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pudge (1)

pudge
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Journal of pudge (1)

Thursday May 02, 2002
08:09 AM

All Browsers Suck

[ #4602 ]
I like a lot of features of Mozilla, but it is unbearable for me. It is not Mac-like. Amongst other things:
  • It won't store passwords in the system Keychain, but in its own thing
  • It won't use helper apps for mail and FTP
  • It won't use Mac OS contextual menus
  • It doesn't use Mac OS widgets
    • Selecting text works differently (if at all)
    • Buttons and other clickable widgets behave differently
    • Everything is slower

There's more, but I don't want to belabor the point: it is not a Mac app, it is an app that runs on Mac OS. And I want a Mac browser.

MSIE is a good Mac app. But it crashes. And takes my whole machine with it. Some would say that makes it a REALLY good Mac app ...

Opera is a pretty good Mac app, but I don't know how actively they are developing the Mac version -- it's a full version behind -- and frankly, I dislike how it renders things. use.perl.org looks pretty bad in Opera, but looks fine in all my other browsers. And that's not the only site that has the problem. It's just weird-looking.

Netscape 4.x is not *very* Mac-ish, but it is Mac-ish enough. But it is also very old and crufty, and crashes quite a bit. It doesn't take my whole machine with it -- usually -- but it does crash too much. It is my fallback browser when my browser-of-the-month annoys me too much.

iCab is nice, though a bit underdeveloped. However, it is coming along nicely; it has HTTPS and Java and JavaScript. Supposedly. JavaScript support seems weak, still. Of course, that could be more a blessing than a curse. It's CSS support is much improved now over previous versions, which was really my big show-stopper. It doesn't understand file:/Volume/ URLs; only file://localhost/Volume/ or file:///Volume/. It doesn't use my cool new favicon.ico files. When I paste something, it puts a space after it sometimes. Oh well. All Browsers Suck. But for now I am going to stick with iCab, now that CSS support is good.


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  • Of course Mozilla doesn't use any of those MacOS specific features. It's a cross-platform browser, which is shorthand for bringing the lowest-common-denominator mediocrity of Windows whereever it happens to tread. :-)

    I wonder how easy it would be to take gecko and throw it into something more Mac-friendly...

    • It's certainly conceivable, but who would do it? The good thing is that someday when I move to Mac OS X, there is plenty of development over there, on browsers like Chimera, which is just that, supposedly: Gecko-based browser with Cocoa-based UI.
      • Does Cocoa have the same kind of system-wide preferences that MacOS does?
        • Does Cocoa have the same kind of system-wide preferences that MacOS does?

          Cocoa is just an API. You can write software to the Cocoa API to produce Macintosh applications, just like you can write software to the Carbon API to produce Macintosh applications.

          I think you're asking if Mac OS X supports Internet Config, and the answer is "sort of, not really". IC isn't nearly as configurable as it was in Mac OS 9.

      • I thought you were going to hole up in OS 9 for the duration. :) I was expecting to see you launch an OpenMacOSClassic project some day.

        --
        J. David works really hard, has a passion for writing good software, and knows many of the world's best Perl programmers
  • Be glad you don't use RISC OS. Every browser there sucks even worse. Doesn't help that none are under active development.

    Browse was looking up, but then the company developing it was bought and they lost that division. Fresco was buggy, but maintained - until the company decided they'd be better off developing for STBs. Ditto for Oregano (the only one of them that could do CSS, and even then it was piss poor and actually felt like a Windows app - same as Mozilla on Mac =) ). And WebsterXL was written in B
    --
      ---ict / Spoon
  • That's almost exactly how I feel about Mozilla under KDE. Konqueror is nice, but it's just not quite *there* yet (though perlmonks is the only site that renders really badly under it - use.perl looks fine).
  • http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=11459#c72

    URL above provides info on configuring external apps for protocols. It'd be nice if it did this using OS prefs automatically, but hey, it's pre-1.0 software.

    Also, the mozilla browser is not an end product. It's a basically a giant functionality test. Users bang on it and report bugs.

    You might be more interested in Chimera (except if I recall you're not an OS X fan... I don't know what the OS9 equivilant would be)
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