MAC Microsoft Internet Explorer
I have a question concerning Microsoft's version of Internet Explorer for Macintosh (ALL O/S)... The company I work for and support (technically) uses mostly PC's (I.E. and Netscape) for users to access it's website (website uses java/script/etc). The MAC Version of IE basically sucks. Sometimes the page doesn't load, sometimes the scripts halt, its varried and the symptoms not always repeatable on the same machine. Equally IE works crappy on my TiPB @ home... What's the deal? Anyone have any ideas for a workaround besides running Netscape? Chimera is a good product it seems, but lacks a lot of features as well. Thanks.
Comments
It uses a completely different rendering engine from the Windows version. It takes advantage of practically NONE of the new (and by "new" I mean 3-year-old) technologies for Mac OS X. It breaks the HUI Guidelines left and right. You've said yourself that it is terribly buggy.
I blame Microsoft alone.
The current version of IE has essentially remained unchanged in the past three years since 5.0 was released for Mac. Other browser developers have advanced in leaps and bounds, but Microsoft? Nada.
But It's funny how it still remains the browser of choice for so many including me. It drives me mad sometimes but it really does work well with, dare I say it *most* things.
That or you can go grab Netspank 7.x, or the leading favorite Chimera (known as just 'Navigator'). I hear it's a swell little browser. Uses the Gecko rendering engine that came to life as part of the Mozilla project.
<strong>So any alternatives out there than using this product?</strong><hr></blockquote>
Go get Chimera now. Don't wait, don't think about it....
<a href="http://www.mozilla.org/projects/chimera/"; target="_blank">Chimera</a>
<strong>
Go get Chimera now. Don't wait, don't think about it....
<a href="http://www.mozilla.org/projects/chimera/"; target="_blank">Chimera</a></strong><hr></blockquote>
I second that
I've heard rumours that IE now works faster in 10.2.3. I am not sure about that though.
But for now, Chimera is my number one browser!
<strong>Chimera is fast, only problem is that its flash plugin does not work very well.
I've heard rumours that IE now works faster in 10.2.3. I am not sure about that though.
But for now, Chimera is my number one browser!</strong><hr></blockquote>
IE might be a drop faster, but it's still very slow.
The best UI out there !
<strong>Or you can wait for the iBrowser Apple is cooking up.</strong><hr></blockquote>Vaporware.
There has not been a single shred of evidence that Apple is working on a browser, short of hiring David Hyatt.
Anyhow, you really just have two good choices of other browsers. There is OmniWeb and there is Navigator (aka. Chimera).
OmniWeb has a vastly superior UI, has better privacy features and overall browser controls, is better threaded to support multiple processors, and integrates better with OSX technologies like services, native text editing, and the like. The downside is that the rendering engine in the current version 4.1 is a bit slow on single-processor Macs, only (barely) supports CSS1, and has some JavaScript bugs. OmniWeb provides a better experience browsing if you can look past the rendering bugs.
Navigator (Chimera) is fast and very standards-compliant for rendering pages. Unfortunately, that's about all is has going for it. Preferences and personal controls are still very lacking. The UI form controls inside web pages behave very poorly and un-Mac-like. If you just want a fast, compatible browser but aren't picky about the interface and customization options, go for Navigator.
There are still other options like Mozilla, Netscape, iCab, and Opera. The first two are basically the same and use the same engine as Navigator. The drawback, though, is that Mozilla/Netscape have an ugly and horribly slow interface. iCab is buggy, has an ugly interface, and isn't really compatible with many pages. Opera is pretty fast, but it has another nonstandard (read: ugly) interface and costs $40 to get rid of the intrusive banner, and is also buggy.
Personally, I keep both OmniWeb and Navigator running simultaneously. I prefer OmniWeb, but if I hit a site it chokes on, I switch to Navigator. I have very high hopes for Omni's acclaimed 5.0 version of OmniWeb because the programmers have mentioned on MacNN that the chunk of the engine that is the current bottleneck is being rewritten to be significantly faster and better support modern CSS, DHTML, and other technologies. They've been very quiet about a release date, only saying "early 2003".
[ 12-31-2002: Message edited by: Brad ]</p>
There are three to choose from...
1. Netscape (Commercial Version)
2. Mozilla (Open Source Version)
3. Chimera (Alpha Version of OSX Version?)
Help me. I'm totally confused. In my opinion I would go with the latest version of Mozilla. Stable and full of the features that are within Netscape...
Chimera is IMO geekware...still needs LOTS of work. <img src="graemlins/hmmm.gif" border="0" alt="[Hmmm]" />
Also...MacSwitcher, can you post a link to your company site? I'd be curious what IE on my iMac G3 700 w/ 10.2.3 & 768 MB RAM will do...
[ 12-31-2002: Message edited by: Artman @_@ ]</p>
<strong>One vote for <a href="http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omniweb/"; target="_blank">OmniWeb</a>.
The best UI out there !</strong><hr></blockquote>
It definately does have the best UI, but OmniWeb is slow.
[ 12-31-2002: Message edited by: EmAn ]</p>
<strong>Help me. I'm totally confused. In my opinion I would go with the latest version of Mozilla. Stable and full of the features that are within Netscape...</strong><hr></blockquote>Mozilla is always the "latest and greatest" of those three. Chimera uses a relatively ancient trunk from Mozilla at version 1.0.1. The official 1.1 trunk has been around for a long time and 1.2 has been in development for a while now too. Netscape is essentially an old build of Mozilla (not nearly as old as Chimera uses, though) plus a built-in AIM client and different logos. That's all.
[quote]Originally posted by Chucker:
<strong>Brad, if you expect a company as tiny as OMNI Group to be able to provide a rendering engine only half as complete as Gecko, then I'm afraid you don't know much about that area (although you surely do about many others).</strong><hr></blockquote>Do you work for Omni? How can you make such grandiose claims yourself while criticizing my claims at the same time? For speed alone, Omni already has the huge advantage of using native classes rather than having to work with the hundreds of thousands of lines of redundant, cross-platform junk that basically redefine every single structure that Mozilla uses. The current speed bottleneck in OmniWeb is that each major cell in the page view is a subclass of a standard NSView, which entails a lot of excess processing on table-heavy pages like these forums. The members of the Omni Group have been fairly open about the structural changes going on in 5.0 and how they affect performance and compatibility. Do a search over at MacNN to see for yourself. It might surprise you to know that Omni is already using some cross-browser code like the SpiderMonkey ECMAScript engine in OmniWeb.
I think it's absurd for you to discount developers like Omni just because they aren't part of some giant monolithic group like Microsoft or Mozilla. Sometimes its far better to have a few specialized programmers work together than throw a hundred or thousand others around the world at a single task.
[ 12-31-2002: Message edited by: Brad ]</p>
Chimera is by far the fastest browser on the Mac, and its standards compliance is a dream. Its UI, however, is atrocious. The text engine is crap. Do the Chimera developers care? Hard to tell, but it's going to take a LOT of work for them to fix it.
OmniWeb is disappointingly slow and its standards compliance is messed up, but pretty much everything else is top notch.
I don't know how much work undoing the monster that is Gecko would be in comparison to Omni's rewriting their own engine, but from what I can surmise, Omni's work is much.. cleaner, shall we say, due to the beauty of OOP.
If I had to bet which one will get to the finish line first, I'd bet on OW5. It's actually a Mac application to begin with, while the Chimera folk seem to have the task of slowly taking apart an app that was built to be platform agnostic (to a fault) and rebuilding it into a Mac app.
I was impressed by IE5 for OS 9.. but that was how long ago? Maybe MS can pull it off again and create a well written OS X-like browser. Right.
I'm on a 56k connection so I don't notice the rendering slowness much, so what if it tacks on half a second to the six it takes to download a page.
The interface is beautiful and easy to use, it renders beautifully (when it renders correctly) the ad blocking is superb, and the shortcuts are indispensable. Oh, and it uses Mac OS X's built in spell checker.
Did I forget to mention? The source view also formats and labels everything.
There's more to a browser than just 100% compatibility with everything, if you think not then I ponder why you use a Mac.