# Chimera browser is available for d/l!



## ThE OutsiDer (Feb 14, 2002)

http://chimera.mozdev.org/


Its freaking fast, bit buggy like has troubles with copy/paste thats not from finder mena but in shortcuts, cant enter text in text fields when loging into forums and I cant get 2 button support so no tabs yet.

I like it though, as I use mozzilla.


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## googolplex (Feb 14, 2002)

This thing is amazing. Don't you love cocoa.

Also I read on their newgroup that they found a bug in it and the next build they make should be 33% faster! This thing kills in speed.

One thing that is annoying is that you can't type in a textfield in a webpage yet... but that should be fixed.


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## .dev.lqd (Feb 14, 2002)

The scrolling algorithms need some work- but elsewise I am extremely impressed.


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## serpicolugnut (Feb 14, 2002)

for a VERY early Alpha build. Rendering of web pages works (mostly), but drop down menus, text fields etc. don't work yet.

Speed is very impressive, esp. for an Alpha, and esp. since the developer said the next build will be 33% faster. Wow.

Scrolling is terrible right now, but from the info. gathered from the mailing list, they haven't implemented all the Cocoa widgets yet, so that probably has a lot to do with it.

One pet peeve that I'm not sure if it will be addressed... It uses the same button widgets (like Submit, Reset, etc.) that Mozilla uses, which look butt ugly. The thing I love about OmniWeb is these widgets are fully aquafied and gorgeous. I hope they can fix this at some point.

All in all, a great start!


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## googolplex (Feb 14, 2002)

The webpages widgets are suppose to go aqua once they hook them up. Also the scrollbars use XUL for rendering right now, they will use cocoa soon.

This could very well be the killer browser.


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## iamnotmad (Feb 14, 2002)

I am very excited about this browser!


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## twyg (Feb 14, 2002)

> _Originally posted by iamnotmad _
> *I am very excited about this browser! *



See, not only is he 'notmad' but he's actually excited!

I downloaded Chimera, and can see the glint of something very powerful.

It is by no means ready so if you're a newbie to OS X expecting an IE killer this afternoon it won't be in the form of Chimera.

In two months though...

_*twyg walks away, and as soon as he turns the corner you hear someone screaming 'YEAH! GO Chimera, GO Chimera. No more IE for me!'*_


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## edX (Feb 14, 2002)

please check out this thread before downloading  any mozilla software.


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## themacko (Feb 14, 2002)

lol.  Ed's got a personal vendetta against mozilla


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## simX (Feb 14, 2002)

How could anyone forget to mention that web pages look JUST AS BUTT UGLY as in Internet Explorer??

No thanks.... after using OmniWeb, I've become spoiled at how it can make even gross web pages look halfway decent.  I couldn't stand to go back to web pages that look like that. XP  Waiting 2 more seconds for MacOSX.com to load is a fair price to pay for good looks.


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## edX (Feb 14, 2002)

no scott, i have a vendetta against helping aol. If apple were to start supporting some particular build and enhance it to make it proprietary, then i would support that build. but since aol is who profits most from mozilla, then i don' twant to use it. and i just want to make sure people understand that helping aol is what they are doing when they use it.  aol users should all be using mozilla just to help themselves in the long run. of course they would help themselves more by getting a new isp, but that's another story.


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## googolplex (Feb 14, 2002)

i'm not going to argue with you ed. but all i'll say is that this is far from supporting aol because its not even going to be used by netscape/aol. 

I'd really appreciate it if you lose the sarcastic "you'll be sorry" tone  And stop spoiling the party!


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## edX (Feb 14, 2002)

point me to the place that says this is hands off to netscape and i will delete both my posts in this thread


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## googolplex (Feb 14, 2002)

Sure they could use it. But microsoft could to. Because its open source. You seem to like open source but then you think that if a company uses it its horrible. I bet you that more people use Mozilla then Netscape 6.


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## dlookus (Feb 14, 2002)

I think we should start a whole section for emotional/political/ethical debates so we can keep it out of threads about a new web browser.

Take it outside boys.


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## googolplex (Feb 14, 2002)

Good idea. We should talk about how damn cool this browser is instead of who might possibly use it in the future. But if the issue is brought up I feel that I should argue against it so people don't get the wrong impression.


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## dlookus (Feb 14, 2002)

I downloaded it. Very fast loading pages (very.) Still an awful lot of it not working though.


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## googolplex (Feb 14, 2002)

Its only been around for about 2 weeks with only two developers working on it. Cut them some slack . They are doing an amazing job!


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## dlookus (Feb 14, 2002)

Hey! You wanna fight?


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## ksuther (Feb 14, 2002)

Wow, it's fast 
Great job for the time it's been worked on, but could use some scrollwheel support and better scrolling


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## googolplex (Feb 14, 2002)

scrolling is at the moment being done with XUL not cocoa. It will use cocoa soon i think..


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## phatsharpie (Feb 15, 2002)

Wow!!! It's even faster than v0.1 from yesterday! This browser ROCKS! I can't wait for it to be usable (in terms of scrolling and form elements).

Does anyone know if Mozilla/Netscape plugins (i.e. Flash and Java) would work with this wonderful browser?

GREAT JOB GUYS!!!

-B


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## Matrix Agent (Feb 15, 2002)

Die Netscape buttons! DIE!


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## googolplex (Feb 16, 2002)

are you refering to the form control buttons in the page? because if you are they will indeed die.

One thing that I found out from one of the developers is that they are planning on making gecko talk to quartz. Gecko would figure out where everything goes and then tell quartz to draw it. This would mean that pages would look like they do in Omniweb only they would render properlly and faster !

phatsharpie, I dont know about the plugins. Post a message asking about it on the chimera newsgroup on news.mozdev.org, or email one of the developers (I think they have their addresses on the site somewhere.), or try and find one of them on #mozilla on irc.mozilla.org (their names are 'hyatt' and 'NSObject' ).


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## fryke (Feb 17, 2002)

I personally think that OmniWeb's path will be better. (To take from Mozilla only what's needed and implement it in a finished Cocoa application rather than building a Cocoa app around a finished Mozilla.)

The speed of Chimera is exceptionally cool, but I guess it'll be diminished once it has to do also the hovers and everything that just isn't in it yet.


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## googolplex (Feb 17, 2002)

Omniweb is going to need to take a whole lot more from mozilla to have whats needed. All they have taken from mozilla so far is the javascript engine BTW.

The speed isn't going to be diminished. I dont know what your talking about that isn't there yet. Most everything that is in gecko in regular Mozilla is there. If the speed were to diminish it would only be at the speed of regular mozilla which is already way faster then everything else.

What is wrong with building cocoa around the engine. Its a much better approach in my opinion. Chimera doesn't have to worry about the rendering engine because it will always be up to date and fast for mozilla. All that chimera has to worry about is making a great cocoa app and tying gecko into it.

I'm not saying that Omniweb is a bad browser, it makes pages look great and its got an amazing interface, but I think that using gecko is a great idea and will make this browser really amazing.


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## Javintosh (Feb 17, 2002)

I just downloaded this. It looks amazing! This is the perfect companion to Apple's Mail. This is the web browser apple should be bundling in with every mac!


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## googolplex (Feb 17, 2002)

It still needs more work. It couldn't be included now. But yes this thing is amazing and it should be the default on os x when it is done!


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## Frederic (Feb 17, 2002)

You can call this FAST ! Obviously, this app is not finished at all, but I think it runs well for an 0.11 alpha...

Long live...


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## fryke (Feb 17, 2002)

> _Originally posted by googolplex _
> *Omniweb is going to need to take a whole lot more from mozilla to have whats needed. All they have taken from mozilla so far is the javascript engine BTW.*



Yes, but they already announced they are planning to implement more for the 5.0 development tree on the mailing list.



> *The speed isn't going to be diminished. I dont know what your talking about that isn't there yet.*



Hover over a link that does change its colour via CSS in IE or mozilla. This is only an example, there are quite a lot of features that aren't there yet. There are even more features that are in OW which aren't in mozilla at all. Features Cocoa provides, so Chimera *could* implement them. Like Quartz displaying the pages. Or live text checking. Other things spring to mind like *very* cool shortcuts (user programmable).



> *I'm not saying that Omniweb is a bad browser, it makes pages look great and its got an amazing interface, but I think that using gecko is a great idea and will make this browser really amazing. *



Well, that's what OW plans, too, only the other way round. If the GUI comes second, then you can always use mozilla, but OmniGroup has developped the app over years now and you can see their experience in almost every Cocoa detail. It'll take the chimera project quite some time to achieve the lot, I believe, while OmniGroup will either finish their work in the browsing engine or adopt gecko.

It's just an opinion I state here. I *like* the idea of chimera. Like it more than mozilla's interface for sure. I'm just thinking aloud here.


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## googolplex (Feb 17, 2002)

omniweb isn't going to adopt gecko fully because then they would have to get gecko to talk with quartz to keep their nice looking pages. Chimera is working on this now.

Your right hover isn't there yet, but when it does get ther it wont slow things down much at all.

having the rendering engine basically done gives chimera a huge head start. Now they just have to make a great interface. Whereas OW has a great interface but now they have to do the dirty work and make a great engine.

Long Live Choice!


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## fryke (Feb 18, 2002)

that's exactly where i think you're wrong. about which part is the hard one. apple itself once said that when everything works as planned in a software development and you'd say 'we're 80% done', really there are 80% to come, and that's refinement in the interface. that's where apple is strong, so they must know. and that's why omniweb has so much appeal although it's cleary inferior in showing websites (missing features) which is its primary task.


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## googolplex (Feb 18, 2002)

Sure, the interface is very difficult. And it needs a lot of attention and time to make a good one. I love omniweb's interface, but being someone who uses CSS and a few other things that Omniweb doesn't do correctly I dont use it. 

I dont want this thread to turn into a browser arguement, because I love omniweb as well. Also I think we should just look at chimera and be glad that there is going to be another great browser on os x!


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## voice- (Feb 18, 2002)

Anybody else noticed how unstable it is? It's like using Windows98, you're always expecting  it to quit and just pray you'll get the job done before that time.


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## bighairydog (Feb 18, 2002)

Fuck me that's fast...

One thing though. Go to the same page in IE and Chimera. Chimera renders faster, but check out how slow vertical scrolling by moving the scroll bar is.

Looks promising though.

Bernie     )


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## ABassCube (Feb 18, 2002)

I downloaded Chimera too, and it's speed is AMAZING! God, I never thought my DSL could be that fast!! Unfortunately, it's not really usable yet, as it has no JavaScript support and you can't type in text fields (not to mention the horrible scrolling), but I see amazing potential for this browser! It's only been out for two weeks, and already it's much faster than OW and IE! Still don't like how it looks quite as much as OW, but I do love the tabs feature.
Also, the "Back" button is not quite as instant as OW and IE, but it is faster than OW was for a LONG time (until about October 2001). I see a very cool replacement for OmniWeb in about 4-5 months!

Adam.


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## fryke (Feb 18, 2002)

guess we have the final messages by now. 

it's f*!ing fast.
it's f*!ing unstable.
OW is nice, too. 
both have yet some way to go.


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## bighairydog (Feb 18, 2002)

I've noticed people talking about what OW has taken from mozilla:


> _Googolplex:_
> ...omniweb isn't going to adopt gecko fully...
> ...All they have taken from mozilla so far is the javascript engine BTW...


&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Is OW open source? I assume it must be to be able to incorperate bits of mozilla. If it is opensource, then it sure is the only nice looking bit of open source I've ever seen!

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;I always thought that opensource meant hello power, goodbye friendly user experience (case in point - UNIX).

Can someone fill me in on the situation?

Bernie     )


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## googolplex (Feb 18, 2002)

omniweb isn't open source. Commercial software can use mozilla code however.

scrolling is a bug. It will get much better.

it will also get more stable as well.

in the future they plan on implementing quartz rendering the pages, which means it will be beautiful like OW.

Sorry this is so short... i could answer those questions more fully but i have to go get my haircut now


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## serpicolugnut (Mar 6, 2002)

Chimera has the most promise of ALL the current browsers... And here's why...

Currently, the best two HTML rendering engines are IE's and the Netscape/Mozilla (Gecko) rendering engine.

Right now, the Mozilla rendering engine (0.9.8 and higher) is running faster than anything else available under OS X. The Mozilla builds are very good (it's my everyday browser), but suffer from slow UI elements. 

So a Cocoa front end to the Mozilla rendering engine should produce one hell of a browser. OmniWeb has exactly the reverse problem. Their front end is wonderful, but the rendering engine is substandard. They've made amazing strides between 4.0 and 4.1, but it's still lacking in full CSS support, and it also features non-standard plugins.

I'd use this analogy:

I would rather have a house with a solid foundation that needs some cosmetic work, as opposed to a house that looks nice, but sits on top of a cracked foundation.

The big question is how long will it take Chimera to become useable. Right now, all we've got is a technology demonstration. The developers here are at the very beginning of the project, and you've got to wonder how long they think it will take before the project sees a viable project. 

OmniWeb is developed by a team of three, and the estimates I've heard have them getting full CSS supported no earllier than OW 5.0, sometime next year.


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## Hartmurmur (Mar 27, 2002)

Can't use something like this. Out of the 3 sites I visited, none displayed properly. And a lot of the content was straight-up text.

I'll revisit at some other time....maybe.


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