Chimera still *snappier* than Safari

M

MacLuv

Reloaded
I've been testing out Safari and I don't see any speed improvements over Chimera. Safari loads the pages a little bit slower, and Chimera is definitely "snappier".

I know you can remove the brushed metal, but makes the browser look "heavy" -- puts too much emphasis on the browser and not what I'm looking at. Even worse than IE in this regard. Apple used to have a "fun" interface, the brushed metal apps are giving it a very "sterile" appearance. Not to be confused with a "clean" appearance.

Safari has also been "stacked" with preinstalled autocompleted URLs, like "1-800 Flowers" Not cool. If I've never been there, I don't want to go there or see it. I think Apple is following M$ lead on this one.

I'll stick with Chimera. It still rocks.
 
well, you're not the first to say this. from www.macosrumors.com:
As promised, we have been playing with Apple's new KHTML-based (KDE's Konqueror being the prototype for this open-source family, as Netscape is to the Mozilla project) Web browser, Safari. It's a great browser, but it is still a beta and it shows.

In subjective speed tests, Safari clearly beats out Internet Explorer, OmniWeb, and iCab....but despite Apple's benchmarks, compared to the latest build (01/02/03) of Chimera, Safari is noticeably slower. It is difficult to tell if this is really a rendering performance issue, however, because it appears that the difference is not in raw rendering performance, but rather in download efficiency.

While Chimera appears to be able to retrieve data from Web servers as fast as any broadband line can download it, Safari -- and keep in mind it is still in deep beta, so this will no doubt be addressed in due time -- appears to be much slower at actually acquiring the data for rendering. When testing with cached data, Safari does appear to have a small performance edge; not really enough in our opinion to justify switching from the more feature-rich Chimera, but surprisingly close for such a young browser.

With the Mac OS X userbase just recently warming to Chimera, Safari threatens to further balkanize an already small marketplace for Mac browsers....and give Web developers even more variables to account for. However, as both KHTML and Mozilla are open source, perhaps we can have the best of both worlds. With Chimera's lead developer working for Apple, we have to wonder what sort of cross-over potential exists.

Clearly, Safari is going to be a key application for Mac users going forward. It is fast, surprisingly stable, supports almost everything (although many sites, notably Hotmail, are still ridden with bugs - even Versiontracker appears to have some significant but not fatal issues in Safari), and does have some very nice interface elements such as its bookmark management GUI. Promising, but it has a long wait to go before it is ready for full-time use.
Click to expand...

this is apparently the article that got SJ ticked off.

personally i think safari is the best i've seen yet and may just be the incentive i needed to upgrade to jaguar. this is the first free app to really get my attention right off the bat.
 
Uh, edX if you are still on 10.1.5 ... i guess you haven't browsed on Chimera for the last half a year :)

Open Source. Yes... Steve said something about the open source. Now give me someone *ppppllleeeaazze* the link to the source, i want it :D
 
giaguarra - i've never browsed on chimera. despite all my efforts, i've never been able to download a build that works. most have quit while launching and a few have lasted a site or 2 before quitting. not exactly a snappy browser in my book. probably just my mac or the computer Gods protecting me from the mozilla connection. but from what little i did see, it doesn't impress me like it seems to everybody else. i don't like tabs and i just don't find the interface anything spectacular. not that i like the brushed metal of safari either.
 
May I recommend you to download and try build #2002122004 of Chimera. I am using this one and have never changed; actually, it has never crashed on my IiMac.
 
What's not snappy about Safari? It even eats your home folder for lunch if you don't set the download panel's clearing prefs to 'manual' (if you option-click to download a link). :p

I'm sure glad I've never option-clicked a link in my entire life, so I'm not one of the betawhiners on Apple's boards now. Guess we'll see a newer beta very, very soon.

But to stay on the thread's topic: There is software & hardware I instantly like and software I instantly dislike. Chimera was one of the latter, while Safari was definitely an 'A' candidate.

I also think it doesn't really matter whether Safari really is faster than Chimera at this time, because it's certainly gonna be improved. And if I ignore Chimera (which I tend to do, anyway), Safari is _clearly_ much faster than any other browser on the Mac, maybe with the exception of links or lynx (but I happily ignore those, too, for my everyday browsing).

The preinstalled auto-completes are deletable. Go to the bookmarks and get rid of the shopping-folder.
 
Well thanks fryke, but I'm still not convinced to switch yet... I've given them the side by side and I'm not impressed. I'll wait until Apple decides to stop releasing betas on us.
 
I still prefer chimera also. It does seem slightly faster, and I prefer its interface, and it has tabbed browsing.
 
Originally posted by Giaguara
Uh, edX if you are still on 10.1.5 ... i guess you haven't browsed on Chimera for the last half a year :)

Open Source. Yes... Steve said something about the open source. Now give me someone *ppppllleeeaazze* the link to the source, i want it :D
Click to expand...

Take a look at http://dot.kde.org/1041971213/

Brian
 
I have to admit I have completely fallen for Safari, even without tabs! It just seems faster than any browser out there (including Chimera), and it renders pages so beautifully. I think it's because it uses real Aqua widgets that makes all the difference. The UI is also wonderful, so clutter-free!

I haven't ran into many CSS problems, so I don't have much complaints in that department, but I think it's an amazing browser, especially considering it's beta. I can't believe I am saying this, but I've actually found a browser on OS X that I love more than Chimera! Wow!
 
Both Safari and Chimera have their own positive qualities. Chimera's tabs are a great addition. It takes a little while to get used to them. But after a while, you will value not having to move windows out of the way to get to a window underneath ... or going down to the dock every time you want a minimized window. However, Safari has a great bookmarks UI. And I do think the UI of Safari is more elegant than Chimera's, I really think the brushed metal looks good on it. However, I have a question. I thought Apple hired the creator of Chimera? Maybe this was a joke, but I was pretty sure they did. But then again, even if they did doesn't mean he worked on Safari.
 
I have to say that the bookmark management in Safari is probably the most horrible garbage I've seen in my life. How this is supposed to make it easier for people who found the bookmark system difficult is beyond me. Besides, who the hell out there is stupid enough to find the bookmark management system complicated? Did Steve Jobs get his stats from mentally impaired people? I do tech support for an internet service and even the most irritating and stupid clients know how to bookmark and manage their bookmarks. This 'revolutionary' bookmark system in Safari is unbelievable garbage.

Lack of tabs is a huge step backward, the lack of support for Hotmail (and a couple of other sites I have to log on to) is purely embarrassing. If Steve Jobs intended to hurt IE, he succeeded since IE is pure sh*t, but let's hope he makes no comparison to Chimera. As much as I wanted to keep Safari on my system, I kept longing for the ease and power of Chimera. It's the best of the new world, and the best of the old. All it's missing is a cookie management system that only accepts from servers I'm visiting (no third-parties) and image blocking and I'll be happy. I know Mozilla has those but Mozilla is unbearingly slow.
 
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