Competition to Chimera out on Windows / Linux

I have to agree with Tigger, solrac: Chimera didn't do any such thing for me. But not because it was bad or anything, only because I already HAD decent browsing experience. I'm using OmniWeb for everything except 1%, because I'm much faster with it. Depends on your browsing habits, I guess, but keyboard shortcuts just rock for me. That I can enter 'vt chimera' to find the newest version of Chimera on Versiontracker, for example, or that 'mx' takes me here to macosx.com/forums. Plus: Page rendering isn't that far behind there. And for everything else I'm using IE, as it's the most compatible browser for sites that don't work in OW.

But those are personal opinions that I only put here because you're statement that sounds so absolute... It just _isn't_ that absolute.
 
I used to like Netscape when you could type "quote aapl" and get a specific stock quote.

For some reason they've removed that feature in Mozilla. Quite a shame.

The newest version of IE for OS X actually improves quite a bit upon the original. Its not that bad of a browser either.
 
Originally posted by fryke
I have to agree with Tigger, solrac: Chimera didn't do any such thing for me. But not because it was bad or anything, only because I already HAD decent browsing experience. I'm using OmniWeb for everything except 1%, because I'm much faster with it. Depends on your browsing habits, I guess, but keyboard shortcuts just rock for me. That I can enter 'vt chimera' to find the newest version of Chimera on Versiontracker, for example, or that 'mx' takes me here to macosx.com/forums. Plus: Page rendering isn't that far behind there. And for everything else I'm using IE, as it's the most compatible browser for sites that don't work in OW.

But those are personal opinions that I only put here because you're statement that sounds so absolute... It just _isn't_ that absolute.
Click to expand...

You are absolutely wrong. Especially if your computer is a Powerbook G4 500. Chimera is insanely faster than Explorer, and Omniweb, and Opera, and iCab, and every other browser.

You and Tigger simply either don't notice it, don't care, or can't see it.

Like I said. Explorer would take over A MINUTE to load a page. Chimera takes 3 seconds. Any other web browser refreshes the whole screen (including on Windows!) if only a piece of HTML changes. Chimera only redraws that part of the screen.

These are absolute facts. Bring your computer to my house in Southern California if it's not true on your computer. I would love to fall out of my seat.

Chimera changes browsing on the mac forever.
 
I just scrapped IE on my PC and used Netscape 7 which is also a Moz app. And it rocks. No more crashes.
 
solrac got me thinking about some catchy Chimera slogans.

"Chimera changes browsing on the mac forever."

"Chimera, clinically proven to regrow hair!"

"Chimera, less than one calorie per serving."

"I love what you do for me, Chimera!"

"Always Chimera." :p

**edit**

Hit submit thinking my browser had crashed.

Honestly though, Chimera really wasn't that usable until their .30 release and even then plugin support sucked and downloading was virtually impossible.

I always kept wondering how are they going to get people to stick with this project when you can't even download.

It certainly didn't change my life when I first used it and I'm gussing solrac wasn't there during its humble beginings.

Please, someone download the first released Chimera build and tell me how great it is. It really didn't "change browsing on the mac forver" until about six months after its first release and even that statement is highly debatable.

**edit**
 
I think a lot of people see potential more than what's actually there. Chimera did not anything for me until .4. However, from the first version I could see what other people see in it.
 
Originally posted by itanium
It certainly didn't change my life when I first used it and I'm gussing solrac wasn't there during its humble beginings.

Please, someone download the first released Chimera build and tell me how great it is. It really didn't "change browsing on the mac forver" until about six months after its first release and even that statement is highly debatable.

**edit**
Click to expand...

Wrong!!!

I downloaded Chimera 0.13 when it first came out, and within 1 day, I was claiming that it was the future of web browsing on the mac.

I was raving about chimera madly since 0.13.

Everything I said about Chimera has been true since 0.13. 1000x faster than Explorer or any other browser. Instant rendering. Only redraws portions of the screen that change. Not even Mozilla can touch it.

This was all true since 0.1.3

I don't care that it couldn't download. The point was, it made web browsing BEARABLE.

Chimera 0.1.3 was an engine with no car. A powerful, sleek, ultimate engine. And they're building their product around it.

Just like Mac OS X beta. Mac OS X beta to Mac OS 9 is an EXACT PERFECT analogy to Chimera 0.1.3 to Explorer 5. Mac OS X Beta was flawed and didn't have everything and was missing stuff, but compared to Mac OS 9 it was GOD. It didn't crash. It could multi-task. That's it. PERIOD. PERFECTION. All the polishing was just built around it. Chimera 0.1.3 compared to ANY other browser was GOD. It renders pages instantly popping them on screen almost as fast as a Windows box. That's it. PERFECTION. The download dialog, buttons, preferences are all just polishing being built around its perfect amazing engine that worked flawlessly since 0.1.3

I still have that release; I'm saving it as a collector's item.
 
It's an opinion thing, solrac. For example, I'm typing this now in Chimera. I'm typing 'somekindofblue' on 'white'. I almost can't read what I'm typing, and I don't like it. It reduces my productivity. I'm not saying Chimera is all bad. I agree that its page buildup speed is phenomenal. Only: I don't care that much about it. I'm aware of that this also is an opinion thing. I only stated that while Chimera might have changed browsing for you personally forever, it hasn't for me, personally. It was OmniWeb that did that for me. Accept that your statement, as absolutely as you put it, is wrong. That's all I'm saying.

Btw. I'd love to come out to you to Southern California, but I don't have money or time right now for vacation. :)

I'm saving for either a new iBook or PowerBook I'm going to buy sometime next year. Now i'm going back to OmniWeb, where I can type in black on white instead of brightblue on white.
 
I love lynx because of the built-in popup blocker.

It certainly changed the way I browsed the internet. :p

tehehehe
 
fryke,

The light blue text on white is a CSS setting on macosx.com. If you try typing into text fields on other web sites, the text will be black. It's only light blue here at macosx.com

Omniweb is ignoring the light blue text. Omniweb is doing wrong.

If you try Explorer on mac, Phoenix on windows, Exporer on Windows, etc., they all have light blue text here.

Of course, they all have a dark blue background too.

Chimera is ignoring the dark blue background. Hopefully they fix that in the next release. But it's closer than Omniweb!! (Omniweb is completely ignoring the styles.)

Lastly, I don't even type in the text boxes. I use TextEdit. That way if the power goes out I don't lose what I'm typing, and Text Edit won't crash either!! Then I just paste into the text box.

Fryke, everything I said is absolute fact, not opinion. You even agreed with me. You just said you agree that page rendering is phenomenal in Chimera. It is. It's a fact.

The opinion is that it changes browsing on the mac. For me, it did. My Windows friends could no longer point and laugh at me about web browsing when I got Chimera.

But it is absolute fact that since 0.1.3, page rendering was extremely phenomenal, redrawing was intelligent, and it renders wayyy faster than ANY other browser on the mac. I challenge anyone.
 
Can't you just accept that it HAS NOT changed browsing for me and others, and that therefore you shouldn't put your statement that absolute? Yes, speed is different. But speed is always an ambiguous thing. OmniWeb has great autocomplete (better than any other browser) and has changed webbrowsing for me forever. Chimera has none of that.

See, there are four or five features of OmniWeb that changed webbrowsing for me forever. And going Chimera was and is a step back from that.
 
I'm not saying it changed browsing for you forever.

I'm saying (and you can NOT argue) that:

Page rendering speed is PHENOMENAL. (You agreed with this.) It is faster at displaying pages than any other browser. Omniweb and all others are a joke compared to it.

However...
If you personally don't care about the speed of the page rendering, then of course it makes no difference to you.

The features you love in Omniweb are irrelevant in this topic. I'm talking about an ENGINE. Chimera is the best engine EVER for rendering pages.

The features you talk about in Omniweb are like Spring Loaded Folders in Mac OS 9, versus none in Mac OS X pre 10.2. People were complaining. "I love my spring loaded folders!" But the ENGINE was the OS, the uncrashable, stable, multi-tasking OS. Spring Loaded Folders and tons of other little features don't mean crap compared to that. Those features can be built on top of the new engine (and has, as you can see in Jaguar).

Chimera is the ultimate browsing engine today, and Omniweb should license it. Omniweb's features should be built on top of Chimera and Omniweb would suck.

The features are simple. It's the ENGINE that matters.

But of course, if you personally don't care about that speed, then the engine is useless to you.
 
Page rendering is absolutely worthless if the browser is completely unstable which the first releases of Chimera were.
 
Originally posted by itanium
Page rendering is absolutely worthless if the browser is completely unstable which the first releases of Chimera were.
Click to expand...

Wrong.

When Chimera first came out I used it as a companion to Explorer.

I'd do everything I possibly could in Chimera, and when I came across a limitation, I'd copy and paste the URL in Explorer.

This STILL saved me TONS of time over Explorer's piece of *deleted by Ed Spruiell* rendering.

These days I use Chimera (Navigator) 100% of the time EXCEPT FOR ONE THING

GRRR....
If I want to get the URL of an image on an HTML page there's no way!!! I have to paste the URL into explorer, then right-click on the image and "open image in new window". There's no way to do this in Chimera yet.

I wait for the day I can delete Explorer just like I waited for the day that I could delete Mac OS 9.
 
Guess we're settled now. :)

You're much more interested in speed (the engine), I'm much more interested in features (the GUI, although I browse 'headless', only with keyboard shortcuts, but that's UI all the same).

You're right, I guess we would have no problems agreeing on a combination of Chimera's speed and OmniWeb's features.

But I guess we're going to disagree on the following: I think the finishing touches of a UI are not 10% important but 50% or more.

Also, while I agree 100% that OW's engine is displaying pages much too slow (and OmniGroup agrees here, too), there are other things in the engine that are very, very good. But they're, well, UI things again.

For example, text behaves like text in OW. You can triple click a paragraph to select the paragraph, which might be more important to me than anybody else, because I'm handling a literature platform, but that's only an example. Chimera, on the other hand, uses a Mozilla/Carbon/Cocoa mix that doesn't feel healthy to me.

OmniGroup is very good at everything UI. So what I'm really hoping for is that we'll get our hands on OmniWeb 5 sneaky peeks as soon as possible, to see whether that engine (which will be a completely overhauled engine, not based on Mozilla, which I think is good, because there already ARE enough Mozilla-based browsers with Chimera and Mozilla) will be what OW users were craving for, really.

But that's future talk. If we look at the current state of builds, we can agree that Chimera is the fastest browser on the Mac, and OmniWeb is the most useable. I'm glad there's competition. It'll finally bring browsing into the 21st century (I personally think it's not there yet, even on Windows).
 
Remember, UI things are never part of the engine. UI is built on top of an engine.

It's the engine that makes it all worth it, but it's the UI that sells.

I think Chimera is ahead of the game, because all they have to do is tweak the UI to perfect it.

While Omniweb has to OVERHAUL the whole engine... see what I mean?

Also, I think Chimera is using Cocoa very well. It looks really healthy to me now! There's no Carbon actually. It's a mix between Cocoa and a XUL backend (or something like that). It is a cocoa app, and ... I don't know... but when I triple click in here I get the whole line... both in the text box and in the web page!!
 
Paragraph. Like in TextEdit. Not line.

And the emphasis you put on the engine vs. the UI is just that. An emphasis. I tell you, you'd hate a car with a good engine and seven levers to steer it.
 
i wish there were a browser that didn't ignore certain CSS things like scroll bar and button changes other than IE. even IE doesn't change the scroll bar. it really kinda sucks for us web developers. i have to fire up virtual PC to see how a page will look to everyone else. i just hope chimera allows an option in the future to turn CSS recognition on/off. i don't think the browser should offer its take on what the web site /should/ look like. what a pain.

anyway, that said, i use chimera all the time. chimera over mozilla because it's a bit snappier and it actually allows me to check my bank balance (for some reason, mozilla won't let me). chimera over explorer because it's prettier and more compact. i wish it didn't crash, but it's still a .4 release. the fact that /anyone/ uses it over IE 5.2 should prove it is something special.
 
Pheonix isn't just Mozilla with a different about box, and icons. Mozilla was written to let you do HTML editing using WYSIWYG tools, as well as go on chat (either on AIM or IRC), do e-mail, among other things. Pheonix is just a straight web browser. It doens't have all the extra overhead.
 
Boi, Chimera is at 0.5, not 0.4

And Fryke, the car with 7 levers is a bad analogy. Chimera is more like a stripped Ferrari with only a wheel, brake, accelerator, shifter, and that's it.

Explorer (or any other web browser) is like a Pinto-Yugo with power windows and locks and A/C and reclining seats.

Much easier to add those to the Ferrari than it is to get the Ferrari engine in the Pinto. And the Ferrarri is wayyyyy cooler and faster anyway. ;-)
 
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