FAST web browsers for OS X?

Gwailo

Gwailo

B.A. Economics (Hon)
Right now I'm helping someone configure their new Dell Dimension 2.2GHz P4 with 2GB RAM, WindowsXP. I'm using Internet Explorer 6.0.26 and wow, is the interface ever fast. Checking checkboxes in Hotmail, for example, is instant: as fast as it would be if it were a local dialogue box.

My question is this, why, on my system (in my sig), do the checkboxes and such in IE 5 (latest update) respond so dang SLOWLY. I can check a box 3 times before it actually checks.

Which web browser (non beta release please) have you found to be the fastest for OS X. NATIVE would be excellent (i.e., cocoa not carbon). Internet Explorer is certainly not at the top of the list, and if it turns out to be, I'll be very disappointed with Apple's programming architecture...

Cheers! :)
 
Links. It's a port of Lynx, the text-only browser.


Seriously. It's the fastest browser that I've used.


OK, OK, if you won't accept text-only, I'd have to say Mozilla or Chimera.

This topic (browsers) has already been discussed in about a bazillion threads, but I don't think anyone has focused purely on speed. Which is, IMO, not really a good thing to be looking at. For example, Links is a fast browser, but that doesn't mean that it's the best browser by any stretch of the imagination. Nor will I say what I think is the 'best' browser. There are way too many things that come into play for different users. I use OmniWeb, but that doesn't mean it's the best. It is the best for what I want (which is appearance).

I think the browser thing is the weakest part of OS X. We need a stable, fast, good looking browser that comes installed with the OS. Not that I expect that to happen any time soon, but one can always hope...
 
Right nkuvu thanks for the tip! You're absolutely right, many factors are brought into the evaluation of a browser, and any application for that matter.

I was mainly curious why the interface (like HTML checkboxes) were so terribly slow...and the topic kind of branched from there :)

Cheers!
 
1st - if you are serious, for whatever absurd reason, about not wanting a beta, then you only have ie and netrape to consider. all the other browsers are still in beta and still constantly improving.

2nd - the last time we did this speed thing we got off into a long tangential discussion about all other aspects of browsers at the same time.

3rd - icab is by far the fastest that won't rob your soul using it. but obviously someone who thinks ie is such great stuff in windows has no consideration for their own soul anyway.;)

that being said, their is no blazing fast browser for osx. all the major players seem to have reached a level of respectability right now. it's getting to be much more a matter of what other features do you like or how compatible they are with your favorite sites. Things have changed speed wise since we last discussed this.

and just so this will become another historically long and debated thread, let me say that i just got thru trying chimaera 2.7 and it is a snail compared to both icab and omniweb on my imac. sorry googolplex, but chimera isn't even worth talking politics about. it just doesn't do it for me.
 
Speed is nice, but W3C conpliance is even better... For me iCab and Omniweb's inability to render many sites properly is just not acceptable as a primary browser. I like Chimera and Mozilla for their W3C compliance due to the Gecko renderer. I find Mozilla (RC1) to be quite respectable in terms of speed. It does take longer than IE to startup, but after that it is quite fast, and you just can't beat the tab browsing, ad blocking, and popup blocking features.

Chimera rocks, but it's still a 0.2x release, so it's way too much "in the works" to be a primary browser.

Just my 2 cents of course.
 
Opera claims to be the fastest browser on Earth, and do find this quite right. It's much faster than IE and it has a good GUI too. (The only "problem" is that Opera follows W3's standars, and doesn't view pages that doesn't follow this standard very well.)

So Gwailo, if you can live with a beta (ver. 4) I would certainly recommend Opera! :)


Kris
 
I'm just not a fan of betas (thanks to my experiences in Windows :)), but I don't have any grudge against them.

I'll certainly check these out, thanks for the comments!

Cheers,
 
Ahem. Internet Explorer is fast on Windows because it is Windows.

iCab is the fastest browser for OS X, hands down. No, it doesn't render everything quite right, but that's partly because so many web developers think everyone is running Internet Explorer on Windows.

Why do I think iCab is the fastest? Because on MY machine, every little bit of slowness is magnified a zillion times.

(saddly) Internet Explorer has the best all-around functionality + speed, I just
have to remember not to open more than a few windows.

AOLscape & Mozilla are pretty much unusuably slow. It's too bad; I like Mozilla.

Opera is mediocre.

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My Box: Beautiful Beige Minitower, PPCG3 @ 266MHz (damned thing won't overclock), 288MB RAM (128+128+32), CDRW, Zip, VoodooII, Floppy Drive YEAH!), about 20 GB worth of hard disks.
 
iCab - Something's ugly about it, sorry. Small download, though.
Opera - Same thing.
Internet Explorer - It's Microsoft, but it works. If MS can improve it for Jaguar, I'll be a lucky MSIE user on Mac OS X.
Mozilla - UI sucks big time, browser is okay and fast. Tabs are okay, though. Big, big download - bad.
Netscape - Same thing, only one step behind the development and more blob.
Chimera - Mozilla encapsulment. A strange beast indeed. Very fast rendering times but the interface feels like goo. And too much is missing as of yet. And it's also a big download.
OmniWeb - 4.06 is a final version, Ed. But the very stable 4.1sp versions give you more. Its lack of standards support is awful, but it's got the best interface of them all, very nice, innovative features and Quartz antialiased text rendering. And - most importantly - it's been translated in umphteen languages.

I personally hope there'll never be one big winner in OS X browser wars. I still hope that web developers (like myself) start to grow up and follow the rules. For now, IE & OW are my winners.
 
about not wanting a beta, then you only have ie and netrape to consider
Click to expand...

Keep in mind that most browsers are always in beta. And while Netscape Navigator may claim actuall release versions, all they do is pull in-production Mozilla builds for the rendering, so, technically, Navigator will always be in beta when compared to Mozilla.

I've been liking Opera a lot, but, like iCab and OmniWEB, none of them are true W3C compliant browsers. Which is infuriating. WHY would you build a browser in this day and age that is NOT fully compliant? Ugh.
 
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