I've been going in and out of the Mac platform (as far as general use and acomplishing actual work) and I've had a nice list of complaints and annoyances about OSX. Most of them have been addressed in Panther. But there's this one thing that still bothers me and keeps me from having even the simplest experience on my iBook: surfing the web.
I have an aquiantence from another forum who is a professional artist and she swears by Mac. She's always saying how her dual G4 system could handle massive high res Illustrator files where as when she attempts the same feat on a PC it chokes up. I had asked her this question: "if Macs are so great at handling high resolution graphics, then why (oh God why) can't it handle surfing websites smoothly?" I never did get a reply from her.
Let me illustrate what I mean. Most sites now a days are ridden with Flash ads and/or animated gifs. Even when those Flash movies are not visible and don't actually need to be drawn, it's still sucking CPU cycles. I can have the window minimized, hidden, out of sight, whatever. It'll still be playing the animation and wasting CPU time. How bad does it get? I have 3 or more tabs opened all on pages with ads, and then I can't type in, oh say, this reply box for example. I use to blame OSX for being a slow UI, people can call it the most sophisticated UI to date, but it's still SLOW. Well I recently learned something. It's not the UI, it's the poorly designed web browsers (Camino is the basis of my rant) or Flash plugin. I never really warmed up to Safari but I suspect it behaves the same. GIF animations also slow down my system. Particularly in forums, I go to www.cgtalk.com and in their posting page they have smilies on the right side of the text box (just like this site) but the problem is most of them are animated gifs. I'm watching them run the animation 1 FPS because it's bringing my system to its knees. Thank God for OSX's great threading code, otherwise I wouldn't be able to do anything else. Typing in the text box would suffer because of all the animation going on.
I didn't just give up right then and there. I searched for proxy servers with ad filtering capabilities. I've tried Squid + DanGuardian, didn't work, didn't like it. Moved on to Privoxy (?) it worked great but it would block certain cookies, forcing me to login to some forums every visit. Hate to say it, but this whole experience has proved to be more work than I ever had to do to have a comfortable web surfing experience on a Windows PC.
But at least now I know where the problem lies. Hell, if I really wanted to be helpful I'd grab the Camino source package and hack at it to add an option to disable GIF animations on the fly. But I've pondered over the whole matter for a while trying to figure out how it all works. I know just a little bit of how OSX composites the screen graphics, and I kinda have a mental image of the whole drawing pipeline. I know this will sound ridiculous, but my hypothesis is that OSX has to redraw the entire screen rather than just a portion of it everytime a window or a child window is updated. Would that mean the screen is constantly redrawn if I'm staring at a bunch of GIFs? That would be really bad. Again, I don't know all the specifics and innards of Quartz [Extreme] but I just have a gut feeling as though it's doing more work than necessary. It does make for a clean interface and no weird graphical drawing glitches (that happen so often in Windows) but it's really taxing the hardware.
You're probably wondering why don't I just use Safari. I just happen to prefer Gecko based browsers. I'm just having a hard time finding the "perfect" browser in OSX. Believe it or not Firefox and Mozilla don't act the same (neither does Camino) and they don't compare to the Windows or Linux versions. Safari just doesn't fit my style of browsing.
I have an aquiantence from another forum who is a professional artist and she swears by Mac. She's always saying how her dual G4 system could handle massive high res Illustrator files where as when she attempts the same feat on a PC it chokes up. I had asked her this question: "if Macs are so great at handling high resolution graphics, then why (oh God why) can't it handle surfing websites smoothly?" I never did get a reply from her.
Let me illustrate what I mean. Most sites now a days are ridden with Flash ads and/or animated gifs. Even when those Flash movies are not visible and don't actually need to be drawn, it's still sucking CPU cycles. I can have the window minimized, hidden, out of sight, whatever. It'll still be playing the animation and wasting CPU time. How bad does it get? I have 3 or more tabs opened all on pages with ads, and then I can't type in, oh say, this reply box for example. I use to blame OSX for being a slow UI, people can call it the most sophisticated UI to date, but it's still SLOW. Well I recently learned something. It's not the UI, it's the poorly designed web browsers (Camino is the basis of my rant) or Flash plugin. I never really warmed up to Safari but I suspect it behaves the same. GIF animations also slow down my system. Particularly in forums, I go to www.cgtalk.com and in their posting page they have smilies on the right side of the text box (just like this site) but the problem is most of them are animated gifs. I'm watching them run the animation 1 FPS because it's bringing my system to its knees. Thank God for OSX's great threading code, otherwise I wouldn't be able to do anything else. Typing in the text box would suffer because of all the animation going on.
I didn't just give up right then and there. I searched for proxy servers with ad filtering capabilities. I've tried Squid + DanGuardian, didn't work, didn't like it. Moved on to Privoxy (?) it worked great but it would block certain cookies, forcing me to login to some forums every visit. Hate to say it, but this whole experience has proved to be more work than I ever had to do to have a comfortable web surfing experience on a Windows PC.
But at least now I know where the problem lies. Hell, if I really wanted to be helpful I'd grab the Camino source package and hack at it to add an option to disable GIF animations on the fly. But I've pondered over the whole matter for a while trying to figure out how it all works. I know just a little bit of how OSX composites the screen graphics, and I kinda have a mental image of the whole drawing pipeline. I know this will sound ridiculous, but my hypothesis is that OSX has to redraw the entire screen rather than just a portion of it everytime a window or a child window is updated. Would that mean the screen is constantly redrawn if I'm staring at a bunch of GIFs? That would be really bad. Again, I don't know all the specifics and innards of Quartz [Extreme] but I just have a gut feeling as though it's doing more work than necessary. It does make for a clean interface and no weird graphical drawing glitches (that happen so often in Windows) but it's really taxing the hardware.
You're probably wondering why don't I just use Safari. I just happen to prefer Gecko based browsers. I'm just having a hard time finding the "perfect" browser in OSX. Believe it or not Firefox and Mozilla don't act the same (neither does Camino) and they don't compare to the Windows or Linux versions. Safari just doesn't fit my style of browsing.
