Comments on: It's That Simple

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 24 Apr 2002 08:08:21 +0000

Furo: On our iBooks (600mhz g3, 100mhz bus, each with 384mb ram), Mozilla isn't any faster rendering pages than IE is. I haven't taken out a stop watch, but that's what I notice.
As a side note, I often wondered why Apple kept using the dated, near legacy ATI Rage cards in their notebooks (except the newest Ti books)… then the info about how the OS offloads very little work to the vidcard (relative) kinda makes me realise why… either that, or Steve has a garage full of the vid cards he needs to get rid of.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Tue, 23 Apr 2002 11:12:05 +0000

CoffeeKid: Yes, I did read the article, and my contention is that if Mozilla can be significantly faster, why can't IE? Or Opera for that matter? The performance of each will obviously be different on something less than my 933MHz G4, but it truly is a very dramatic difference even on my machine. Mozilla renders the pages about the same as I see on Windows machines.
Once 10.2 hits the road, hopefully it will bring performance improvements along with it, though there will be an on-going effort to improve things, as one would expect. Remember, this OS is only a year old. Remember Windows NT at one year of age? It was the first version of the “advanced” operating system from Microsoft, on which Windows 2000 and Windows XP are based. Look how long it has taken for even Microsoft to bring a decent effort to market (read Windows 2000) and the number of drivers and applications that are still incompatible.
-Furo

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Mon, 22 Apr 2002 21:13:11 +0000

Looks just like KDE.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Mon, 22 Apr 2002 08:06:58 +0000

I wouldn't recommend a 128mb mac os x system to my worst enemy. It's torture. Why not just give them a G3 300mhz to run it on while yer at it :)
The system needs at least 256mb, and 384 is the start of the sweet spot, esp. if you use photoshop. 512 and above is gravy.
To the guy who said IE runs slower than other techs… did you read the article Chris linked to? This is a “known issue” with the Mac OS X and how it uses the CPU to draw many elements on the screen. I'm all for MS bashing, but only when warranted.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Mon, 22 Apr 2002 04:20:39 +0000

MacMall has a sale when you buy an Imac you get an additional 256 megs for free, plus a free printer.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Mon, 22 Apr 2002 04:01:55 +0000

No, MacOS X does not need 512MB to run well. Of course, if you plan to run every app installed on the machine simultaneously, then maybe, but the same holds true for Windows. For general use (email, web, documents, etc.) 256MB will likely serve you just fine. If you plan to do a lot of video editing and such, meaning more than just pulling a few clips from a video camera now and again, then higher than 256MB would likely help. I've outfitted my mom's PowerMac with 384MB and she runs Photoshop, Quark Xpress 5, Illustrator and Office v. X without any problems at all.
OS X will actually run fairly well with 128MB if you're just doing email, web browsing and a few other misc. apps here and there. 256MB is a good comfort level though. With RAM prices where they are today, spending a bunch of money to go to 512MB is likely a bit of a waste unless you're really planning to do some serious work with large files.
-Furo

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Mon, 22 Apr 2002 03:53:35 +0000

Aye! And what a glorious battle it shall be! I've got IE6 and Mozilla and Opera installed right now. I use IE6 because it's fairly snappy (on WinXP) and it renders pages the best. I'm not saying that it renders them according to the standards: it renders them based on what the author meant. Most people write for IE these days, sadly. I love Moz, but it seems just a little sluggish compared to IE. Hopefully, 1.0 will take care of this. Is there a lot of debug code to get rid of? Opera has me sold with the gestures. I love them to death! I haven't been using it much. I actually don't know why. ::shrugs:: Really, my number one feature in a browser is tabs: Opera and Mozilla have them. IE6 doesn't. I should really switch, shouldn't I?

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Mon, 22 Apr 2002 03:50:54 +0000

Hey Chris, I know you bought the best iMac available but how much RAM did you get (the standard 256 mb) or did you up that for some more bucks ? I've heard that OSX needs at least 512 mb to run decent. Just curoius …..thinking about my own conversion.
Later Mirk

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Mon, 22 Apr 2002 02:46:21 +0000

Actually the reason IE is so popular now, and to a point why Microsoft was able to survive the “Internet revolution” was because they took a program (mosaic) and made it better and faster (Netscape 4 vs IE 4). They will have to do the same with the next version because the browser war part two is brewing.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Mon, 22 Apr 2002 02:09:36 +0000

Well, you know, in Windows, MS can use all sorts of OS API calls to make their stuff look and run better than the competition. Presumably, on the Mac, they're on the same playing field as other third party developers. It wouldn't surprise me if the IE development team and project managers just didn't care that much to optimize their code for the Mac. It doesn't pull a profit like Office, does it? And of course, Opera and Mozilla are developed by people who are used to ferreting out performance boosts. Am I wrong about any of my assumptions?

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Mon, 22 Apr 2002 01:41:51 +0000

There is a very noticable difference between the speed of IE on the Mac and browsers like Mozilla and Opera. I would say that the performance issue lies squarely with Microsoft. Now that they've basically said that they will not be putting more effort into IE on the Mac, I think it's safe to assume that they didn't go overboard to begin with. The Mac business unit has done an awesome job with Office v. X, to be sure, but IE leaves something to be desired. Overall web compatibility is quite good, but speed is disappointing, to be sure.
Intentional? You be the judge, but Mozilla is at least twice as fast in loading the same page. It's not the Mac that's slow…
-Furo

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sun, 21 Apr 2002 16:24:35 +0000

VirtualPC will be just fine for P2P and things like that. The only thing that isn't fun is 3D stuff.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sun, 21 Apr 2002 13:35:59 +0000

Wow, I think hell just froze over ;-)

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sun, 21 Apr 2002 08:52:18 +0000

The new iMacs ARE great and they really appeal to my old “Amiga” way of life ;) I do need to upgrade this Pentium III 450 at some stage :P

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sun, 21 Apr 2002 07:45:25 +0000

harumph.
you know my opinions on macs… :)