Help Viewer Too Slow

nessness
Posted:
in macOS edited January 2014
Help Viewer works too slow on my G3 iBook(late 2001) with Panther...

When it starts, it takes minutes to start responding, and often it never responds. (A help shouldn't crash a computer!) I have sufficient memory

and hard disk space, and screen depth is already reduced to "Thousands".

Is there any way to speed up Help Viewer?

I really miss Mac OS 7.5's Apple Guide... it was faster, friendlier, and more innovative.

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 4
    gamblorgamblor Posts: 446member
    Did you upgrade your previous OS to Panther, or did you do a fresh install? I had similar problems (except I could never get Help to run-- it would just crash) when I upgraded from Jag -> Panther on my 12" Powerbook. Making a clean install of the OS solved the problem I had with Help.
  • Reply 2 of 4
    sledgehammersledgehammer Posts: 505member
    Help has always been ridiculously slow for me. It sped up a great deal when I upgraded to Panther. It is now fast enough to be usable, but I still avoid it if at all possible. I could never figure out why it was so slow either. It's basically a text viewing app with browse and search capabilities. What slows it down?
  • Reply 3 of 4
    torifiletorifile Posts: 4,024member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by SledgeHammer

    Help has always been ridiculously slow for me. It sped up a great deal when I upgraded to Panther. It is now fast enough to be usable, but I still avoid it if at all possible. I could never figure out why it was so slow either. It's basically a text viewing app with browse and search capabilities. What slows it down?



    I *think* it retrieves a lot of its information from the web. If you're on a slow connection or no connection at all, it tends to poke around for a while before it does anything. :/ I don't like Help much but it's way better than pre-Panther.
  • Reply 4 of 4
    kickahakickaha Posts: 8,760member
    Several things:



    1) Yup, it checks with the mothership for Help updates whenever possible. Sometimes this is quick, sometimes... not.



    2) It's not just a text and image viewer - those Help files are HTML. Yup, there's a full WebKit viewer (think Safari) in there. Upside: as WebKit is improved (and with Safari being the showcase, you just *know* it will...), Help Viewer will improve as well. Downside: kinda heavyweight for Help... so far. Toss in some UI scripting stuff (brand new in 10.3, but still developing, looks like 10.4 will take it far), and you get back the old Apple Guides with a *vengeance*.



    3) The 10.3 Help Viewer is *much* better than before... I'll agree, before 10.3 it was painful. I had to retrain myself to look in it. If you're running 10.1 or 10.2, you've got something to look forward to.
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