Chimera programmer feeling way down...

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Chimera is dead. Sorry. I have used it once or twice, just for kicks. I found it no more useful than IE or any other browser. Nothing against it, but it's JUST A BROWSER.

I have never understood the passion behind these browser wars. It's not like these things are Photohop, Lightwave and Indesign. And as far as web development goes, which I do a ton of, I guess it's nice to have a standards compliant browser, too bad none of them seem consistent to each other in terms of delivering on those "standards".

Admittedly, I don't use advanced features of browsers, other than Auto Form Entry (which IE still rules at). Tabs would be nice I guess, but I don't do enough layered browsing to care either way. Safari, for me, is easily the best browser with the one exception of Auto Form Entry missing. Other people have different needs, tastes, etc. I can accept that.

I have no idea what drives people to program a browser, which nobody on earth is going to ever pay for, no matter how good it is, given the perfectly adequate free options. Now that I say that, I did actually pay for an early release of Omniweb just to support OS X development.

I congratulate the programmer's efforts, I guess. Hopefully that skill can be used for something more productive.

I love cellfish's "Safari is garbage" comment, with absolutely nothing to back it up. Too funny.
 
Just like mindbend did, I'd like to detail my own personal needs with a browser. While mindbend only needs auto-voucher-fill, for my own the only thing I need is to be able to do the following in only a few clicks:

- Open a news page (www.lemonde.fr, equivalent to The Times or to the NYTimes).
- Open four sections of this forum (news & rumors, sys & software, web works and net).
- Open www.desktoppublishing.com boards (I'm in DTP).
- Open Xicons.com so I can see if anything new is out.
- Open http://support.carracho.com as I'm participating to their forums.

Chimera allows me to save all those URLs under one single bookmark that I've called "Hyperdaily". Every morning, I run Chimera and click "Hyperdaily" once and the whole Web I've selected shows up. I read page after page, participate, bookmark more, read again, close, read more, participate again, and close the last tab - then quit Chimera.

All Web in a two clicks :) Well done !

This what I need to do, I use the Web this way. And Chimera is the browser I need to do this.

Suggestions:
- Obviously, better Flash/WMP/Real support.
- Reduce browser application size ? It's quite huge !
- Apart from this, I can't see anything else.
 
Chimera is nooot dead! Into the barricades!

[bolero of ravel] Chi-meee-raaaa...!! Chi-meee-raaa...!! Chii-meeee-raaa...!!!

[hidden code for the users of macs only to provocate to the international terrorism] Hey, I think we should encourage him more! Lets post on every mac board that we DO like chimera..
[/hidden code for the users of macs only to provocate to the international terrorism]

:D

[/bolero of ravel]
 
>>No way that i'll use safari before it has tabs
Same here, Chimera stays. It crashed for me before .6 but now it is very stable especially the 12202002 bld
 
I jumped on the Safari bandwagon and i'm loosing faith. It's a good browser, and has the best bookmark system for me, but it seems slower. I think i might just come back to Chimera. I do miss tabs and i feel that Chiimera (as of today) is better than Safari (as of today).

However, sad but ture, Apple has many people working on Safari and it's going to be hard to compete. Especially if they fix some of the big bugs in their beta.

It'd be sad to see Chimera go but, in (browser) war some won't make it.

Twister

My Chimera requests
-better Flash support
-spell check
-themeable
-easier access to "enable/disable" pop-ups
 
2003010706 here. feels like dirty nowadays when i don't change every day or at leat once a week... :D
 
the good thing about safari is that insect button at the top right hand corner. its very simple to use and lets u report problems very easily! at the same time apple have much more ppl workin on safari and with a lot of feedback from us they can improve much faster than chimera!

on the other hand chimera only has that Send somethin .. to report bugs!it opens only upon crashing . as a result. there is LESS feedback to chimera developers. and less developers workin on these problems
it is therefore logical, that safari will catch up with chimera in all the remainin matters!
safari (i think) will eventually become the ideal mac browser !

its a shame though for chimera. theyve done a very good job. maybe the best thing for all of us would be if. apple took up ALL of the chimera team with them . that would lead to a better and faster overall result!!!
 
Chimera was/is still alot more advanced than Safari. It's had time to be refined and added many useful features such as tabs, the ability to remember your form entries in the keychain (which no other browser does). It had superior rendering capabilities.

It also had some issues. Javascript recognition and plugin compatability were lacking.

That said, I am now a safari user. It just makes more sense to me. I like the features so far and believe Apple will add more features in the future. If only there was some way to borrow code from both projects in Safari. It would be the ultimate in compatability but alas I doubt for many reasons that would happen.

I don't wish Chimera to fail but I always knew since the day MacOS X hit retail shelves that if Apple ever released their own browser i'd support it before supporting any others. I hoped it would be a good browser because i didn't want to blindly support a bad product (like some do with IE) All in all I think Apple has done a good job. I think by putting their weight behind konquerer, they further fragment the market which I think in the long run will create a basis for better support of standards and less support for MS standards.
 
Well, I guess I'd feel a little depressed too if a company I supported brought out a product that competed against mine. But let's look at reality here. Apple has a perception problem within the public eye of being a "slow" and expensive computer. Micro$oft makes IE for Mac OS X and is completely on par with its Windows couterparts for bugs, random crash routines, and security holes. Mozilla is nice for W3C compliance, cross platform, but BIG and BLOATED, which it must to be cross platform feature for feature. Apple needs something light and FAST, faster than anything else out there, and once again it looked to the open source movement for the answers. I've used Chimera, it's pretty good, but I'm used to Mozilla. I started cruising the web when there was only Mosaic, then Netscape, then AOL bought Netscape and screwed it up, then I discovered Mozilla, and I'm really happy with Mozilla because it gives me control over every aspect of what I want and don't want to see. Sure it's not the fastest, but my dialup connection is at best, on a good day, 24000 bits per second, so Mozilla will render the pages slightly faster than the bandwidth of my dialup connection, so I'm not missing much. People are going to use what works best for them, that's the only reason they are passionate about which browser or other software they use. For a long time all I used was Netscape Communicator 4.X, even my mother just switched to Mozilla because that was what she was used to using. I'll switch to Safari when I get TABBED browsing and the ability to bookmark tabbed webpages, until then Mozilla all the way baby.
 
I downloaded safari both at work and at home....

After a few days at work I started using chimera more and more and eventualy took safari off the dock completely.

Today I just tok safari off the dock. I miss the tabbed browsing, the tabbed bookmarks, the dock menu bookmarks and also I hate the download manager (especially since I have to close it manually).

Personally, I would like for apple to include every mac browser available with their systems and then let people test run a few and choose what fits them.
 
I still use chimera only. I used Safari about four times, but I just don't like it as much. almost if it had tabbed browsing I might like it almost as much as chimera, but I doubt it. The overall look and feel of chimera is better, IMHO.
 
well why not offer his ideas to apple so that we can all be happy (maybe apple might even hire him on the safari project...)
 
Okay, to sum up all of this...

1) Chimera *was* cool. *Was* is the key word. Yes, it may still have features and enhancements and may still be your primary browser of choice, but (2) remains a fact...

2) Safari has a team of paid developers working on it, even though it's open source. Safari is currently beta, and could rapidly become "the cats meow" in no time at all. You are all used to IE and Chimera, Mozilla, Omniweb update schedules, I think you will see Safari bypass all functionality and all features in the next 6 months. It will become the "IE" of the Windows world, but hopefully better. :)

He should be down and out, he should feel like he is wasting his time, because he is.

Point in fact:

Safari accesses to macosx.com in the month January surpass the next in line (IE) by double. Following up in third place is Chimera. Obviously, this is no rep of the real world, but it is reflective of this site.

Safari is fast becoming and will be the de-facto web browser for the Macintosh platform. The only browser that has a chance of competing is IE, and that is only if Microsoft cared. Which we know they don't.

So folks, decide what browser you want to smoke and enjoy it now, while Safari is being purified, cause in a matter of months, the only browser you will be smoking is Safari.

Scott
 
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