Mac surfing speeds slaughtered in Wired

In my experience it is the opposite. My work PC is a lot slower at rendering pages than my home mac.

z4ph0d - can you fix the URL link - you have http: in there twice.

It is not a great article:

And, at least in Wired News tests, OS X didn't mimic 9.2's habit of locking up completely, requiring the Mac's power cord and/or battery to be removed in order to reboot it -– hardly a satisfying user experience.
Click to expand...

Very unbiased....not.

R.
 
Wow, I bet $10 this guy hates Macs. Aren't editors supposed to maybe reject stuff that, oh I don't know, is slightly biased?

Besides, it's Wired. What do you expect?
 
uh sadly it's fairly close to the tuth. IE and many others simply suck at rendering pages. My old 333 k6 back home does a better job than my dual 533g4. I'm willing to accept that Apple's a smaller company and has fewer resources to put into it's OS, not to mentino they do the hardware too. So progress on OSX may be a bit slower coming than we reall want. But all in all the possibility for speed is definitely there. Tests using the gcc 3.1 compiler alone show a 10% improvement in many areas. I'm sure by 10.2 Apple will have squeezed even mor performance out of their new system.

Also browsers such as chimera are a good deal faster at rendering pages so I'm certain some of the culpability can be attributed to the browsers themselves.
 
The article specifically mentions IE and Opera. While Opera may "claiim" to be the worlds fastest browser, it isn't (when running under OS X).

I have to take issue with the statements the IE engineer made about the problem not lying with IE, but with OS X in general. There may be truth in that, but if that were the case, how could OmniWeb, Mozilla, and especially the alpha staged Chimera/Navigator wipe the floor with IE when it comes to page rendering performance? The truth is somwhere in the middle.

Yes, OS X needs major improvements in it's underlying core 2D graphics. It seems the technology is fine, it's just that Apple hasn't optimized it yet. And yes, Apple NEEDS to offload some of the screen redraw calls to the graphics card (when possible), and freeup the CPU. This will help immensely.

The problem is really obvious on slower Macs with weaker grahics chipsets. For example, my PMG4/800/DP w/1.5GB of RAM is plenty fast in rendering web pages, even in IE. However, my PBG4/500 w/384MB of RAM and a lame ATI Rage128Pro 8MB graphics chipset is much much slower. Couple that with a frequent "SCUD" (spinning cursor of death), and you can sometimes end up frustrated while surfing with it.

Maybe Jaguar will address the issue, but I doubt it. My main hope at this point is that Chimera will become the browser we all want/need, and do it in a relatively short period of time.
 
I think PCs are faster at loading webpages... for example... this site. on the old pc at school, this site renders really fast. at home on my G4 400mhz, it is half as fast.
 
Personally I don't think it's a big deal. Probably becaus I tend to be doing several things on the computer at once. I'm used to letting pages load as I chat online or do something else. I'm not a developer but I think what the guy from Opera was saying sounds legit. I think developers are more worried about getting the product out at this point and not optimizing it as much as they would a revision.
 
Sometime IE doesn't show anything on window until I change window size. First time, I thought it was Mac that renders page slow but it's not. It's IE fault, IE doesn't want to show you page sometime unless you resize window.

I donno it's only me or not.

Anyway, Mac is as fast as PC for website and PC isn't as fast as Mac in terms of processing not clock speed. :)

I am waiting for Navigator to full support plug-in and Javascript than I will say goodbye to IE

Thank you
 
I've always found that the PC gets the page onto the screen and then sits there. For me, my Mac sits there while getting the page onto the screen, much better :D

Browsing for me seems to be about as fast, but maybe that's because I usually use about 5 browser windows at once, and just kinda tab through them until I find a fully loaded winow :)
 
Shouldn't browser problems be reported to/blamed on Microsoft, and not Apple? Last time I checked Microsoft did make IE...

All pages render in Mozilla for me usually in under 2 seconds. Maybe the testers were using a 56k?
 
The guy is right on the money. My iBook is dreadfully slow, especially on long pages like you find on slashdot.org. I wish I knew why it was so slow. The opera guy seemed to know what he was talking about but I'm not in a position to judge him.

As for blaming msft, I'm not so sure. A lot of apps are slow on OSX, just because they wrote some of them doesn't mean it's all their fault.

Let's hope that 10.2 gives us more speed.
 
I'm all for blaming wired on this one. They were wrong - *no* page takes 10 seconds to render, even on IE.
Sent to wired by me
Hello,

I was interested in your article on the speed (lack thereof) of the new iMacs. I am utterly convinced that the tests carried out (of which no results were given) are flawed.

To assess rendering time, you open a locally stored HTML file so that the effects of download time, which is highly variable on any platform, are removed and you are left solely with rendering time.

On my Mac, CNN.com (the example given in the article as taking 10 seconds to render) takes well under a second to render. That’s a whole order of magnitude out!

I see 3 explanations:
the tester did not measuree what they claimed they were measuring
the tester has done the tests wrong
the tester was in possession of a damaged machine

Either way, stories like this one, which make false claims that are plain wrong, hurt the reputation of an online magazine which can usually be trusted by technically competent people for accurate information.

I think you should, as soon as possible, update the article with the details of the tests, as I cannot believe that the claim of 10 seconds to render CNN.com is correct. Both the experimental methodology and the sites used should be made public.

Yours sincerely

Bernie :eek:)
Click to expand...

Aah, flame...

Bernie :eek:)
 
Hey my pages render fine. they are a little slower than when I was in 9 but nothing that is to gripe about. On my pc 600 p3 it is not much if any faster at rendering pages than mac os x on a imac 800. Anyway, I tried omniweb and I don't really see that much of a difference. I have not tried all the other ones, just because ie works fine. It is really nothing to gripe about. If you are on a 56k modem you wouldn't know the difference and if you are on a cable modem what is 2 seconds if that. i have never had to wait more than 2 seconds unless the server is bogged down.
 
CNN.com just loads for me in OmniWeb fully in about 5 seconds. You can see the top bar and the sideboard in about 1. Slow? I think not.

IE took about 5 seconds to load fully, and displayed nothing until it was all done.

Chimera loaded it in about 3 seconds.

So I guess if you use a PC 4 hours a day surfing, and a PC is faster loading, say two seconds, and you spend 3 minutes on each page, you'll save about 3 minutes, assuming that all the pages are of the size of the front page of CNN.com.

These tests were done on a Ti667 512. *shrug*
I can give up three minutes for antialiased text :)
 
Its not apple's problem its mainly the browser's problem. You can see this by comparing the speed of Chimera to Omniweb. They both use quartz to render their stuff, but Chimera is way faster. Thus it is not apple's stuff (quartz is still slow and could get much better) it is the browser. Apple can do better by making quartz faster and the browser developers can do better as well. There is, however, more room for the browser vendors to optimize rather then apple.
 
it's everything. browsers, operating system, quartz... the whole shebang. browsing the net has been faster on windows for several years now. could have taken iCab on OS 9, netscape on windows, whatever: the mac's slower there. and nobody actually *did* something about it, and even chimera on os x is slower than ie on windows.

it's a big pile of dog's sh... to claim the mac is a great internet browsing platform. but that's how it is, and i'm staying mac all the same.
 
Actually os x is a good browsing platform if you are looking for features and variety not so much speed. And speed is adequate anyways. Its not like its intolerably slow, especially with chimera or mozilla :)
 
Maybe you can make your browser go a little faster when it's illegally embeded into the core of the system? Of course, I won't go into the security risk this leaves opened, esspecially in buggy Microsoft closed source trash dump code, but that's probably how they get it faster.
 
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