Actually, I think Chimera's interface is mostly superior to Mozilla's, except that there are so very few working preferences. The standard Cocoa toolbar is completely customizable (Mozilla's isn't at all, right?) and has several more options for buttons.
The biggest caveat I have with Chimera (next to its stability) is its horrible text fields. Unfortunately, last I heard, it would require a hugeundertaking and a mammoth amount of recoding to get them working as proper OSX-native text fields.
*sigh*
What's the problem with them? Well, it's a four-fold issue.
1. They are slow. Sure, they're not as slow as they were in earlier builds, but typing speed still isn't anywhere near what typing is in *any* other app I have (except maybe Photoshop, but that's a completely different scenario). Try typing something really fast, even just smattering the keyboard for a test. The faster you type, the more lag is induced. Characters will pause and appear is groups of four or five and then you'll realize that even those are appearing about a half second after you're typed them. There is no reason typing should be this slower or as slow on a dual 500 G4 in a web browser than on a Mac SE/30 in MacWrite. Pathetic.
2. Double-clicks and triple-clicks do not function as they should on any Mac OS. Double click the middle of a word and before releasing the second click, drag in any direction. It *should* keep the first word selected and add to the selection on a per-word basis. Nope. It has some weird inconsistent behavior of keeping the work selected if you go right, but not if you go left, and either way it doesn't add whole words to the selection. Now, try a triple-slick somewhere. That *should* select the entire paragraph. Nope. It only selects the current line. What's even weirder is that Mozilla added some kind of quadrouple-click that selects the current line and one line above it. WTF? I suppose that would make sense to select the paragraph, but two lines?
3. Navigating text entry boxes with arrow keys is ATROCIOUS. Okay, anyone who has used Macs for any significant amount of time should know that the option, command, and control keys are great modifiers for the arrows. Option left/right skips whole words option up/down skips paragraps, control left/right and command right/left go to the start/end of a line, and command up/down skip to the beginning and end of the document. Well, first of all, the Chimera folks are hypocrites for removing the command left/right for page navigation. They claim that they do this because Apple's guidelines say that these controls are reserved for navigating text. IF YOU'RE GOING TO REMOVE STANDARD AND ESTABLISHED BROWSING CONTROLS BASED ON APPLE GUIDELINES, MAKE ALL CONTROLS WORK AS APPLE SAYS THEY SHOULD. DON'T HALF-ASS IT. <img src="graemlins/oyvey.gif" border="0" alt="[No]" /> Anyhow, that's the normal behavior for text entry in Mac OS X apps. How do these controls change in Mozilla/Chimera? Option right skips whole words but also stops at every space and grinds to a halt when it hits punctuation like a comma or period or slash or quote, option up/down does nothing, control left/right does nothing. These are essential keystrokes that I use constantly and am extremely hampered without their proper implementation. Not only do I do a lot of typing for forums like AppleInsider, I also use my browser for updating and changing code for web pages and services. Both of these tasks require lots of editing and lots of quick navigating.
4. Apple's spell-check service!! Aauugghh! Have I become dependant on this handy feature? Sure, a little bit, but isn't that usually the case with any good UI enhancement? Of course, this isn't nearly as bothersome as #3, but it would be very helpful to keep users from having to re-read and edit text for simple spelling errors and typos.
After thinking about it, I think that Mozilla is probably the best browser out now. I've noticed the same problems with Chimera that Brad has: slow text boxes, bad prefs, etc. That puts it out of the running. Also, I just upgraded from 0.4 to 0.5, and now it unexpectedly quits every few minutes. Terrible.
I used OmniWeb for a while, and like Chimera, it looks just beautiful. But it also is buggy and slow. It usually crashes on me and gives me that long-ass CrashCatcher dialog box at least once or twice a day, sometimes more.
Mozilla has yet to crash on me, and it's compatible with every web page I've been to. It's fast, it has good text entry, and it has a lot of preferences to play around with. It's also really ugly, but that's a small price to pay for something that works really well.
IE and Netscape I don't even consider because they don't have built in ad blocking. I haven't tried Opera or iCab in a long time because I've used them both and neither one is very good. Netscape 4.79 is probably one of the best browsers for speed, but unfortunately, it's classic-only. It reminds me of Mozilla, ugly but fast.
Comments
It uses a rendering engine called Gecko, and has a x-platform front end.
Chimera uses Gecko, but it has a cocoa front-end and is just a browser.
Pheonix is has the same x-platform front end, but it's modified to be just a browser, and a damn good one.
If Apple developed a browser, it would probably be like Chimera but with a better interface.
Barto
The biggest caveat I have with Chimera (next to its stability) is its horrible text fields. Unfortunately, last I heard, it would require a hugeundertaking and a mammoth amount of recoding to get them working as proper OSX-native text fields.
*sigh*
What's the problem with them? Well, it's a four-fold issue.
1. They are slow. Sure, they're not as slow as they were in earlier builds, but typing speed still isn't anywhere near what typing is in *any* other app I have (except maybe Photoshop, but that's a completely different scenario). Try typing something really fast, even just smattering the keyboard for a test. The faster you type, the more lag is induced. Characters will pause and appear is groups of four or five and then you'll realize that even those are appearing about a half second after you're typed them. There is no reason typing should be this slower or as slow on a dual 500 G4 in a web browser than on a Mac SE/30 in MacWrite. Pathetic.
2. Double-clicks and triple-clicks do not function as they should on any Mac OS. Double click the middle of a word and before releasing the second click, drag in any direction. It *should* keep the first word selected and add to the selection on a per-word basis. Nope. It has some weird inconsistent behavior of keeping the work selected if you go right, but not if you go left, and either way it doesn't add whole words to the selection. Now, try a triple-slick somewhere. That *should* select the entire paragraph. Nope. It only selects the current line. What's even weirder is that Mozilla added some kind of quadrouple-click that selects the current line and one line above it. WTF? I suppose that would make sense to select the paragraph, but two lines?
3. Navigating text entry boxes with arrow keys is ATROCIOUS. Okay, anyone who has used Macs for any significant amount of time should know that the option, command, and control keys are great modifiers for the arrows. Option left/right skips whole words option up/down skips paragraps, control left/right and command right/left go to the start/end of a line, and command up/down skip to the beginning and end of the document. Well, first of all, the Chimera folks are hypocrites for removing the command left/right for page navigation. They claim that they do this because Apple's guidelines say that these controls are reserved for navigating text. IF YOU'RE GOING TO REMOVE STANDARD AND ESTABLISHED BROWSING CONTROLS BASED ON APPLE GUIDELINES, MAKE ALL CONTROLS WORK AS APPLE SAYS THEY SHOULD. DON'T HALF-ASS IT.
4. Apple's spell-check service!! Aauugghh! Have I become dependant on this handy feature? Sure, a little bit, but isn't that usually the case with any good UI enhancement? Of course, this isn't nearly as bothersome as #3, but it would be very helpful to keep users from having to re-read and edit text for simple spelling errors and typos.
<img src="graemlins/hmmm.gif" border="0" alt="[Hmmm]" />
And that's just the text boxes. Don't get me started on other things like those tabs or font handling or...
[ 10-08-2002: Message edited by: Brad ]</p>
I used OmniWeb for a while, and like Chimera, it looks just beautiful. But it also is buggy and slow. It usually crashes on me and gives me that long-ass CrashCatcher dialog box at least once or twice a day, sometimes more.
Mozilla has yet to crash on me, and it's compatible with every web page I've been to. It's fast, it has good text entry, and it has a lot of preferences to play around with. It's also really ugly, but that's a small price to pay for something that works really well.
IE and Netscape I don't even consider because they don't have built in ad blocking. I haven't tried Opera or iCab in a long time because I've used them both and neither one is very good. Netscape 4.79 is probably one of the best browsers for speed, but unfortunately, it's classic-only. It reminds me of Mozilla, ugly but fast.