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Wired: iMac takes twice as long on some tasks

updated 01:25 pm EDT, Fri April 19, 2002

Wired News reports on iMac slowdowns and complaints by Windows converts about the sluggishness of the computer when performing routine tasks:

"Tests conducted by Wired News confirmed reader complaints that a new 800 MHz iMac takes an average of twice as long to render Web pages as a comparable or cheaper PC running Windows XP. Even on broadband networks, the iMac's default Internet Explorer browser took an average of 10 seconds per page to render several popular sites, including CNN.com and the Apple Store homepage. ...Slashdot discussion pages and some weblog sites took even longer, despite their lack of fat graphics. The diagnosis: The problem is not a bandwidth issue caused by fat HTML, but an annoying delay in actually drawing the page onscreen after its components have been downloaded."

by MacNN Staff

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asdfer
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04/19, 01:47pm | report spam | close Reply |
yeah, its true

and Apple should probably consider fixing it. That would be really nifty!

MacNN.com Reader
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04/19, 01:47pm | report spam | close Reply |
Geez?

It takes a few seconds longer to load a webpage in Microsoft Internet Explorer on the Mac than it does on Windows? *gasp* Who knew? Maybe they should try some other browser if they're that concerned? If they're so sensitive as to notice a three second delay, I'm sure they're smart enough to navigate right on over to Omni.

jrbd

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04/19, 01:52pm | report spam | close Reply |
It's not Apple's fault.

Of course IE is faster on a PC. The same goes for Office. Do you think MS wants their flagship products running faster on someone elses operating system. Hah! Thanks for the news flash Wired magazine.

Kbee

timrand
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04/19, 01:53pm | report spam | close Reply |
iMac Slowdowns

I have felt for a number of years that the table drawing logic on the various Mac browsers including Netscape and IE 5 just isn't as crisp as Windows platform. It seems that complex tables, now common just don't render as quickly. Yet simpler pages do render as fast or faster on a Mac. I have long wondered if the problem isn't in the layout algorithm, much of which could still be similar to early Mosaic code. Could this be why iCab, Opera, OmniWeb and Chimera are popular?

MacNN.com Reader
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04/19, 01:53pm | report spam | close Reply |
Sheesh

It's not *that* bad a disparity. My P3/500 with 512MB running IE 6 on XP is only slightly more spritely than my PowerBook G3/400 running IE 5 on OS X. Sometimes my Powerbook is slightly faster. I don't know why.

And to blame it solely on OS X is illogical at best and slanderous at worst. Pinning the blame on OS X does not explain the great "speed" disparity among various and all OS X browsers, from IE to OmniWeb to Mozilla -- and now Chimera. It's moreover the browser's rendering engine than it is OS X.

MacNN.com Reader
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04/19, 01:56pm | report spam | close Reply |
Wired needs grounding.

What incentive is there for Microsoft to create an equal or superior browser for a competing platform? Use your f****** collective heads, Wired.

timrand
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04/19, 02:00pm | report spam | close Reply |
Office on Mac

Regarding earlier comment about Office being a poor performer... Frankly, I feel that Office v.X runs VERY fast on my lowly G3/266. Launch times are faster than they were under Office 2001 and it runs as fast or faster than my Thinkpad 700 Mhz unit from work. I can't say that MS has built something to make Windows look better in this case.

MacNN.com Reader
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04/19, 02:00pm | report spam | close Reply |
Motives are one thing.

Questioning Wired's motives, or shifting the blame, is avoiding the issue. What Apple needs to swallow is that PC converts notice a difference. Whether they're imagining it, or who's to blame, is irrelevant. Apple needs to put some serious work into the Finder - the one thing that's truly holding OSX back. And the whole reason why I don't use it.

cannacoke
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04/19, 02:03pm | report spam | close Reply |
Its a MS product.....

This article is on /. as well and I would have to agree with the majority of the posters on /.

Apple pushed MS to make IE stable and to follow specs tightly. Because of this the browser runs slowly... BUT DOESNT CRASH! With every update Apple speeds up the OS and related SW. What makes this a bad thing? Come on people!

Oh My Head
CanNaCoke

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MacNN.com Reader
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04/19, 02:06pm | report spam | close Reply |
Blame the browser

Okay, Win IE is more optimized than Mac IE. How is this Apple's fault?

In any case, I'd rather have a slower browser than give up the command-B shortcut, which "rolls up" all the browser toolbars. I've used that dozens of times every day, since it first appeared in IE 5 for OS 9. It makes up for the time difference by saving lots of scrolling.

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MacNN.com Reader
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04/19, 02:08pm | report spam | close Reply |
Babies

God, I hate all the whiners on this site. News flash: Apple is not God. It is a company. It does not make perfect products. You don't have to take every criticism of it personally. OS X IS TOO SLOW! We all know it, but we all deal with it. There's nothing wrong with Wired pointing out an area that needs improvement. If you want to win the market you have to build a better mousetrap. Windows users don't care all that much about the "elegance" of Mac-style computing. They're used to PCs. If you want to win them over you can't just look better, you have to perform better. So let Apple take it to heart and speed up this not-so-ready-for-prime-time OS. And in the meantime, quit whining!

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darcybaston
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04/19, 02:09pm | report spam | close Reply |
doesn't crash?

Are you kidding? IE unexpectedly quits and inifitely beach balls regularly.

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MacNN.com Reader
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04/19, 02:09pm | report spam | close Reply |
Re: Its a MS product.....

Are you on crack? Of course IE crashes on OS X. The difference between OS X and prior is that OS X doesn't even blink. The browser runs slowly because it's always run slightly slower (at least IE5 and onward) than its Windows counterpart, and it having been revamped to run on OS X only made it even slower. Things will definitely improve, though, as IE 5.5 or 6 makes its way out to OS X.

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WiseWeasel
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04/19, 02:12pm | report spam | close Reply |
Mozilla

This is a problem with IE. I've found that it has problems with a lot of sites, pausing several excruciating seconds before rendering pages. I have since switched to Mozilla as my main problem, and am overall more satisfied than with IE. Chimera shows promise if it adds plugin support and other features, and I don't know if OmniWeb will ever be compatible with the sites I need. It looks like Mozilla is your best bet for now. I never read Wired, they're a terrible sensationalist publication, and don't deserve our support.

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MacNN.com Reader
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04/19, 02:13pm | report spam | close Reply |
Field

Hey Steve,
Its time to turn up the distortion reality field another notch, more people are becoming immune to its effects.

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WiseWeasel
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04/19, 02:13pm | report spam | close Reply |
correction

I have switched to Mozilla as my main Browser (not problem, Freudian slip?). . .

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MacNN.com Reader
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04/19, 02:26pm | report spam | close Reply |
Balanced Article

I think most of you that are having this knee-jerk backlash reaction haven't even read the original article. Man, the "sensationalist" publication in THIS case is MacNN, since they've quoted the most negative part of the original article. They mention reasons why it is slower at the moment, and even quotes Apple as essentially admitting that the quoted reasons are true. They also quote others as saying that this is not a really big problem and that Apple's release strategy was the right one.

While it maybe does no good for Apple that this article was published, you can't bash Wired for reporting it. It's called Freedom of the Press! It's only slanderous if they report things that aren't true, which in this case they haven't.

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hzink
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04/19, 02:26pm | report spam | close Reply |
Some bitter Reality Pill!

- Any benchamrks done with Apple's Flagship product of OS X will invariably turn out not only MUC slower perfrmance numbers than Win equivalents, but even slower numbers than OS 9. If this benchmark had been done under OS 9 the numbers would look better.

- The lie from the PR drobe :""Apple supported a number of legacy technologies designed to ease their transition to the new operating system," said Nathalie Welch, the company's public relations manager for hardware." is just that - a lie. If the support for legacy technologies caused the slow-down, then how come those legacy technologies do just fine on their own.

- Install a theme wihout transparencies, turn off anti-aliased text, and disable the damn drap-shadows (WindwshadeX), and try the same page load again - surprise, lots of the slow-down was caused by fluff.

- Last but not least for an OS that brags about multi-threading, none of the browsers truly support threading. Woohoo!

This may be harsh news for all the OS X groupies, and apologists, but OS X right now is still the biggest roadblock to performance, because it's still badly designed under the hood - this will change, but it will take time.

Oh, yeah, try out Photoshop 7 under OS X and OS 9 - night and dday performance differences.

Harry

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extraflav
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04/19, 02:26pm | report spam | close Reply |
Not Here!!

Our I-Mac is Hooked-up to T1 line and it loads just fine. How much memory did each machine have? There's way to many factors to that aren't brought up. CNN might be swamped by users at one time. What time off day did they use both machines? Office runs better in X than on any PC.....

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MacNN.com Reader
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04/19, 02:31pm | report spam | close Reply |
Re: Babies

Oh, shut up. Calling names doesn't make up for your apparent lack of knowledge of software development. Just *how* is OS X slow for you? For me, OS X is slightly to moderately slower than OS 9 and prior primarily in its reaction to user interaction; its windowing manager and UI Server can certainly stand for some beefing up. But most of this slowdown is easily alleviated by its multitasking capacity. So in the end, I'm just as "productive" in OS X as I was in OS 9. And it will only improve in the coming months and years.

I came to include the Mac during OS 8.x years, and would've gone back to PC-only had it not been for OS X. Without OS X, XP would've been the only desktop player in town -- and XP is actually good. Be grateful you have choices.

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MacNN.com Reader
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04/19, 02:36pm | report spam | close Reply |
Holy s***.

This may be harsh news for all the OS X groupies, and apologists, but OS X right now is still the biggest roadblock to performance, because it's still badly designed under the hood - this will change, but it will take time.

It's still badly designed under the hood? And you know this for a fact because...you're a mechanic?

Please don't speak, layman. You are not qualified to make such statements.

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MacNN.com Reader
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04/19, 03:23pm | report spam | close Reply |
OS integration perhaps?

I agree that my browsing experience is generally faster on my PCs than my Macs. I believe that a lot of that has to do with OS integration. IE is so tightly integrated with the Windows OS that it can take advantage of a lot of its built-in features and functions. Probably a huge part of it right there. Just my wild guess, though.

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testudo
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04/19, 03:29pm | report spam | close Reply |
Re: reality pill

Any benchamrks done with Apple's Flagship product of OS X will invariably turn out not only MUC slower perfrmance numbers than Win equivalents, but even slower numbers than OS 9. If this benchmark had been done under OS 9 the numbers would look better.

Well, a big "duh" on the OS 9 comment. OS 9 is a cooperatively mutitasked system, which means that programs (like IE) can get as much processor time as they want when they do a task. As opposed to OS X. But when doing those benchmarks, don't forget to add in the time it takes to reboot when OS 9 freezes up on you. As for "Win eqivalents". How do you equate the Mac to windows? They're two separate beasts. [For example, on my Work PC, it takes AT LEAST 15 seconds for IE to open and load Yahoo as its home page. Sure, the browser window appears in like two seconds (quick start-up, woo-hoo), but that doesn't make it fast. h***, while waiting for it to load, I can start-up Netscape, and go to several pages before IE shows the first. I can even get stuff to load faster on my ancient Beige G3 and OS X.]

If the support for legacy technologies caused the slow-down, then how come those legacy technologies do just fine on their own.

Because the support for legacy technologies is ON TOP of the current stuff, not just by itself. This is the same reason why 16-bit apps ran slower on a Win95 machine, and why current apps ran slower on the P4 when it came out. The legacy code slows it down, but makes it compatible.

- Install a theme wihout transparencies, turn off anti-aliased text, and disable the damn drap-shadows (WindwshadeX), and try the same page load again - surprise, lots of the slow-down was caused by fluff.
Do you know this for a fact, or just making assumptions? Logic would seem that if the window is already up, why would it have to spend time redrawing it over and over?

- Last but not least for an OS that brags about multi-threading, none of the browsers truly support threading. Woohoo!

And this is Apple's fault how? You can have the best OS in the world, but if the programs don't support its features, that's the programer's faults, not the OS.

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berserkintosh
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04/19, 03:38pm | report spam | close Reply |
actually

so far omni web exploder netscape classic and 6.2 all load php like s***. im not shure why but theres allways this delay on macs when there isnt even on my work peecee which is a pathetic p2. even when i aim php links to my friend he gets pissy waiting for them to open on his g4/733. sites and pages load just fine but php is fukity on the mac no matter what browser i use. is this lack of php support by apple or does just every browser not handle it right on the mac? gods i hate php.

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pkeppel

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04/19, 03:43pm | report spam | close Reply | delete
Web speed = market share

Guys, our precious market share isn't going to increase until the business world can realistically include Mac as an option for their desktop environment. Businesses drive sales, not home users, and businesses want web-based apps. (I'm sure Apple still loves your home $$, though!)

Many companies are designing web-based systems to handle critical parts of their business. Even if you're lucky enough to have T1s between all of your sites, a lag is still a lag. If your app is slower on one system than another, you'll be drawn toward the faster box.

Your CEO will ultimately sign off on the system that refreshes in 2 seconds, not 4. And your IT department will be forced to deploy WinIE, simply because it pulls web pages quicker than MacIE. And the Apple community has lost another business.

We can kick and scream all we want, but until our professional industry is organized in making the Mac viable for big business (the boring stuff, like accounting and purchasing), and your average IT department actually UNDERSTANDS what to do with a Mac (other than replace it with windows, which is all too common), we'll stay right where we are, no matter HOW powerful Steve's reality-distortion field becomes.

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berserkintosh
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04/19, 03:46pm | report spam | close Reply |
lol

"Oh, yeah, try out Photoshop 7 under OS X and OS 9 - night and day performance differences."

god ps7 sucks. i feel sorry for any mac prepress/printshops migrating to osx. wait i dont they can yet.....oh well.

It's still badly designed under the hood? And you know this for a fact because...you're a mechanic?

"Please don't speak, layman. You are not qualified to make such statements."

uhmmm yeah its widely know apple still has to do alot of optimization on osx and has been the focus of many forums and every apple update for half a year now. so while the guy may not be a programmer hes just stating what has been going around and getting bitched about for quite a while.

hope 10.2 is snappy snappy snappy! then ill be happy happy happy!

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baxterboy
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04/19, 03:52pm | report spam | close Reply |
Try a Different Browser

I too have noticed the slower page loads with IE but I have been using Mozilla 9.9 and now 1.0 rc1 and I can tell a significant difference in speed. IE just doesn't seem optimized for OS X. Even Opra or OmniWeb loads faster than IE.
Hopfully with 10.2 we will see a big speed boost.

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apple4ever
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04/19, 04:23pm | report spam | close Reply |
Opera Comment

Read this from a Opera Developer:

Jason Hazlett, a Mac developer for Opera, said performance problems are something application developers have to live with at this stage. "To get any application running on OS X is one thing, but getting it to run well is another," he said. "The most important thing to do is to use the OS X native event model. I cannot speak for Internet Explorer, but the Opera beta you are running does not (run the event model). This goes a long way in explaining what you are observing."
So despite wired's comments, it is the BROWSER that is the problem, NOT the OS! Since Apple isn't developing a browser, there isn't much they can do!
And I use OW, and it have very acceptable performance.(I trashed IE as soon as X installed it. It was c***).

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hayesk
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04/19, 04:30pm | report spam | close Reply |
Re: actually

"so far omni web exploder netscape classic and 6.2 all load php like s***. im not shure why but theres allways this delay on macs when there isnt even on my work peecee which is a pathetic p2...is this lack of php support by apple or does just every browser not handle it right on the mac? gods i hate php."

Uhm... what you are saying suggests you don't quite understand PHP. PHP feeds HTML to the browser. There is no PHP code running on the client, it's all done on the server and HTML is fed back to the client. To the browser, it looks like any static web page. If a specific site using PHP screws up in a web browser, then the site is coded incorrectly and feeds bad HTML back. But to say that PHP is slow and buggy, would mean it is slow and buggy on every single browser that views it, no matter if it's Windows or MacOS.

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testudo
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04/19, 04:52pm | report spam | close Reply |
Re: web speed

Your CEO will ultimately sign off on the system that refreshes in 2 seconds, not 4. And your IT department will be forced to deploy WinIE, simply because it pulls web pages quicker than MacIE. And the Apple community has lost another business.

That's really funny. The CEO doesn't sign off on something based on how fast it loads. They'll sign off on the recommendation of the CTO (plus looking at how it might affect the bottom-line and his precious stock options). The CTOs and IT departments do not want Macs, and generally never want Macs, because they make their living servicing PCs, run up huge budgets for support staffs (plus it makes them feel important to get those MSCE certifications as well). Oh, and lets not forget those little kickbacks that usually get handed around by VARs and such. Most of these guys kiss Bill Gate's a** worse than the so-called Apple apologists kiss Steve's.

I mean, if any of them had an iota of non-MS-influenced brains, would they really deploy all that security-hole-filled-software like IIS, SQL Server, IE, Outlook, etc, etc, etc?

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MacNN.com Reader
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04/19, 04:53pm | report spam | close Reply |
Doeh

Apple needs to address this problem. I've tried Mozilla and Omniweb, and although both are faster than Micro$oft's IE crapware, they still pale in comparison to IE on Windows. I don't know the reason for this, but Apple needs to correct the problem, before it gives OS X and Macs a bad reputation.

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The Grand Panjandrum

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04/19, 05:17pm | report spam | close Reply | delete
Hey, let's face

Well, I hate to say it, but anyone who has spend much time browsing on the Mac (in ANY browser, in OS 9 or X) and on a comparable PC, will realize that the PC does render html considerably faster in most cases. It is a little annoying, but overall not that big a deal.

I expect that the browsers are poorly written for the Mac. Chimera is the first browser for OS X that I consider acceptably fast. Omniweb is terribly slow (even 4.1b4), but otherwise beautiful.

Generally, the more complex the page, the greater the speed difference.

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MacNN.com Reader
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04/19, 05:31pm | report spam | close Reply |
I switched to XP to surf

I switched to my XP computer whenever I surf simply because this Wired article is very true. To the person saying his 500MHz P3 is only slightly faster than his Mac, don't forget, a 500MHz P3 is what, 2 years old now? A modern $1500 PC versus a modern $1500 Mac will ALWAYS result in the PC being faster at web page rendering. It's a hard pill to swallow, and I'm sure 90% of the people here will try somehow to argue I'm wrong, but it's the hard truth.

IE may be the most popular browser on the Mac and thus it gets the most complaints, but all browsers on the Mac are slow when compared to Windows browsers.

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olepigeon
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04/19, 06:07pm | report spam | close Reply |
A couple of things...

First of all, Internet Explorer is no longer the default browser, Netscape is. Secondly, did they even try to determine whether it was even the browser itself and not the computer? There are plenty of other webbrowsers such as Netscape, Mozilla, OmniWeb, Opera, and iCab. Opera touts it's the fastest webbrowser period. Maybe they should've tried it with that?

Very, very stupid "test" by Wired.

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MacNN.com Reader
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04/19, 06:12pm | report spam | close Reply |
|-|

My name is eggnon

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olepigeon
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04/19, 06:15pm | report spam | close Reply |
To anonymous,

I assume you mean MacOS X browsers in general, not ALL web browsers among the numerous operating systems that run on a Macintosh.

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MacNN.com Reader
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04/19, 06:27pm | report spam | close Reply |
Spinning beachball

I rarely have IE crash, it just goes into infinite spinning beachball mode fairly often (very occassionally it hasn't actually gone into spinning beachball mode, it just takes 5 minutes to come back to life, but normally you can leave it for hours and the beachball's still spinning away).

That, the fact that it sometimes loads a page and then makes the page go completely white, and the fact that it's not particularly compatible with sites that use scripts that are designed for the Windows version of IE, are the main other problems with IE on Mac OS X aside the obvious performance issue.

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loudpedal
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04/19, 07:02pm | report spam | close Reply |
Clean up your act MS

I have used Office for Windows at work for years on a 225 MHz laptop, therefore I was amazed when I used Word on my 400 MHz iMac and there is delay after delay in the cursor changing modes. MS needs to do some code optimization across their line.

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sundip01
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04/19, 08:51pm | report spam | close Reply |
test could be biased...

someone else already may have already mentioned this but since IE is so tightly integrated into windows and they are not really comparable versions, this test could be biased.

the best way to verify this would be to run the same build of mozilla on both machines. since they are essentially the same code base (with different ui schemes) it could give us all some insight to the speed differences, if any.

everyone needs to calm down for a change. ppl get so worked up when anyone says anything about pc's better than macs. all your swearing and bitching doesn't sway anyone's opinion of the topic, it just lowers their opinion of you.

i bought my first mac when os x public beta came out and have been extremely happy with the choice i made ever since. this os, although not perfect, is fantastic and better than anything i've used before in terms of features and personal productivity. the thing is, its only going to get better too...apple is constantly working to improve it. as far as I'm concerned there really isn't a "final version" of the os b/c they are constantly making improvements that we can all appreciate. keep that in mind next time you want to b**** about it.

and you know what, if you really hate it that much, go buy a windows box and live with that for awhile and see how much worse it can really be.

word.

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palegolas
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04/19, 08:55pm | report spam | close Reply |
too bad

Too bad Apple discontinued CyberDog. Maybe then it would have been the fastest webbrowser for the Mac today. IE for Mac is slow, has always been. I choose IE for its "solidness" though, it's a damn fine app. IE for PC is super fast and probably even more stable... but it looks just like any MS app for Windows... boring. IE for Mac looks and feels nice, allthough a little slow... as does the whole OS X by the way.

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cmdtab

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04/19, 10:57pm | report spam | close Reply | delete
Apple Should Buy OmniWeb

As one of my fellow Mac using friends pointed out, Apple should buy OmniWeb from the Omni Group outright, and make their own web browser. Apple can tweak the hardware and software like nobody else :-P iSurf, anyone?

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sebastien
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04/20, 02:57am | report spam | close Reply |
It's IE's fault

IE is a duwg! Not only is it a CPU hog, it's not even fast at what it does.

Another reason it's slow, is because it doesn't support GZIP compression for data transfer. Combined with its crappyness, it's makes the user experience less than ideal.

I just did a test on my new iMac 800 loading a Slashdot page with 600+ comments (displayed flat) with both IE and the newest Mozilla. Mozilla took maybe 3 seconds MAX to display the page, IE took over 10 (and this is AFTER having downloaded the data, which was faster on Mozilla)

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Brontojoris
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04/20, 04:48am | report spam | close Reply |
Wired love Macs

They're just trying to look impartial because so many of their top stories lately have been about Macs. On 23 March, it was Where old Macs go to thrive, on 9 April it was iPod, Music to hackers ears, on 16 April it was A top secret one-of-a-kind Mac, and yesterday it was Rarest of Rare Apples for Sale. I read this latest article and its pretty superficial reporting, with no benchmarks or facts to go on, other than the reporters subjective evaluation. Wired love Macs, and you can tell by reading the publishing binding of the printed Mag, where they list the computers, software and music that went into making that edition.

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memyselfandimac
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04/20, 05:48am | report spam | close Reply |
Better times ahead

As i see it OSX is still a work in progress, how many years did it take for the classic mac OS to reach it's current ver. 9, it improved a little bit with every revision. i think OSX is a marvel for a OS that only been out in the real world for about a year. And it gets better with every update. Look at what windows user had with Windows95 and what they have now. With Apples track record they will get us what they can in as timely manner as possible without throwing a bunch of bug ridden premature updates at us just to masses happy. to me, browsers have always been slightly slower on macs for some reason. IE especially so(really think this is by design IMHO), we have to face it that it's a windows world out there, so they seem to be a little more web compliant than OUR browsers. i use omniweb mostly and have went in to the compatibility pref pane and told it to identify itself as IE 5.5 windows version and compared load times with the other browser emulations available and i do notice a slight difference when loading a lot of my web pages. So i don't really think we can blame this on OSX. But really, if it takes you 3.4 sec to load a page versus the guy in the next office on a PC takes 2.5 sec, do you really think that during the coarse of a day the time difference is really going to amount to anything even worth mentioning. Of course once you add in time to the PC guys day that he spent rebooting after numerous crashes and you'll probably come out way ahead in productivity anyway.
Anyway i use anything but IE and Microsoft products if at all possible and hope all the rest of you will try to do the same I also say a prayer for the speedy dev. of Chimera and OmniWeb every night before bed.

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04/20, 10:13am | report spam | close Reply |
I'm staying put

I'm surprised by the number of zealots here who are defending OS X. It is quite blatantly slow, for most things compared to a 3 yr old machine at work with NT4. (I own a Powerbook G4/667)
But you know what?! I'm sticking with the Mac - it's just nicer to use.
This is the first time I've heard a quote from Apple say they are intending to make it quicker. Gives me hope!
Also, for those who complain about people not knowing enough about SW development. Why on earth should people know that? I came to the Mac because I could use it without worrying about technology. It used to just work; but we are getting there again. Slowly.

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eric_n_dfw

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04/20, 10:57am | report spam | close Reply | delete
OS X Speed

I'm actually amazed at how FAST OS X is on my G4/400 considering how much Aqua and Quartz are doing. In my opinion, Aqua/Quartz is the only bottleneck here. If you look at command line applications like the RC5 client, they run faster under OS X than their OS 9 counterparts.

The "Darwin" core of this thing is rock solid and fast guys, NeXT worked on that thig for a decade before you Mac users even probably heard of it. Aqua/Quartz, however is a whole new beast and will only get better with time. Heck, the old 25Mhz 60040 chip NeXT Stations were blazingly fast with their Display PostScript desktops. Quartz will be optimized more and more.

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eric_n_dfw

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Oops! :-)

Forgot to close my italics tag there - sorry! :-)

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04/20, 11:11am | report spam | close Reply |
OS X is slow

Yes it is. Even on my G4 desktop its not as fast as OS 9. But I use it because I don't have to deal with crashes. Lets hope Apple brings further speed improvements in 10.2.
These are our growing pains, can't be avoided.

Its a spinning disc BTW, not a beach ball.

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orlock
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True.

Look. I've used macs since '90, and been doing web development since '93. About '95 I switched to PCs for browsing/surfing due to the major speed difference -- not because the mac's fine sitting on a T1 or IE's code is goofy on the mac, any of the other c*** reasons floating here. Because at best there was a 2:1 disparity in speed. No big conspiracy - the mac platform from System 7.0 on has been excruciatingly slow for surfing compared to a similar or lesser-spec'ed PC machine.

From the Wired article:Jason Hazlett, a Mac developer for Opera, said performance problems are something application developers have to live with at this stage. "To get any application running on OS X is one thing, but getting it to run well is another," he said. "The most important thing to do is to use the OS X native event model. I cannot speak for Internet Explorer, but the Opera beta you are running does not (run the event model). This goes a long way in explaining what you are observing."

So the problem is that it's hard as h*** to get something stable on OS X right now, and using the native event model is a level beyond even that high threshold. So to fix this, Apple needs to address developers' concerns on the difficulty of developing in the OS X environment. No one purposely releases dog-code that users don't want - but they may be forced to if writing fast-running apps requires backflips in the new environment.

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DavidRavenMoon
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Re: berserkintosh

"god ps7 sucks. i feel sorry for any mac prepress/printshops migrating to osx. wait i dont they can yet.....oh well."

Are you crazy? On my system PS 7 runs faster on X then 9! What are you running, the beta that was floating around?

I do all my design work in OS X now with no problems... at work we still use 9 because of Quark, but as soon as Quark goes native so will we. Personally I'm using InDesign now. :)

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DavidRavenMoon
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Mozilla!

I have to say since I started using Mozilla 0.9.9, and now 1.0, it's MUCH faster than IE 5.1. To use the Apple website as an example, on my system it loaded in 1.7 seconds on a Cable modem. Of course I'm not on an iMac, but this is only a G4/466...

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ha11mark

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04/20, 05:37pm | report spam | close Reply | delete
�all load php like c***�

re: �all load php like s***�

Umm, dude. To a web browser, there's no difference between a PHP page and an HTML page and an SHTML page.

There could be some crappy coding on some PHP pages you visit often, or they're running on an underpowered browser, but there is absolutely nothing browser-based that can make PHP pages load slower than plain old HTML.

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And another thing

I hate those butt wipes who insist on putting popups in their sites. Man that is so annoying. Stop it, I ignore every popup that I get.

That includes monkeynn.

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littledog
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04/21, 05:39am | report spam | close Reply |
letter to Wired

We use both Macs and PCs and I have not observed the issues mentioned in the article. Explorer is slow across the board, although obviously better optimized to run on Microsoft's own operating system.

Explorer is the default browser on Macs as part of the agreement to keep MS Office on the Mac. That doesn't mean they are required to make it faster and better than the Windows version. Why would they, as it would draw customers away from Windows.

Part of using computers is utilizing the ability to choose various software/hardware combinations to maximize the potentional for each situation. (This is why diverse marketplace competition is so important to the end user) This article ultimately fails because it does little or nothing to encourage an examination of best possible solutions and by attemping to substanciate its premise by claiming that the default browser, which Apple is compelled to use, is an adaquate yardstick for comparison.

I just compared the Mozilla 1.0 browser to Explorer on OS X.

Mozilla was 40-50% faster on 25 random (identical) page loads. (3-5 secs for mozilla as compared to 7-10sec for IE)

I also compared load times on a HP PIII 800Mhz -Windows 98 (which most people still use) with an AGP Diamond Stealth III video card and a Mac G4 500 running OS X w/standard pci ATI 128 Video (a reasonable speed comparison)

Mozilla was still 10-20% faster loading on the Mac than Explorer on the PC Windows clone (over the same DSL Network).

Mozilla was 10-20% faster on the PC than Explorer on the PC,.........go figure..???

Mozilla was about the same on the Mac and the PC.

If as the article mentions, Apple can wring out even better optimizations, OS X will be a truly phenomenal operating system.

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the Rebel
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04/21, 11:43am | report spam | close Reply |
Important choice of words

From the Wired article :

"Switching browsers -- even to the latest version of Opera, the self-styled "world's fastest browser" -- indicated that Mac versions of most browsers are conspicuously slower than their Windows counterparts."

Why did the Wired author say "most" ??

Although everyone knows that there is still a lot of optimization to be done in OS X (improvements in 10.2 is going to amaze), it should be obvious that least part of the problem is with the browser. IE is not well optimized for OS X and we can not expect a whole lot yet from Microsoft in that area. Mozilla is somewhat better than IE, but still OS X work on Mozilla has really only actively been happenning for less than a year; the Mach-O builds of Mozilla will be much faster when they get stablilized; Chimera of course will rock. According to the Wired article, Opera 6.0 will have signifigantly improved OS X performance over the current Opera beta.

Regarding the suggestion that Apple buy OmniWeb from the OmniGroup, as much as I like what all the guys at OmniGroup have done for the OS X platform, I really think that OmniWeb is a dead end road. Maybe Apple could buy OmniWeb from the OmniGroup and then donate the code to the Mozilla/Chimera guys. That way Apple would compensate OmniGroup for their work and the OmniWeb developers would be available to work on other projects. Then instead of Apple paying developers to work on speeding up OmniWeb, Apple could pay those developers to work on Mozilla/Chimera. Overall the expense for Apple would be less and the rewards would be greater sooner.

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liwoog

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Chimera 2x faster than IE

Chimera loads the CNN page twice as fast as IE on my machine. Antialiased fonts and all. So this is definetly NOT a MacOS X "too many frills" problem. And simply a browser issue.

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rok
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04/21, 04:55pm | report spam | close Reply |
better late than never...

look, there is a point here, and it needs to be heard. i don't know if wired did all their home work on this, but sites, ESPECIALLY with any flash content, do zip faster on a pc of comparable speed/specs and the latest the g4 has to offer. when that new 4" half-pound computer got announced, i headed pver to www.oqo.com to see their product. real cool, let the flash load, pretty neat. go over to my i.t. guy's computer to show him, and the page loded in ie 6 for windows 200 so fast, and the animations were so fluid, i was floored.

the thing i can't wrap my head around is whether this is better resources being allocated to explorer by windows, better integration between ie and windows overall, better optimization of the flash plug-in by macromedia on behalf o ftheir larger windows installed base, or a combination of them all.

either way you look at it, yes, it IS that bad, and macs have been coming with explorer pre-installed for browsing for a while, so that's what many of the newbie mac users see as their "mac surfing experience." sorry, guys, i am as big a geek as they come, and i have just about every mac-browser on my box at work, but i'd be a friggin' idiot to expect my mom to be reading about how great omniweb is, to download the latest beta, install it by herself, etc., etc.

so does that leave it up to apple to fix? and how much good can they do? if explorer 5.x is c***, you can only poilsh it so much -- and it'll still be just a shiny t***. ;-)

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rok
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04/21, 05:05pm | report spam | close Reply |
btw, davidravenmoon...

kind of off-topic, but i though i would post about it re: quark being the last os x major holdout... a friend and i came to the realization that adobe has managed to s**** over quark once and for all, no matter how fast quark gets xpress carbonized. wanna know how?

simple. go make a pdf out of quark. i'll wait...

ah, you're back! great. bet you used acrobat distiller, right? well, adobe isn't going to carbonize distiller! so every time you want to make a pdf from quark, you will have to launch classic in order to do so. quark can fix this by paying adobe lost of cash to license the pdf file format (and adobe wins), or staying with the current systemwhich relies on a rapidly antiquating operating system (and adobe still wins).

man, it's so slick, i never saw this coming. ;-)

of course, if quark didn't have such a stranglehold on the publishing world, adobe could be running the same game that got microsoft in trouble for exploiting ther industry dominance to further their own ends. but quark does, so adobe's just fighting back with the most powerful ammo they have. ;-)

so for those of you relying on quark, i suggest you get real comfy with booting classic for a very long time...

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04/22, 02:55am | report spam | close Reply |
PHP, and the main point

To clarify on the PHP clarification, PHP is rendered by the web server, not the browser. PHP code never reaches the browser, so there can't possibly be any compatibility issues between the browser and PHP. Like ha11mark says, if you're having problems with PHP sites, it's probably other kinds of code that's in the sites, but not the PHP code.

And getting back to the main point ... I agree and have witnessed first hand that HTML renders more quickly on Mac IE than Windows IE. But I just can't figure out why everyone thinks that's Apple's fault, and a problem that Apple needs to fix. How can Apple make Microsoft's software run faster? The only way I can think of is to do what Microsoft did -- merge the browser with the OS itself -- and I don't think any of us want IE merged with OS X.

By the way, I also agree, and have witnessed first hand, that OS X is slower in general than OS 9. But if we're talking about HTML rendering speed in particular, then we have to talk about browser performance, not OS performance.

So please, beg Microsoft for a faster browser, but let Apple off the hook on this one!

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04/22, 02:55am | report spam | close Reply |
PHP, and the main point

To clarify on the PHP clarification, PHP is rendered by the web server, not the browser. PHP code never reaches the browser, so there can't possibly be any compatibility issues between the browser and PHP. Like ha11mark says, if you're having problems with PHP sites, it's probably other kinds of code that's in the sites, but not the PHP code.

And getting back to the main point ... I agree and have witnessed first hand that HTML renders more quickly on Mac IE than Windows IE. But I just can't figure out why everyone thinks that's Apple's fault, and a problem that Apple needs to fix. How can Apple make Microsoft's software run faster? The only way I can think of is to do what Microsoft did -- merge the browser with the OS itself -- and I don't think any of us want IE merged with OS X.

By the way, I also agree, and have witnessed first hand, that OS X is slower in general than OS 9. But if we're talking about HTML rendering speed in particular, then we have to talk about browser performance, not OS performance.

So please, beg Microsoft for a faster browser, but let Apple off the hook on this one!

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Wired: iMac takes twice as long on some tasks

updated 01:25 pm EDT, Fri April 19, 2002

Related Articles

Recent Articles

yeah, its true

Geez?

It's not Apple's fault.

iMac Slowdowns

Sheesh

Wired needs grounding.

Office on Mac

Motives are one thing.

Its a MS product.....

Blame the browser

Babies

doesn't crash?

Re: Its a MS product.....

Mozilla

Field

correction

Balanced Article

Some bitter Reality Pill!

Not Here!!

Re: Babies

Holy s***.

OS integration perhaps?

Re: reality pill

actually

Web speed = market share

lol

Try a Different Browser

Opera Comment

Re: actually

Re: web speed

Doeh

Hey, let's face

I switched to XP to surf

A couple of things...

|-|

To anonymous,

Spinning beachball

Clean up your act MS

test could be biased...

too bad

Apple Should Buy OmniWeb

It's IE's fault

Wired love Macs

Better times ahead

I'm staying put

OS X Speed

Oops! :-)

OS X is slow

True.

Re: berserkintosh

Mozilla!

�all load php like c***�

And another thing

letter to Wired

Important choice of words

Chimera 2x faster than IE

better late than never...

btw, davidravenmoon...

PHP, and the main point

PHP, and the main point

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