I agree. Surfing the web on my mac is a little slower than my XP machines. Of course, Firefox on OS X makes it a close battle. Safari is terrible, although I do like the feel and look of Safari. I hope it is better in Tiger.
Overall, I am pretty happy with Firefox browsing on OS X, but I wouldn't mind, if it was a bit faster.
Firefox has some issues. You can't "tab" to a drop-down menu. Why is that? It really slows you down when you're filling out a form. Furthermore, I like the way my scroll mouse scrolls in Safari much better than Firefox, but I still go with the speed of Firefox.
FIreFox is pretty good, one of things I would like to see is the (X) that closes the tabs on the tab itself and not at the end of the browser. I can't tell you how many times I closed FireFox on accident instead of just the tab.
FIreFox is pretty good, one of things I would like to see is the (X) that closes the tabs on the tab itself and not at the end of the browser. I can't tell you how many times I closed FireFox on accident instead of just the tab.
Search for Tabbrowser Extensions for FireFox 1.0. Its some Japanese site, and it will add MANY options for tabs, including the X on the tabs.
[edit]nevermind, found it for you. Click Here[/edit]
Someone please explain to this old guy what "ROFLMAODBLLOL" means...
Not being a tech-geek I can only offer this anecdotal observation.
For the past five years I've owned or have had access to top of the line Macs and PCs. Both at home and at work.
Whether on broadband or dial up, Windows based browsing is faster. The G5 tower plus Panther are a big improvement in this area. However, how many Mac users have that firepower? This is no reason for Mac-heads to get their collective shorts all up in a bunch at the person suggesting this. Rather, let Apple KNOW that this situation is unacceptable. It's been like this at least for the last five years that I've been paying attention to this fact.
I only see a few ads, and no more flash than most any other website. Most of the content is related to the website itself. But I see how it is, it's anyone but Apple's fault. Gamespot is just too elaborate. The fact that Windows renders it smooth as silk is completely dismissive and should not be a cause for question.
It isn't just Safari BTW, it's all browsers. Can table inefficiencies be at the system level?
Gamespot renders like crap on Firefox 1.0 on my Windows machine at work - it seriously looks like the system is crashing. Images flick all over the windows for about 10 seconds before it finally settles down. A horrible, horrible site design.
Thanks for all the discussion on this topic. I too have noticed that general web browsing with my PB G4 1.5Ghz is much slower than on my 2.5 year old 1Ghz Toshiba laptop.
I've had my Mac now for almost ten months and while overall I'm a convert, the small issue of why it often "seems" that surfing on my Mac is slower than on most Windows machines which I have tried. I say seems only because from observation it feels slower, but I have no evidence to back it up.
Question: My biggest criticism of Firefox, IE, etc. browsers is that when I resize the screen, it drops below the Dock. Safari always stops right at the dock. Is there anyway to keep Firefox and IE from going below the dock?
IME. There's a few problems with browsing on the Mac and some of them are just trade offs in how Macs do things and others are to be fixed, and have been fixed in Tiger. It's never going to be as fast as on Windows as Windows doesn't render accurately and never tries too, even with Firefox. It can't.
Text is anti-aliased to a much greater degree than on Windows so that takes extra CPU over windows. Web pages on Macs just look much better than Windows as hardly anything gets anti-aliased on Windows. That's just a difference in philosophy - Mac = accurate, Windows = quick and dirty.
Tables in Safari at least are quite slow to render. I'm not sure if this is related to the text rendering speed or they are just slower.
The Flash plugin sometimes doesn't work well with some flash files that work ok on Windows. There's something very dodgy with the way delays work in some flash files which slow down the rendering on the Mac.
Animated GIFs in Safari are slower. Especially if you have a lot of them on page at once.
The GUI loves videoram. If you get a beachball often, it's often not enough VRAM. Been there with an iBook with only 8MB VRAM.
Safari Autofill slows down forms significantly on older machines or machines with less RAM as it appears that thread is paged out and then paged back in when entering into a form. Switch off Autofill in the prefs and it runs quicker than Firefox.
Macs have a built in delay to scrolling to keep it smooth which often gives the impression of it being slow. Again, Windows goes for quick and dirty rather than smooth, unless you switch 'Smooth Scrolling' on in the control panel and even then it's not quite as smooth.
On the Mac, try switching the text anti-aliasing to not anti-alias below 12pt and you'll also get faster rendering. Similarly, switch it ON on windows and see it slow down dramatically. You'll need a 3rd party hack to do it to the same level as on the Mac. TweakUI or something like that - I can't remember the exact program as it's been a few years since I last used Windows to any degree of hackness.
IME. There's a few problems with browsing on the Mac and some of them are just trade offs in how Macs do things and others are to be fixed, and have been fixed in Tiger. It's never going to be as fast as on Windows as Windows doesn't render accurately and never tries too, even with Firefox. It can't.
Text is anti-aliased to a much greater degree than on Windows so that takes extra CPU over windows. Web pages on Macs just look much better than Windows as hardly anything gets anti-aliased on Windows. That's just a difference in philosophy - Mac = accurate, Windows = quick and dirty.
That's a bunch of crap.
The operating system has nothing to do with rendering at all. Rendering depends on the application, and it entirely. Firefox renders "accurately", thank you very much, for it actually bothers to support as much Web Standards as it can.
Firefox on Mac and Firefox on Windows render stuff the same, just like Opera on Windows and Opera on Mac do. IE on the Mac and IE on Windows render stuff like bovine manure, because the browser is coded by monkeys who can't tell their CSS from their grandmothers' dentures.
As far as antialiasing goes, any speed impact it might have is generally waaaaay overstated and based in FUD. Also, since you clearly demonstrated to all present that you are not even remotely aware of this, Windows has shipped with built-in antialiasing for many, many years. Debuted all the way back in Windows 98, as a matter of fact. Recent incarnations of Windows antialiasing under the ClearType tech moniker also feature subpixel antialiasing, just like OS X does. None of this is new, and all my web pages on XP are antialised to hell and back, and they still render faster than anything Safari can cough up on my shiny 1.5Ghz PowerBook G4.
(As an aside: antialiasing is highly subjective. Personally, I've always liked Gnome's better than either OS X's or that of Windows.)
Your binary oversimplification of "Windows = quick and dirty" and "OS X = accurate" is pathetic on so many levels I don't even know where to begin. Does Windows suck overall? Hell yes. Does its user interface (or lack thereof) invoke a reception in a special circle of computing hell for generations of Microsoft "designers"? You bet your ass. Does this have anything to do with web browsers? Not in the least.
The reason Safari is slow is because it's a 1.0 release of a very young piece of software that will need years of more coding and optimizing to reach its full potential. Kudos to Hyatt and Co. for already choosing to base their foundation on KHTML, a lightweight engine compared to Mozilla (which I love dearly nonetheless), but there still is a lot of work to do. Safari's JavaScript/EMCAScript parser/executor is a joke speed-wise, as are many other processing-heavy tasks that really shouldn't be. Such as the GIF issue -- it's a disgrace (but oddly also affects Firefox on the Mac, so it could be a more general graphics bug, perhaps to be resolved by CoreImage in Tiger).
Long, whiny bitch of a post short: You are letting your realization of the Mac platform's superiority (which is valid) seep over to areas you do not fully understand, and you really oughtn't go on a black-and-white Browser Judgement Day tirade without at least bashing them for the issues they actually do have, instead of focusing on fabricated non-sense.
Bottom line: unless you're on a fancy G5 with oogles of RAM, browsing on a PC is usually dramatically faster, especially if you have a shitload of tabs open. Hopefully this will change in the future.
The operating system has nothing to do with rendering at all. Rendering depends on the application, and it entirely. Firefox renders "accurately", thank you very much, for it actually bothers to support as much Web Standards as it can.
My turn to say that's a bunch of crap. ;-)
I meant that how the pixels get onto the screen and rendered, not how the application lays out the html. Ie. the graphics subsystem. Fonts on the Mac in a browser are rendered much more accurately than on Windows due to the mere fact it renders them with anti-aliasing right down to really small point sizes by default so they look more like they would if you printed them than typically displayed on Windows with it's default setting.
Quote:
Originally posted by m01ety
Firefox on Mac and Firefox on Windows render stuff the same, just like Opera on Windows and Opera on Mac do. IE on the Mac and IE on Windows render stuff like bovine manure, because the browser is coded by monkeys who can't tell their CSS from their grandmothers' dentures.
See above. They aren't rendered the same because the two architectures render fonts differently through a completely different graphics layer and often use completely different font metrics from differing font engines - be it truetype, opentype, adobe or whatever, with different levels of anti-aliasing. Optima on the PC isn't necessarily the same size as Optima on the Mac. They're pretty close generally if you stick to the same browser on both platforms but pixel for pixel they can and are different, sometimes with some fonts appearing completely differently.
Secondly, PNGs render incorrectly in some browsers on different platforms depending on if the platform can match the gamma settings correctly. Mac and PC differ. Firefox and Safari differ on the Mac even. And it depends also on where the content was created - PC or Mac and in what tool!
Thirdly, equivalent versions of the same browser support different features on different OSs depending on what the OS can provide as an api.
Forthly, Quicktime will render CMYK images in the browser on the Mac, but they won't render at all on most Windows browsers.
Do I need to go on?
I spend most of my day dealing with browser and OS differences on so-called "accurate" standards based browsers and correctly issue created by users who don't know why a page renders differently.
Quote:
Originally posted by m01ety
As far as antialiasing goes, any speed impact it might have is generally waaaaay overstated and based in FUD.
Well that's a bunch of crap.
Switch Font anti-aliasing on to anti-alias down to 4point in OSX and I get 2.84KChars a sec in Xbench in it's text test. Switch it to 12point so not so many characters are anti-aliased and I get 6.24Kchars per sec. Ie. It's more than twice as fast if you switch the text anti-aliasing off to a level that's roughly equivalent to Windows best setting.
I'm sure there are other benchmarks out there but that's fairly indicative of the kind of speed difference I notice.
Try switching between a bitmap font and a vector font in Terminal and you'll notice the difference.
Quote:
Originally posted by m01ety
Also, since you clearly demonstrated to all present that you are not even remotely aware of this, Windows has shipped with built-in antialiasing for many, many years. Debuted all the way back in Windows 98, as a matter of fact. Recent incarnations of Windows antialiasing under the ClearType tech moniker also feature subpixel antialiasing, just like OS X does. None of this is new, and all my web pages on XP are antialised to hell and back, and they still render faster than anything Safari can cough up on my shiny 1.5Ghz PowerBook G4.
Actually, It was there much earlier if you knew how to switch it on either in the registry or using the Microsoft PowerToys which were around even when I was writing compiler software for NT 3.1 Beta on a Pentium 60 that cost us about 10K and had a huge drainpipe of a cooler attached to it. They then got later built into TweakUI and then later still into the control panel display settings.
The difference, if you don't know the registry hack, is that Windows only allowed you to anti-alias text as low as 12point by switching on the 'Smooth Edges of Fonts' setting and almost everything in the user interface and on web pages is smaller than that setting so rarely got anti-aliased.
The default setting on OSX is 8point IIRC. Mine's long been set at 4point because I hate to see bitmap aliased text mixed in. And why I used to run hacks like Silk to antialias carbon apps. Now, I don't think I have so many carbon apps ;-)
Quote:
Originally posted by m01ety
(As an aside: antialiasing is highly subjective. Personally, I've always liked Gnome's better than either OS X's or that of Windows.)
Your binary oversimplification of "Windows = quick and dirty" and "OS X = accurate" is pathetic on so many levels I don't even know where to begin. Does Windows suck overall? Hell yes. Does its user interface (or lack thereof) invoke a reception in a special circle of computing hell for generations of Microsoft "designers"? You bet your ass. Does this have anything to do with web browsers? Not in the least.
See above. I think you just got off on the wrong foot with the presumption I meant something entirely different.
Without anti-aliasing as low down as is default on a Mac, it's a lot quicker. If the Mac didn't do it, or you set your level at 12point then it's about the same from my experiments. I don't like it set at that though as it looks ugly.
Quote:
Originally posted by m01ety
The reason Safari is slow is because it's a 1.0 release of a very young piece of software that will need years of more coding and optimizing to reach its full potential.
Don't know about you, but I'm on v1.2.4 as I suspect most OSX10.3 users are now if they keep up with Software Update. It's night and day better than the old v1.0 Jaguar releases. But still, a better javascript engine would be useful and as I say, table rendering is a bit slow but that may be text related. Dunno. Not tested it too deeply to see. I don't mind it being a little slower if it looks nice.
Quote:
Originally posted by m01ety
Long, whiny bitch of a post short: You are letting your realization of the Mac platform's superiority (which is valid) seep over to areas you do not fully understand, and you really oughtn't go on a black-and-white Browser Judgement Day tirade without at least bashing them for the issues they actually do have, instead of focusing on fabricated non-sense.
I really wasn't. I pointed out the bugs and put the speed differences down to rendering differences in the way the output is displayed via the graphics, font and anti-aliasing engines and their priorities set by their OS designers, NOT the browser. IMHO, Apple have designed the OS and tweaked the settings to give a more accurate portrayal of text and images on screen which mirrors their old display-postscript goals in NeXT whereas Windows are still kind of stuck on their 2D GDI stuff, at least until Longhorn and then I bet their users will be complaining about slow scrolling too.
I'm not saying one is better than the other. I think they have different design goals for a different set of users. Mac users are generally more interested in their output looking as close to printed output as possible. Windows users generally want to bash text into an office app as quickly as possible.
Quote:
Originally posted by m01ety
Bottom line: unless you're on a fancy G5 with oogles of RAM, browsing on a PC is usually dramaticallt faster, especially if you have a shitload of tabs open. Hopefully this will change in the future.
I am, I do, and I still notice a difference. But then it looks nice and Windows makes web pages look like a throw back to the 90s.
Just remembered another thing that slows things down - in this long textarea, cursor up/down through the text is really slow as it's trying to spell check as it goes too.
I imagine if I switched all the nice font rendering, spell checking, fancy compositing, gamma support, CMYK suport, PNG transparency... it'd be as quick as Windows IE, but then I like all those features.
I'll go out on a limb here and assert that anti-aliasing has absolutely zero to do with slow browsing in OS X. Our systems are way WAY WAY more than fast enough to render absolutely huge blocks of text in a fraction of a second. There are differences in font kerning which make OS X more processor intensive. Yet, this represents just a fraction of the processing time when rendering a web page.
Instead, the slow browsing is most likely the result of Cocoa's rather heavyweight NSView. Nested subclasses of NSView are used extensively when laying out webpages with webcore. I suspect that there is a rewrite in the works which relies far less heavily on NSView. A custom, more light weight class would be far better suited to web rendering.
Does anyone remember where to dig up omniweb's postings on this subject?
I'll go out on a limb here and assert that anti-aliasing has absolutely zero to do with slow browsing in OS X. Our systems are way WAY WAY more than fast enough to render absolutely huge blocks of text in a fraction of a second. There are differences in font kerning which make OS X more processor intensive. Yet, this represents just a fraction of the processing time when rendering a web page.
Instead, the slow browsing is most likely the result of Cocoa's rather heavyweight NSView. Nested subclasses of NSView are used extensively when laying out webpages with webcore. I suspect that there is a rewrite in the works which relies far less heavily on NSView. A custom, more light weight class would be far better suited to web rendering.
Does anyone remember where to dig up omniweb's postings on this subject?
Quite possibly right there. Even if it's twice as fast to render text without anti-aliasing, it's still probably not that significant a proportion of the page display. I wonder if it's a problem with a slow cocoa class or just the way it's built up on top of Quartz?
hmmmm.....I think i'll just stick with my 4 year old PC for the time being then. I don't want to spend a fortune on a new computer and find that it's slower than the one it's replacing.
xflare, you have issues if you think web browser speed is ANY indication of system performance as a whole. Macs are in most cases more speedy and powerful than their PC counterparts. You'll find that a $495 desktop PC with XP and Office preloaded and all the other bells and whistles they offer is going to be slow compared to even an iMac. Pit it against the beast that is the new G5 tower, and there is no comparison. The Mac is far more powerful and speedy than the PC.
Explorer is widely known to be a buggy program. The only reason most Windows users actually use it is because they HAVE to! Firefox is a pretty solid browser for either platform, but there are sites that will not support it. Safari can be the same way. It is hardly logical to NOT buy a Mac because the web browser "MIGHT" be slower. If you want IE that bad, then download version 5.2 for Mac.
The web browser should be a non-issue when it comes to purchasing a computer. Also, you might want to consider the fact that IE is prone to viruses and other bad things for windows. I don't know of ANYONE with a Mac that has been infected with a virus or spyware problems. It just doesn't happen. Feel free to join those of us who act smug when our PC friends have to run virus scans and defrag their disks. With Mac OS X you have no viruses and <gasp> yes, the OS does defragging and optimizing for you... Come on xflare ... you knw the Apple is calling you to take a bite ... admit it ... that Mac mini just makes it even more tempting now!
The web browser should be a non-issue when it comes to purchasing a computer.
I couldn't disagree more. If the user will be doing lots of web surfing, then the web browser becomes THE criteria when selecting a system.
I far prefer Macs and OS X, yet claiming that browsing on a mac is as quick as windows... simply discredits us to the rest of the world. Give credit where credit is due and people will be more likely to believe you on other points. Browsing on the PC is faster but this isn't the only consideration. The struggle against windows spyware negates any lure of increased speed.
Comments
Overall, I am pretty happy with Firefox browsing on OS X, but I wouldn't mind, if it was a bit faster.
Firefox has some issues. You can't "tab" to a drop-down menu. Why is that? It really slows you down when you're filling out a form. Furthermore, I like the way my scroll mouse scrolls in Safari much better than Firefox, but I still go with the speed of Firefox.
Originally posted by Relic
FIreFox is pretty good, one of things I would like to see is the (X) that closes the tabs on the tab itself and not at the end of the browser. I can't tell you how many times I closed FireFox on accident instead of just the tab.
Search for Tabbrowser Extensions for FireFox 1.0. Its some Japanese site, and it will add MANY options for tabs, including the X on the tabs.
[edit]nevermind, found it for you. Click Here[/edit]
Not being a tech-geek I can only offer this anecdotal observation.
For the past five years I've owned or have had access to top of the line Macs and PCs. Both at home and at work.
Whether on broadband or dial up, Windows based browsing is faster. The G5 tower plus Panther are a big improvement in this area. However, how many Mac users have that firepower? This is no reason for Mac-heads to get their collective shorts all up in a bunch at the person suggesting this. Rather, let Apple KNOW that this situation is unacceptable. It's been like this at least for the last five years that I've been paying attention to this fact.
I've also noticed most websites look like shit on the PC (probably due to the antialiasing.) I'd rather wait and have a nicer page to look at.
MrSparkle, come on... Anything pre-XP you'll get no argument from me.
Originally posted by Gene Clean
Search for Tabbrowser Extensions for FireFox 1.0. Its some Japanese site, and it will add MANY options for tabs, including the X on the tabs.
[edit]nevermind, found it for you. Click Here[/edit]
Yeeeaahh. cool thanks, you're the man. 8)
1)overall look and feel, i tried Firefox and find it ugly (in my opinion);
2)the ability to save any files including videos and flash from activity window;
3)snapback is very useful feature (for me again);
4)google search is also very handy;
5)my pc is athlon 2000+/512Mb RAM ; my mac is pb g4 1Ghz/256Mb RAM
and in my case (i dont know why) safari is faster (compared to IE6 on pc) almost always;
regards and sorry for my english
Originally posted by JonE
I only see a few ads, and no more flash than most any other website. Most of the content is related to the website itself. But I see how it is, it's anyone but Apple's fault. Gamespot is just too elaborate. The fact that Windows renders it smooth as silk is completely dismissive and should not be a cause for question.
It isn't just Safari BTW, it's all browsers. Can table inefficiencies be at the system level?
Gamespot renders like crap on Firefox 1.0 on my Windows machine at work - it seriously looks like the system is crashing. Images flick all over the windows for about 10 seconds before it finally settles down. A horrible, horrible site design.
I've had my Mac now for almost ten months and while overall I'm a convert, the small issue of why it often "seems" that surfing on my Mac is slower than on most Windows machines which I have tried. I say seems only because from observation it feels slower, but I have no evidence to back it up.
Question: My biggest criticism of Firefox, IE, etc. browsers is that when I resize the screen, it drops below the Dock. Safari always stops right at the dock. Is there anyway to keep Firefox and IE from going below the dock?
Text is anti-aliased to a much greater degree than on Windows so that takes extra CPU over windows. Web pages on Macs just look much better than Windows as hardly anything gets anti-aliased on Windows. That's just a difference in philosophy - Mac = accurate, Windows = quick and dirty.
Tables in Safari at least are quite slow to render. I'm not sure if this is related to the text rendering speed or they are just slower.
The Flash plugin sometimes doesn't work well with some flash files that work ok on Windows. There's something very dodgy with the way delays work in some flash files which slow down the rendering on the Mac.
Animated GIFs in Safari are slower. Especially if you have a lot of them on page at once.
The GUI loves videoram. If you get a beachball often, it's often not enough VRAM. Been there with an iBook with only 8MB VRAM.
Safari Autofill slows down forms significantly on older machines or machines with less RAM as it appears that thread is paged out and then paged back in when entering into a form. Switch off Autofill in the prefs and it runs quicker than Firefox.
Macs have a built in delay to scrolling to keep it smooth which often gives the impression of it being slow. Again, Windows goes for quick and dirty rather than smooth, unless you switch 'Smooth Scrolling' on in the control panel and even then it's not quite as smooth.
On the Mac, try switching the text anti-aliasing to not anti-alias below 12pt and you'll also get faster rendering. Similarly, switch it ON on windows and see it slow down dramatically. You'll need a 3rd party hack to do it to the same level as on the Mac. TweakUI or something like that - I can't remember the exact program as it's been a few years since I last used Windows to any degree of hackness.
Originally posted by aegisdesign
IME. There's a few problems with browsing on the Mac and some of them are just trade offs in how Macs do things and others are to be fixed, and have been fixed in Tiger. It's never going to be as fast as on Windows as Windows doesn't render accurately and never tries too, even with Firefox. It can't.
Text is anti-aliased to a much greater degree than on Windows so that takes extra CPU over windows. Web pages on Macs just look much better than Windows as hardly anything gets anti-aliased on Windows. That's just a difference in philosophy - Mac = accurate, Windows = quick and dirty.
That's a bunch of crap.
The operating system has nothing to do with rendering at all. Rendering depends on the application, and it entirely. Firefox renders "accurately", thank you very much, for it actually bothers to support as much Web Standards as it can.
Firefox on Mac and Firefox on Windows render stuff the same, just like Opera on Windows and Opera on Mac do. IE on the Mac and IE on Windows render stuff like bovine manure, because the browser is coded by monkeys who can't tell their CSS from their grandmothers' dentures.
As far as antialiasing goes, any speed impact it might have is generally waaaaay overstated and based in FUD. Also, since you clearly demonstrated to all present that you are not even remotely aware of this, Windows has shipped with built-in antialiasing for many, many years. Debuted all the way back in Windows 98, as a matter of fact. Recent incarnations of Windows antialiasing under the ClearType tech moniker also feature subpixel antialiasing, just like OS X does. None of this is new, and all my web pages on XP are antialised to hell and back, and they still render faster than anything Safari can cough up on my shiny 1.5Ghz PowerBook G4.
(As an aside: antialiasing is highly subjective. Personally, I've always liked Gnome's better than either OS X's or that of Windows.)
Your binary oversimplification of "Windows = quick and dirty" and "OS X = accurate" is pathetic on so many levels I don't even know where to begin. Does Windows suck overall? Hell yes. Does its user interface (or lack thereof) invoke a reception in a special circle of computing hell for generations of Microsoft "designers"? You bet your ass. Does this have anything to do with web browsers? Not in the least.
The reason Safari is slow is because it's a 1.0 release of a very young piece of software that will need years of more coding and optimizing to reach its full potential. Kudos to Hyatt and Co. for already choosing to base their foundation on KHTML, a lightweight engine compared to Mozilla (which I love dearly nonetheless), but there still is a lot of work to do. Safari's JavaScript/EMCAScript parser/executor is a joke speed-wise, as are many other processing-heavy tasks that really shouldn't be. Such as the GIF issue -- it's a disgrace (but oddly also affects Firefox on the Mac, so it could be a more general graphics bug, perhaps to be resolved by CoreImage in Tiger).
Long, whiny bitch of a post short: You are letting your realization of the Mac platform's superiority (which is valid) seep over to areas you do not fully understand, and you really oughtn't go on a black-and-white Browser Judgement Day tirade without at least bashing them for the issues they actually do have, instead of focusing on fabricated non-sense.
Bottom line: unless you're on a fancy G5 with oogles of RAM, browsing on a PC is usually dramatically faster, especially if you have a shitload of tabs open. Hopefully this will change in the future.
Originally posted by m01ety
That's a bunch of crap.
The operating system has nothing to do with rendering at all. Rendering depends on the application, and it entirely. Firefox renders "accurately", thank you very much, for it actually bothers to support as much Web Standards as it can.
My turn to say that's a bunch of crap. ;-)
I meant that how the pixels get onto the screen and rendered, not how the application lays out the html. Ie. the graphics subsystem. Fonts on the Mac in a browser are rendered much more accurately than on Windows due to the mere fact it renders them with anti-aliasing right down to really small point sizes by default so they look more like they would if you printed them than typically displayed on Windows with it's default setting.
Originally posted by m01ety
Firefox on Mac and Firefox on Windows render stuff the same, just like Opera on Windows and Opera on Mac do. IE on the Mac and IE on Windows render stuff like bovine manure, because the browser is coded by monkeys who can't tell their CSS from their grandmothers' dentures.
See above. They aren't rendered the same because the two architectures render fonts differently through a completely different graphics layer and often use completely different font metrics from differing font engines - be it truetype, opentype, adobe or whatever, with different levels of anti-aliasing. Optima on the PC isn't necessarily the same size as Optima on the Mac. They're pretty close generally if you stick to the same browser on both platforms but pixel for pixel they can and are different, sometimes with some fonts appearing completely differently.
Secondly, PNGs render incorrectly in some browsers on different platforms depending on if the platform can match the gamma settings correctly. Mac and PC differ. Firefox and Safari differ on the Mac even. And it depends also on where the content was created - PC or Mac and in what tool!
Thirdly, equivalent versions of the same browser support different features on different OSs depending on what the OS can provide as an api.
Forthly, Quicktime will render CMYK images in the browser on the Mac, but they won't render at all on most Windows browsers.
Do I need to go on?
I spend most of my day dealing with browser and OS differences on so-called "accurate" standards based browsers and correctly issue created by users who don't know why a page renders differently.
Originally posted by m01ety
As far as antialiasing goes, any speed impact it might have is generally waaaaay overstated and based in FUD.
Well that's a bunch of crap.
Switch Font anti-aliasing on to anti-alias down to 4point in OSX and I get 2.84KChars a sec in Xbench in it's text test. Switch it to 12point so not so many characters are anti-aliased and I get 6.24Kchars per sec. Ie. It's more than twice as fast if you switch the text anti-aliasing off to a level that's roughly equivalent to Windows best setting.
I'm sure there are other benchmarks out there but that's fairly indicative of the kind of speed difference I notice.
Try switching between a bitmap font and a vector font in Terminal and you'll notice the difference.
Originally posted by m01ety
Also, since you clearly demonstrated to all present that you are not even remotely aware of this, Windows has shipped with built-in antialiasing for many, many years. Debuted all the way back in Windows 98, as a matter of fact. Recent incarnations of Windows antialiasing under the ClearType tech moniker also feature subpixel antialiasing, just like OS X does. None of this is new, and all my web pages on XP are antialised to hell and back, and they still render faster than anything Safari can cough up on my shiny 1.5Ghz PowerBook G4.
Actually, It was there much earlier if you knew how to switch it on either in the registry or using the Microsoft PowerToys which were around even when I was writing compiler software for NT 3.1 Beta on a Pentium 60 that cost us about 10K and had a huge drainpipe of a cooler attached to it. They then got later built into TweakUI and then later still into the control panel display settings.
The difference, if you don't know the registry hack, is that Windows only allowed you to anti-alias text as low as 12point by switching on the 'Smooth Edges of Fonts' setting and almost everything in the user interface and on web pages is smaller than that setting so rarely got anti-aliased.
The default setting on OSX is 8point IIRC. Mine's long been set at 4point because I hate to see bitmap aliased text mixed in. And why I used to run hacks like Silk to antialias carbon apps. Now, I don't think I have so many carbon apps ;-)
Originally posted by m01ety
(As an aside: antialiasing is highly subjective. Personally, I've always liked Gnome's better than either OS X's or that of Windows.)
Your binary oversimplification of "Windows = quick and dirty" and "OS X = accurate" is pathetic on so many levels I don't even know where to begin. Does Windows suck overall? Hell yes. Does its user interface (or lack thereof) invoke a reception in a special circle of computing hell for generations of Microsoft "designers"? You bet your ass. Does this have anything to do with web browsers? Not in the least.
See above. I think you just got off on the wrong foot with the presumption I meant something entirely different.
Without anti-aliasing as low down as is default on a Mac, it's a lot quicker. If the Mac didn't do it, or you set your level at 12point then it's about the same from my experiments. I don't like it set at that though as it looks ugly.
Originally posted by m01ety
The reason Safari is slow is because it's a 1.0 release of a very young piece of software that will need years of more coding and optimizing to reach its full potential.
Don't know about you, but I'm on v1.2.4 as I suspect most OSX10.3 users are now if they keep up with Software Update. It's night and day better than the old v1.0 Jaguar releases. But still, a better javascript engine would be useful and as I say, table rendering is a bit slow but that may be text related. Dunno. Not tested it too deeply to see. I don't mind it being a little slower if it looks nice.
Originally posted by m01ety
Long, whiny bitch of a post short: You are letting your realization of the Mac platform's superiority (which is valid) seep over to areas you do not fully understand, and you really oughtn't go on a black-and-white Browser Judgement Day tirade without at least bashing them for the issues they actually do have, instead of focusing on fabricated non-sense.
I really wasn't. I pointed out the bugs and put the speed differences down to rendering differences in the way the output is displayed via the graphics, font and anti-aliasing engines and their priorities set by their OS designers, NOT the browser. IMHO, Apple have designed the OS and tweaked the settings to give a more accurate portrayal of text and images on screen which mirrors their old display-postscript goals in NeXT whereas Windows are still kind of stuck on their 2D GDI stuff, at least until Longhorn and then I bet their users will be complaining about slow scrolling too.
I'm not saying one is better than the other. I think they have different design goals for a different set of users. Mac users are generally more interested in their output looking as close to printed output as possible. Windows users generally want to bash text into an office app as quickly as possible.
Originally posted by m01ety
Bottom line: unless you're on a fancy G5 with oogles of RAM, browsing on a PC is usually dramaticallt faster, especially if you have a shitload of tabs open. Hopefully this will change in the future.
I am, I do, and I still notice a difference. But then it looks nice and Windows makes web pages look like a throw back to the 90s.
Just remembered another thing that slows things down - in this long textarea, cursor up/down through the text is really slow as it's trying to spell check as it goes too.
I imagine if I switched all the nice font rendering, spell checking, fancy compositing, gamma support, CMYK suport, PNG transparency... it'd be as quick as Windows IE, but then I like all those features.
Instead, the slow browsing is most likely the result of Cocoa's rather heavyweight NSView. Nested subclasses of NSView are used extensively when laying out webpages with webcore. I suspect that there is a rewrite in the works which relies far less heavily on NSView. A custom, more light weight class would be far better suited to web rendering.
Does anyone remember where to dig up omniweb's postings on this subject?
Originally posted by dfiler
I'll go out on a limb here and assert that anti-aliasing has absolutely zero to do with slow browsing in OS X. Our systems are way WAY WAY more than fast enough to render absolutely huge blocks of text in a fraction of a second. There are differences in font kerning which make OS X more processor intensive. Yet, this represents just a fraction of the processing time when rendering a web page.
Instead, the slow browsing is most likely the result of Cocoa's rather heavyweight NSView. Nested subclasses of NSView are used extensively when laying out webpages with webcore. I suspect that there is a rewrite in the works which relies far less heavily on NSView. A custom, more light weight class would be far better suited to web rendering.
Does anyone remember where to dig up omniweb's postings on this subject?
Quite possibly right there. Even if it's twice as fast to render text without anti-aliasing, it's still probably not that significant a proportion of the page display. I wonder if it's a problem with a slow cocoa class or just the way it's built up on top of Quartz?
Originally posted by xflare
hmmmm.....I think i'll just stick with my 4 year old PC for the time being then. I don't want to spend a fortune on a new computer and find that it's slower than the one it's replacing.
xflare, you have issues if you think web browser speed is ANY indication of system performance as a whole. Macs are in most cases more speedy and powerful than their PC counterparts. You'll find that a $495 desktop PC with XP and Office preloaded and all the other bells and whistles they offer is going to be slow compared to even an iMac. Pit it against the beast that is the new G5 tower, and there is no comparison. The Mac is far more powerful and speedy than the PC.
Explorer is widely known to be a buggy program. The only reason most Windows users actually use it is because they HAVE to! Firefox is a pretty solid browser for either platform, but there are sites that will not support it. Safari can be the same way. It is hardly logical to NOT buy a Mac because the web browser "MIGHT" be slower. If you want IE that bad, then download version 5.2 for Mac.
The web browser should be a non-issue when it comes to purchasing a computer. Also, you might want to consider the fact that IE is prone to viruses and other bad things for windows. I don't know of ANYONE with a Mac that has been infected with a virus or spyware problems. It just doesn't happen. Feel free to join those of us who act smug when our PC friends have to run virus scans and defrag their disks. With Mac OS X you have no viruses and <gasp> yes, the OS does defragging and optimizing for you... Come on xflare ... you knw the Apple is calling you to take a bite ... admit it ... that Mac mini just makes it even more tempting now!
Originally posted by AgNuke1707
The web browser should be a non-issue when it comes to purchasing a computer.
I couldn't disagree more. If the user will be doing lots of web surfing, then the web browser becomes THE criteria when selecting a system.
I far prefer Macs and OS X, yet claiming that browsing on a mac is as quick as windows... simply discredits us to the rest of the world. Give credit where credit is due and people will be more likely to believe you on other points. Browsing on the PC is faster but this isn't the only consideration. The struggle against windows spyware negates any lure of increased speed.