Chimera hits 0.28

Originally posted by simX
Back to a REAL browser. I don't even know why I bother with Chimera. What a joke.

What's with the browser bashing? A "real" browser? Shouldn't a "real" browser display most W3C code and CSS correctly? Considering that at a 0.2.x release Chimera can display webpages more correctly than Omniweb, I think you need to rethink what you mean by a "real" browser. People have different preferences, why don't we let people use their favorite browser without resorting to attacks? As Mac users, don't we know how stupid it is to bash other people's software choices by now?

P.S. I am using Chimera 0.2.8 to type this, and the text box speed has vastly improved.

P.P.S. If you don't like Chimera, don't use it. There are plenty of options, but please lay off on calling other people's choices "jokes".
 
Originally posted by phatsharpie


What's with the browser bashing? A "real" browser? Shouldn't a "real" browser display most W3C code and CSS correctly? Considering that at a 0.2.x release Chimera can display webpages more correctly than Omniweb, I think you need to rethink what you mean by a "real" browser.

...

P.P.S. If you don't like Chimera, don't use it. There are plenty of options, but please lay off on calling other people's choices "jokes".

yeah, browsers have feelings too

i use IE --> flame me
 
Originally posted by phatsharpie


What's with the browser bashing? A "real" browser? Shouldn't a "real" browser display most W3C code and CSS correctly? Considering that at a 0.2.x release Chimera can display webpages more correctly than Omniweb, I think you need to rethink what you mean by a "real" browser. People have different preferences, why don't we let people use their favorite browser without resorting to attacks? As Mac users, don't we know how stupid it is to bash other people's software choices by now?

P.S. I am using Chimera 0.2.8 to type this, and the text box speed has vastly improved.

P.P.S. If you don't like Chimera, don't use it. There are plenty of options, but please lay off on calling other people's choices "jokes".

phatsharpie: I know I have a choice, and that's why I use OmniWeb.

The reason that I am bashing Chimera so much in that last post is because it can't get SIMPLE THINGS RIGHT. OmniWeb, contrary to what most people say, actually displays most websites right. And even so, TYPING IN TEXT FIELDS IS FAR MORE BASIC. Where OmniWeb displays 95% of websites right, Chimera is fast in 0% of text fields. Because a lot of my time is spent here at MacOSX.com, it's ludicrous to think I will use Chimera when I can't reliably type in text fields.

Oh, and by the way, typing in text fields has NOT improved one bit in 0.28 from 0.27.
 
I like Chimera -- I think it renders pages quite nicely. Omniweb is still much 'prettier' with the aqua elements and such, but Chimera is much faster.

HOWEVER - 0.28 is VERY unstable. I have been using chimera all night and it has crashed probably 12 times. 0.27 seemed a lot more stable.
 
SimX -
Typing in Chimera is plenty fast on my Macs (see below) - and I can type pretty darn fast. 0.28 is more unstable than 0.27, but that seems to be the pattern - one release introduces a bunch of new features and bugs, the next release cleans up the bugs, etc. etc.

I don't know why OW is so damn crash prone on my machines. I really like OW alot. It's my #2 browser for most things. But it really steams me that after being in development for a year now, that it still is so unstable.

Also, with regard to OW rendering "most sites right" - are you kidding? OW's limited support of Javascript and especially CSS support makes around 10-15% of the websites I visit render incorrectly, some so bad that the page is unviewable. Say what you will about Chimera's bugs and lack of features (again, it's a 0.28 release - which by definiting means it isn't even 3/10's of the way done), but thanks to the Gecko rendering engine, at least it renders HTML/CSS/Javascript according to the standards, something that OW probably won't be capable of for at least another year when OW 5 is release (according to the developers own notes).
 
Originally posted by iFunk


yeah, browsers have feelings too

i use IE --> flame me

(Insert flame here)


I just downloaded at tried Chimera .28 today. It's nice and speedy, a fun browser to use.... however, this version crashes SO much more than .27.... Before, it was unusable because it lacked features. Now, it's unusable because it's instable. This makes Adam sad. :( Adam wants to make Chimera his main browser. If Chimera is stable, Adam will be happy again.

Also... does anybody else have this problem..? When I control-click to edit a bookmark's name, or something like that, ALL of the options in the menu are greyed out... WHY?
 
serpi: Right. Fast. This movie (click the link) shows how fast Chimera is typing when I am using it with the normal amount of applications open. Mind you, this movie was taken with no apps open except for Chimera, and was taken using Snapz Pro 1.0.3. Nevertheless, this is the speed that it usually types at with 5 or 6 applications open. Even when I'm not taking a movie and when nothing else is open, Chimera just barely keeps up.

That is not what I call a good browser.

A note about the movie. I finished typing the whole post I INTENDED to make by the time the word "last" comes up, at 0:43. Needless to say, Chimera finishes typing at 1:04, with NUMEROUS omissions in the last few sentences (not to mention that I can't really correct very well). This DOES NOT QUALIFY as "plenty fast".

Oh, and one last thing. I wouldn't recommend watching that movie with Chimera -- it makes a weird window.

Oh, and one other thing. Even if you're right, serpi, that OmniWeb can only display 10-15% of all web pages correctly (which is a totally false statistic), OmniWeb would STILL be better than Chimera which types takes more than 20 seconds to finish typing 2 or 3 sentences. That last sentence, by the way, was "I could probably go down and make some tea, and when I come back Chimera would STILL not be finished typing."
 
I just did a test with Chimera Navigator and I have no slowness whatsoever. This was running an app in classic, AIM X, Icy Juice, Mozilla and Mail, all in the background. It seemed just as fast as Mozilla, if not faster. The only time I had *ANY* slowness was when I tried to capture it with Snapz Pro, but that slows down everything that I've ever tried it with. And I'm only running a 733 QuickSilver with no L3 Cache!

I think if you're having speed issues, it may be due to your current setup or lack of ram or something, because with my bottom-o-thebarrol PowerMac I have no speed issues with text input.

Anyways, it's still in early early development. I wouldn't judge it yet. I'm sure everything will get worked out eventually, but what they've done so far is amazing.
 
If you looked at my sig, dricci, you'd see that I have a G4 cube running at 450 MHz with 896 MB RAM. That's enough speed and memory, and I shouldn't need any more to make typing in text fields run NORMALLY.
 
Well, I've had no speed issues at all. You do have more ram than me, so I don't really know what it could be other than something not agreeing with your system.

For me it was instant input with tons of apps running, including classic and an app, so I really don't know.

And I'm not a slow typer, either.
 
Does a 0.2.x version application deserve so much complaint? Why is everyone b*tching about Chimera as if it's a fully completed app? Heck, I love this browser and it's not even my main browser, simply because it's alpha software and A LOT of work still needs to be done!

If you don't like playing with alpha software, don't use it, and if you have constructive criticism, submit it to the developers.

I think we should be glad that there are so many options and developments going on for Mac OS X.

SimX: I am sorry, but I am not experiencing any text box input slowdown whatsoever. I type quite fast, and Chimera keeps up with me quite well. Text input was slow as molasses in earlier version, but it's on par with Mozilla and IE for me now.
 
SimX, I prefer OW too at the moment. But I completely disagree with you on about Chimera future. Chimera bug's are all related to the UI and developing a nice Cocoa UI (hurray for Cocoa) isn't going to be a big deal.

Okay I agree that at the moment Chimera is next to unusable... and maybe they should be a little more attentive to developing some of the really big missing features.. But hey, at the end of the day all that is really needed is to write UI wrappers around the gecko engine.

Omni on the other hand have a very tidy/nice UI, but their problem is with their rendering engine. IMO I don't think Omni will ever be able to solve this fully with their current 2/3 developers working on it. The gecko rendering engine has taken years to get up to scratch with many developers working on it (and it's still not perfect).

The rendering problem isn't a problem of ability and panache - which I think Omni have. It is a problem of man hours. You have to support 10 standards that have a hundred different versions that change every week. And if they don't support them all then you'll need IE on hand to view some pages.

Unfortunately I think the best use of Omni's time would be to apply their obviously talented programming skills to giving Chimera a great UI.
 
It's very comparable to the house analogy...

If you're foundation (rendering engine) is solid, then anything else can be fixed... But if your foundation is shaky, you are going to have a very hard time getting the rest of the house right.

Chimera's rendering engine (Gecko/Mozilla) works great. It renders standards perfectly, and one ups Mozilla/Netscape by using OS X native widgets, just like OW.

OW, on the other hand, has a great front end. It's very well polished and has some nice touches to it. However, there are so many problems with it's rendering engine, I just don't see it catching up with IE in it's support of web standards.

It's not impossible for them to fix, but with a small development team, it will take them a long time. Mozilla's rendering engine has been in development for 4 years by thousands of developers. As a result, it fully supports standards and renders pages correctly as long as standards are used.
 
Originally posted by phatsharpie
Does a 0.2.x version application deserve so much complaint? Why is everyone b*tching about Chimera as if it's a fully completed app? Heck, I love this browser and it's not even my main browser, simply because it's alpha software and A LOT of work still needs to be done!

Because some users were praising it too high. It was said to be the all-other-browser killer at the stage of 0.2.2, which made me - among others - angry, because it was still lacking almost everything.

I think we should be glad that there are so many options and developments going on for Mac OS X.

Yes. And that's all I, for example, am saying. I just think it's ridiculous to have a separate thread for every 0.2.x release, praising stuff to the heavens that have been here for more than a decade. (Bookmarks!!!)

I'm glad there's a diversity of players in this field - as long as the *old* browser wars don't start up again, where companies like Netscape and Microsoft made it almost impossible for web developers to make a website that worked well with both browsers. (Of course, that's the devs' failure, too.)

If Chimera (and I *really* hope they switch back from calling it 'Navigator') development goes well, this will be a nice player in some time. But right now it ****s, IE will make inroads come Jaguar and IE 5.5 and OmniWeb, though a very good Cocoa application, still has its way to go for standards compliance. Opera seems an outside player, iCab too. And Mozilla per se is too bloated.

If Chimera can be OS X' Galeon, I'm happy as a fruit cake.
 
I like having choices!
Chimera (yep, much better than navigator, IMHO) is a great choice!
I still have to figure out which browser to make default. At the moment it's iCab (believe it or not!) just because of its download manager and ability to save webarchives.

I'd love to use Omniweb, but it just acts weird on a number of sites that I use everyday: bank, webmail etc.
Chimera does them justice, and that's all that matters at the end of the day. Plus it's fast and pretty.

True, text entering is slow, but it won't be like that for long!

Now, everyone go back to their repsective browsers!

P.S. isn't it nice to have open standards?

:)
 
And if you are so insulted by these threads please just ignore them. Stop being asses about it.

I like you guys but this really is starting to **** me off. We like chimera let us talk about it please.
 
Originally posted by simX
The reason that I am bashing Chimera so much in that last post is because it can't get SIMPLE THINGS RIGHT. OmniWeb, contrary to what most people say, actually displays most websites right. And even so, TYPING IN TEXT FIELDS IS FAR MORE BASIC. Where OmniWeb displays 95% of websites right, Chimera is fast in 0% of text fields. Because a lot of my time is spent here at MacOSX.com, it's ludicrous to think I will use Chimera when I can't reliably type in text fields.

Oh, and by the way, typing in text fields has NOT improved one bit in 0.28 from 0.27.

You're missing the point. You can't bash Chimera for having bad text fields unless you are a true professional cocoa developer and know what it takes to get it right. I'm not, I have no idea what it takes.

The point is, you should find a work around. Chimera is SO fast, and SO stable, and SO ---- F- U- C- K- I- N- G- ---- GREAT that it is worth finding a work around.

Simple work around: type in text edit. That way, if you're typing a long post or email, you can save the text to your hard drive in case your computer crashes, or there's a power failure, or whatever. Then you won't lose your work. Second, you do stuff like Find and Replace all. It's much nicer to type in Text Edit than ANY web browser. Then, just do select all, then paste into Chimera. That happens instantly, by the way :)

Oh, and text fields in IE **** too. Did you know if you try to select a big block of text, the selection hilite gets all screwed up and all the text gets redrawn incorrectly and the placement is all off? Text blocks seem to disappear even though they are still there. It's MUCH more aggravating than Chimera's text block.

So why did I decide to find this work around and paste text into Chimera? Well, because it's so great it deserves it. You say "it can't get SIMPLE THINGS RIGHT." This is what people said about Mac OS X when it came out, too. Even 6 months ago. But we all used it anyway? Why? Because it was SOOO MUCH BETTER that it was worth putting up with the bull****. Same with Chimera. It's so much god damn better than it was worth finding the TextEdit work around, and it's also a good habit to use text edit ANYWAY instead of the browser, any browser. (Then just copy/paste.) Like I said in another post, Chimera is a direct analogy to OS X. Where OS X was GREAT yet had bad problems, we all stuck with it cuz we saw how GREAT it was. Now it's Chimera's turn. We will stick with it despite the stupid little problems because it's core is something great, something beautiful. Good software.

And if you typed that WHOLE post in frustration in Chimera's slow text box, then you are letting your computer OWN you. I, on the other hand, used Text Edit and instead chose to OWN my computer.

I know you can see this, SimX, because as a Mac OS X user, I know you're god damn smart and ahead of the crowd.
 
Originally posted by serpicolugnut
OW, on the other hand, has a great front end. It's very well polished and has some nice touches to it. However, there are so many problems with it's rendering engine, I just don't see it catching up with IE in it's support of web standards.
I completely agree with you. IE is way more advanced then all the other browsers, you guys can't even compare.
 
Yes, IE dominates all. It even has Smart Crash™ Technology direct from Windows 98! Smart Crash brings the browser to a halt and kills it when it senses you've been using the Internet for too long. Of course, in Microsoft Time™, this can be only seconds after application launch.
 
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