enough, about half an hour ago, though I suspect that might have had something to do with me repairing permissions while doing a downlaod, and 5.2.2's permissions were complete garbage...