Safari, Chimera, IE: The OS X Browser Battle (1 Viewer)

[Patrick Larkin]

Anyone have any thought on the latest browsers? I've been using Chimera for about 6 months. The only time I've used IE is one site in particular that runs a Java app that won't work in Chimera.

As for speed, Chimera and Safari destroy Internet Explorer. I'm using Safari to type this now - and you know what is really cool? Right click or Ctrl-click the text box and it runs a spell check.

Popup blockers are always good.

I'm stcking with Chimera for the time being. I really love tabbed browsing now that I've tried it.

All I can say is IE is dead on the Mac platform.

 

[Michael*K]

I gave up on IE long ago. I've been using Chimera pretty exclusively, but I've tried Safari the last two days. I hate that it doesn't have the tabbed interface, but it hasn't crashed on me yet. Chimera was good for a couple crashes daily. Of course, keep in mind that both browsers are beta versions. I'm sure I'll be using both on my machine, but I can't decide yet which will be the ""preferred" choice until I see a regular release of each.

 

[Kelley_B]

I love Safari's simplicity and Speed and the ability to report any page that doesn't work back to Apple. On launch day I reported atleast 20 pages that had graphical errors, login errors, etc. Now I just got the nightly build of Chimera 0.6 and I must say its starting to rock also, but still is not at the speed of Safari.

I feel that once Safari is done I won't need another browser.

 

[BrandonG]

Great to see some fellow Mac users on the HTF. I have been using Chimera for about 4-5 months and I must say I have fallen in love with tabbed browsing. I think Safari is going to rock, having used it for several hours. As soon as Apple implements a form of tabbed browsing, and keychain support, I am jumping ship.

 

[DonRoeber]

Brandon,
Safari has keychain support for passwords sent via HTTP. It doesn't yet store passwords entered onto webpages. FTP support with Safari is pretty cool though; it mounts the ftp site as a volume on your desktop.

 

[MikeM]

Safari is great, but I've run into some odd problems, especially on vBulletin sites like HTF.
If I type a reply, and then click "Submit Reply", everything is fine. But if I click "Spell Check" first, I can no longer Submit the reply. If I click Submit Reply, nothing happens. And with Safari's minimal interface (which is really nice), you can't see if anything is happening. Kind of a pain.
So iff myy speeling loooks lika thiss frrom noww onn, youll no whyy.

 

[Mark Cappelletty]

Interesting. I just got a 17" iMac and downloaded Safari (I'm using IE to type this on my old G3 All-in-One). I don't know much about Chimera. Is Navigator/Communicator pretty much worthless anymore?

 

[Michael*K]

Netscape is pretty bloated and slow. Chimera (which was developed from Netscape's open source code) is very lean and fast. It also features tabbed browsing, which allows you to have multiple pages loaded at once without having a ton of windows cluttering up the screen. Until Safari came out Chimera was my browser of choice, but now I'm using Chimera and Safari in conjunction with one another. If Safari can make a few improvements over the next several months, I could easily see myself using it as my primary browser.

 

[Greg Rowe]

I am not a mac user. I am a big fan of the mozilla rendering engine, gecko. The mozilla browser is bloated because they have a cross platform UI. Use mozilla on Linux, Solaris, Mac, Windows, whatever, and it looks and behaves the same. Most of the time I get to use galeon which is a simple browser that uses gecko for rendering. It's quite fast and handles everything I throw at it.

I can't live with out tabbed browsing. I was surprised that Apple chose to use the KHTML engine instead of gecko but it doesn't really matter. I'd really like to see safari take hold on the Mac (as long as they make it standards compliant like gecko).

Isn't competition great?

Greg

edit: changed kparts to KHTML (I used the wrong name)

 

[DonRoeber]

Greg,
It's been said that Apple went with the KHTML and KJS browser components intead of gecko because they did a great job in less code. Apple doesn't need to care about cross platform matters, as the browser is being developed solely for the Mac.

I'm really interested to see what comes out of the Microsoft camp. With MS complaining that it can't sell enough copies of Office for the Mac, and then Apple tryig to get away from using IE, it should be pretty interesting...