[muglo] Re: Browsers
- From: "Eric D." <hideme666@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <muglo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 09 Jul 2003 22:48:54 -0400
on 9/7/03 10:09 PM, 'TDK' Tim Kearn at kearn@xxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
> FWIW,
> Awhile ago I posted a question regarding opening a 'secure' (https)
> site for my wife, which she needs to access for work from home.
> She was able to on her Windows laptop, but no Mac browser was able to.
> When I switched to OS X I d/l Safari and tried the site.
> Bingo! No problems!
> Was very surprised. The tried IE and was denied.
> Any guesses why one and not the other? What is different about Safari
> that it would work?
> BTW, have had no problems with website compatibility and find it fast,
> tabs are a nice feature.
Hmm. That's pretty bizarre. I've found that if a web site is going to work
on Mac, it'll work in OS X IE. It's pretty much the most web-compatible
browser we have on Mac (even though it sucks rocks as far as speed is
concerned).
Safari is (at the moment) the worst of the lot for web site compatibility
that I regularly use (Camino (Mozilla derivative), Safari, iCab/IE (these
two get used rarely)) and there are a number of sites which either patently
refuse to work, or work with limited functionality in Safari (e.g. both
Mail.Yahoo.com and Hotmail.com have issues with Safari)). When a site works,
it works well, but when a site uses JavaScript or anything fancy it's
currently a hit-and-miss proposition. It would've been ideal if Apple had
gone with Gecko as their rendering engine (since it has the most active OSS
developer community) than KDE but I guess they decided to go with KDE's
small size (not necessarily a bad thing, but rather redundant since even the
lowliest of Macs should be running 256 MB of RAM, and most should be at a
minimum of 512 MB).
PS At the moment I'd estimate that my usage % is as follows: Safari 59%,
Camino 30%, iCab 6%, IE (5.2.3) 4% and <1% for Mozilla/OmniWeb/Classic Opera
combined.
Safari use will probably go up to near exclusivity once: (1) they fix the
display engine problems introduced in the 1.0 build (I've had problems with
image display with the 1.0 final release), (2) they make it compatible with
more web sites (like canadapost.ca, hotmail.com... these sites work, but
some functions simply don't work... canadapost.ca can't do rate calculations
and hotmail.com cannot properly place its cookies with Safari (but it can
with IE and Camino/Mozilla). I am sure both fixes are in the pipeline b/c as
it stands it's only a pretty advanced beta (not bad, but it's still rough
around a few edges).
Camino development has unfortunately slowed down a bit. I guess the
developers are probably discouraged since Apple threw their own browser into
the mix only to reduce the need for IE competition. However much I may
despise Netscrape and the kitchen sink philosophy of web browsing, Gecko is
certainly a more robust HTML display engine than is KDE or even IE's. If
Camino development dies down we'll be left only with Apple's offering again
:( :( :( (Mozilla isn't really a viable browser since it uses Netscapes
interface (which is "soooo early 1990s" ;), and, well, Netscape itself is a
write-off as a heavy duty browser). Maybe FireBird will pick up on Camino's
heels.
Eric.
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