I like and use IE. There's always room for improvement, but it's the best blend of features for almost everyone IMHO. I'm also a webdesigner, so I need to use the main browser for Macs.. everything else is pretty much not worth my time.
OmniWeb is beautiful when it comes to rendering, the interface is perfectly Aqua-compliant and lovely to use, it is very well coded, with some nifty little features as well. Unfortunately, it also has a large CPU/RAM overhead, which causes immense slowness on most machines I use, in comparison to other browsers... it is also shareware/commercial software, and extremely niche when it comes to a browser that should be supported.
Chimera is also awesome, the fastest browser for the Mac, period.. very standards-compliant, great rendering, the interface is still in need of a little work but it's just as great, if not better, than OmniWeb's. The preferences are a tad lacking and it doesn't have any really cool new features (yet), plus it's still in development (though this is both a good and bad thing).. it is a little unstable, however. Fun to try, sometimes, and it doesn't cost a penny.
Netscape is horribly slow, ugly, and bloated.. the rendering is fine, but everything else is undesirable. At least it's free.
Mozilla I don't bother keeping up week but on a biweekly or monthly basis (approx.), though last I tried it it was a steaming pile of ugly, slow, bloaty crashware. Again, it's free and multi-platform, so what do you expect? Maybe it'll get better, in a few years.. it's only taken.. what, 5+ years to get to where it is now?
Chimera here... the only thing that pisses me off about it, is that i cannot open a picture in a new window or copy image. I heard that the newest release has that support, so i'm gonna go d/l it now.
Well, after looking at OW4 and getting tired of crashing every 5 minutes, I stuck with IE. Now I have tried Chimera....this is the SH*T!! It did crash in the first minute of use, but that was the last time about 5 days ago. It's fast (smokes IE in it's pipe!!), pretty stable on my PB800 running X.1.5.
Sure it needs a few bells and whistles added that we all have been spoilt with, but at .4, can you imagine how 1.0 is gonna fly???......Goddam!....I'm getting goosebumps just thinking about it!!
Wait till 1.0 people....you will not even consider using anything else. IE will never enter your head nor your screen again! Mark my words!!
does netscape 6.2 read html correctly? the last version (6.0??) i tried didn't read my html correctly, every other brower i used did; omni, ie,mozilla. text with bold tags didn't appear as bold for example <img src="graemlins/oyvey.gif" border="0" alt="[No]" />
WOW! I just downloaded Chimera, and it's super fast! I love it. Looks better than OmniWeb, too.
Only problem - I have to keep OmniWeb around until the "unregistered" problem gets fixed. Since I'm "unregistered," I can't log in on any other computer. It says there is no one registered with my username. I'm lucky I was logged in on this one, because otherwise it would have been impossible to post at all. So as long as the problem gets fixed, and I don't somehow trash all the cookies in OmniWeb in the meantime, I'm fine.
EDIT: Spoke too soon! The other problem is that it has very few preferences. I want to prevent pop-ups like in OmniWeb!
Interesting. When I tried using Chimera to post this AI kept giving me the error message: "FYI Sorry, we have no one registered with that name. Use your browser's back button to try again. " Then I tried logging in as Amorph (just to see if AI was down but you special mods and admins were still here, or something...it could be a conspiracy!) Cookies were enabled.
So here I am back in "good ol'" IE. Now, for a .4, Chimera is amazing. For the amount of people working on it, it is amazing. It just has this "slickness" about it that even (! :eek: !) OmniWeb can't touch. It is just so clean. But there are some simple problems that could easily be ironed out, which would dramatically improve user experience and make me a full time Chimera, err, Navigator, user.
Well, it's fast! Pleasant too. Mozilla is really shaping up. However the interface is incomplete, to use the best word. Aqua sucks, first of all. But that isn't what I mean.
In IE Command-Up goes to the top of the page, Command-Down goes to the bottom. Command-B gets rid of the bars. You have greater control of cookies. In general Preferences need lots of work, basically, there need to be more Preferences And more keyboard shortcuts.
Last but not least, this was really bugging me: Why is Chimera called Navigator? I mean it fits with the icon, but Chimera just sounds right for this app, doesn't it? Of course sometimes people might pronounce it wrong. :eek:
I hope either Apple takes over Chimera, or the authors "borrow" some of the better features from M$ IE and others. Opera's way of remembering open windows is neat. The way you can search for something in IE from the address window is cool (except it's MSN...) A GUI method (no hacks) for choosing which search engine this uses would be cool. Good feature addition for Chimera! Oh, and the multi-threading of OmniWeb (can Mozilla do this?)
Also when I look under Help in Chimera there's no readme, no searchable help, and the site is programmer oriented. That's an important bug to squish.
All in all, no other browser excites me so much as Chimera. OmniWeb comes close. It seems as if M$ has given up on IE. And even when 6 or 5.5 comes it can't be as cool as Chimera. This browser is just plain cool. :cool:
<strong>use Mozilla. It is written from the Netscape6 source code. Now that the open source community has tweaked and debugged a lot of the code, as well as added features, Netscape 7 is being based on mozilla. They are just taking Mozilla and adding the Netscape stuff they want to it, and viola! You have Netscape 7.</strong><hr></blockquote>
Uh...
Mozilla predates Netscape 6...basically, sometime after IE 4 gained supremacy over Communicator 4, Netscape decided to open source its next generation Communicator code. That was in 1998. a few dozen Mozilla milestone releases later, Netscape 6 first appeared based on the Mozilla code. Netscape 7 Preview appeared shortly after Netscape 6.2 and is unremarkably different...
Mozilla predates Netscape 6...basically, sometime after IE 4 gained supremacy over Communicator 4, Netscape decided to open source its next generation Communicator code. That was in 1998. a few dozen Mozilla milestone releases later, Netscape 6 first appeared based on the Mozilla code. Netscape 7 Preview appeared shortly after Netscape 6.2 and is unremarkably different...
Chimera is great with its speed and all, but OmniWeb is by far still the best browsing experience on Mac OS X. Chimera has a LONG way to go before it reaches the level of human-interface abeyance of OmniWeb. There is an annoying gray line underneith Chimera's Cocoa Toolbar, as well as strangeness concerning drawers, and improper Quartz rendering on very small fonts--go to Apple.com to see for yourself. But it's more than just graphical weirdness. OmniWeb has a PERFECT set of preferences--they are the best layout of preferences I've ever seen for a Browser, and it's doubtful Chimera will ever be able to match them, judging from the way they are clumping many options into a single icon. Also, OmniWeb's menubar is also correctly layed-out, and is a far cry from Chimera's which is mostly just ripped out from Mozilla; I especially love how the "Tools" group doesn't necessarily require any particular window to be open or closed.
In short, OmniWeb will gain speed and compatibility (with CSS2, etc.) in a single release, but Chimera will take several to even approach OmniWeb's level of interface intuitiveness.
[ 08-17-2002: Message edited by: Jon Rubinstein ]</p>
i use chimera about 90% of the time...IE the other 10%...i almost always start in chimera, but somethings won't link or download so i go over to IE...funny thing is sometimes i start in IE and somethings don't download so i jump over to chimera...between the two i have been able to access all pages and downloads (MP3 was a pain in IE, but great in Chimera)...i have since discarded Mozilla, netscape 6.2.2 and omniweb...down to two browsers in my dock, when it used to be an ungodly 5...maybe only one by the time chimera is 1.0....g
posting now in chimera...works fine here for me...
<strong>Does anyone else get this error when trying to post here under Chimera .4?
"FYI Sorry, we have no one registered with that name. Use your browser's back button to try again. "</strong><hr></blockquote>That's not a problem with Chimera but rather a temporary problem with AppleInsider -- specifically the corrupted database that Neal is too lazy to get off his ass and hit the rebuild button for.
Whatever you do, DON'T clear your cookies in whatever other browser you use. If you do, you won't be able to log in until the database if fixed.
Thank you! I was reading this thread seeing that you couldn't post using Chimera. Here I was not being able to post with Internet Explorer! I just got broadband but had to go back to AOL to post this. It's comforting to know that its not a problem on my end. Ill just be patient.
However, the thread did not seem to help me choose a browser. Would it be safe to say that OmniWeb might be a good choice for me--the rather unsophisticated computer user(compared to you all, not, say, my wife!) ? User interface is as important to me as speed.
BTW, when you say speed, do you refer to surfing (opening URLs) or to downloading large files?
Sorry, forgot to ask this question in my post above. Does anyone use a download called Broadband Optimizer to improve speed? <a href="http://www.enigmarelle.com/sw/BroadbandOptimizer/"; target="_blank">Broadband Optimizer</a>
If you want the best user interface, OmniWeb is at the top of my list without a doubt. Its speed isn't always the best and there are some CSS and table functions broken, but its excellent interface and feature set still keep it as my default browser.
Broadband Optimizer does not directly affect any browsers or programs on your Mac. Rather, it optimizes the actual networking options in Mac OS X. Because Mac OS X is built on UNIX, all of the network settings can be modified through shell scripts, which is basically what Broadband Optimizer is. I've tried it on my Mac with 1.5 Mb DSL but haven't noticed any major change in downloading speeds.
omniweb is beautiful, just slower and didn't open all pages...if it's speed improves and it gets tabbed browsing in 5.0 i would use it as my default...till 5.0 comes out i am sticking with chimera with IE as backup....g
Comments
OmniWeb is beautiful when it comes to rendering, the interface is perfectly Aqua-compliant and lovely to use, it is very well coded, with some nifty little features as well. Unfortunately, it also has a large CPU/RAM overhead, which causes immense slowness on most machines I use, in comparison to other browsers... it is also shareware/commercial software, and extremely niche when it comes to a browser that should be supported.
Chimera is also awesome, the fastest browser for the Mac, period.. very standards-compliant, great rendering, the interface is still in need of a little work but it's just as great, if not better, than OmniWeb's. The preferences are a tad lacking and it doesn't have any really cool new features (yet), plus it's still in development (though this is both a good and bad thing).. it is a little unstable, however. Fun to try, sometimes, and it doesn't cost a penny.
Netscape is horribly slow, ugly, and bloated.. the rendering is fine, but everything else is undesirable. At least it's free.
Mozilla I don't bother keeping up week but on a biweekly or monthly basis (approx.), though last I tried it it was a steaming pile of ugly, slow, bloaty crashware. Again, it's free and multi-platform, so what do you expect? Maybe it'll get better, in a few years.. it's only taken.. what, 5+ years to get to where it is now?
[ 08-14-2002: Message edited by: bradbower ]</p>
Sure it needs a few bells and whistles added that we all have been spoilt with, but at .4, can you imagine how 1.0 is gonna fly???......Goddam!....I'm getting goosebumps just thinking about it!!
Wait till 1.0 people....you will not even consider using anything else. IE will never enter your head nor your screen again! Mark my words!!
<img src="graemlins/smokin.gif" border="0" alt="[Chilling]" />
tabbed browsing, ridiculously usefull.
<strong>... keyboard shortcuts, like switching from one browser window to another (which it might have but </strong><hr></blockquote>
You can switch from one window within an application to another window in the same application by using command and tilde (~)
Only problem - I have to keep OmniWeb around until the "unregistered" problem gets fixed. Since I'm "unregistered," I can't log in on any other computer. It says there is no one registered with my username. I'm lucky I was logged in on this one, because otherwise it would have been impossible to post at all. So as long as the problem gets fixed, and I don't somehow trash all the cookies in OmniWeb in the meantime, I'm fine.
EDIT: Spoke too soon! The other problem is that it has very few preferences. I want to prevent pop-ups like in OmniWeb!
[ 08-15-2002: Message edited by: Luca Rescigno ]</p>
So here I am back in "good ol'" IE. Now, for a .4, Chimera is amazing. For the amount of people working on it, it is amazing. It just has this "slickness" about it that even (! :eek: !) OmniWeb can't touch. It is just so clean. But there are some simple problems that could easily be ironed out, which would dramatically improve user experience and make me a full time Chimera, err, Navigator, user.
Well, it's fast! Pleasant too. Mozilla is really shaping up. However the interface is incomplete, to use the best word. Aqua sucks, first of all. But that isn't what I mean.
In IE Command-Up goes to the top of the page, Command-Down goes to the bottom. Command-B gets rid of the bars. You have greater control of cookies. In general Preferences need lots of work, basically, there need to be more Preferences
Last but not least, this was really bugging me: Why is Chimera called Navigator? I mean it fits with the icon, but Chimera just sounds right for this app, doesn't it? Of course sometimes people might pronounce it wrong. :eek:
I hope either Apple takes over Chimera, or the authors "borrow" some of the better features from M$ IE and others. Opera's way of remembering open windows is neat. The way you can search for something in IE from the address window is cool (except it's MSN...) A GUI method (no hacks) for choosing which search engine this uses would be cool. Good feature addition for Chimera! Oh, and the multi-threading of OmniWeb (can Mozilla do this?)
Also when I look under Help in Chimera there's no readme, no searchable help, and the site is programmer oriented. That's an important bug to squish.
All in all, no other browser excites me so much as Chimera. OmniWeb comes close. It seems as if M$ has given up on IE. And even when 6 or 5.5 comes it can't be as cool as Chimera. This browser is just plain cool. :cool:
<strong>use Mozilla. It is written from the Netscape6 source code. Now that the open source community has tweaked and debugged a lot of the code, as well as added features, Netscape 7 is being based on mozilla. They are just taking Mozilla and adding the Netscape stuff they want to it, and viola! You have Netscape 7.</strong><hr></blockquote>
Uh...
Mozilla predates Netscape 6...basically, sometime after IE 4 gained supremacy over Communicator 4, Netscape decided to open source its next generation Communicator code. That was in 1998. a few dozen Mozilla milestone releases later, Netscape 6 first appeared based on the Mozilla code. Netscape 7 Preview appeared shortly after Netscape 6.2 and is unremarkably different...
[ 08-16-2002: Message edited by: Eugene ]</p>
<strong>
Uh...
Mozilla predates Netscape 6...basically, sometime after IE 4 gained supremacy over Communicator 4, Netscape decided to open source its next generation Communicator code. That was in 1998. a few dozen Mozilla milestone releases later, Netscape 6 first appeared based on the Mozilla code. Netscape 7 Preview appeared shortly after Netscape 6.2 and is unremarkably different...
[ 08-16-2002: Message edited by: Eugene ]</strong><hr></blockquote>
My bad, to my knowledge it had been since Netscape 6 flopped.
In short, OmniWeb will gain speed and compatibility (with CSS2, etc.) in a single release, but Chimera will take several to even approach OmniWeb's level of interface intuitiveness.
[ 08-17-2002: Message edited by: Jon Rubinstein ]</p>
"FYI Sorry, we have no one registered with that name. Use your browser's back button to try again. "
posting now in chimera...works fine here for me...
[ 08-17-2002: Message edited by: thegelding ]</p>
<strong>Does anyone else get this error when trying to post here under Chimera .4?
"FYI Sorry, we have no one registered with that name. Use your browser's back button to try again. "</strong><hr></blockquote>That's not a problem with Chimera but rather a temporary problem with AppleInsider -- specifically the corrupted database that Neal is too lazy to get off his ass and hit the rebuild button for.
Whatever you do, DON'T clear your cookies in whatever other browser you use. If you do, you won't be able to log in until the database if fixed.
Thank you! I was reading this thread seeing that you couldn't post using Chimera. Here I was not being able to post with Internet Explorer! I just got broadband but had to go back to AOL to post this. It's comforting to know that its not a problem on my end. Ill just be patient.
However, the thread did not seem to help me choose a browser. Would it be safe to say that OmniWeb might be a good choice for me--the rather unsophisticated computer user(compared to you all, not, say, my wife!) ? User interface is as important to me as speed.
BTW, when you say speed, do you refer to surfing (opening URLs) or to downloading large files?
And would it work with any of these browsers?
Broadband Optimizer does not directly affect any browsers or programs on your Mac. Rather, it optimizes the actual networking options in Mac OS X. Because Mac OS X is built on UNIX, all of the network settings can be modified through shell scripts, which is basically what Broadband Optimizer is. I've tried it on my Mac with 1.5 Mb DSL but haven't noticed any major change in downloading speeds.
- Brad the moderator (aka. starfleetX)