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[Antony]

In this Macintosh Browser Smackdown (by Eric Bangeman) (ArsTechnica)
The article started with something rather interesting...
Mac users were still second-class citizens when it came to surfing the web. There was OmniWeb 4.0 which had a beautiful rendering engine, but was slow, and Internet Explorer 5.1 which was rendered most pages accurately, but was slow. Soon, Mozilla joined the crowd. It was a large application with its own rendering engine, and it was . . . slow. Mac users had several slow web browsers to go with their slow OS.

And he mentioned that there were nine browsers to choose from, just nine.
MSIE as he mentioned...
Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.2.3. IE has mirrored the up-and-down relationship between Microsoft and Apple. Internet Explorer 4.0 and 4.5 were horrible on the Mac, but not long after Microsoft and Apple signed their 5-year truce, Internet Explorer 5.0 shipped for the Mac, and it was quickly (and deservedly) recognized as the premier browser for the Macintosh. However, while IE for Windows has seen two major revisions (5.5 and 6.0), the Mac version has been limited to minor updates and security fixes. IE 5.1 was one of the first two browsers ported to OS X, and is still included in OS X installs. It is a Carbon port of the Classic Mac OS version. Microsoft has recently announced the end of IE development for the Mac (as well as a standalone application for Windows). MSIE 5.2.3 is a free application.

What it said about Camino...
Camino 0.7 is a Mozilla offshoot touting itself as a "browser for Mac OS X with a Cocoa interface." It conforms rather well to the OS X GUI. While there are still nightly builds available, development on Camino (formerly Chimera) seems to have slowed considerably as 0.7 was released near the beginning of March 2003. Rumor has it that there are only one or two people still actively working on this project and its future development is in doubt as Firebird development progresses.

And Safari...
Safari 1.0 is Apple's own browser for machines running OS X 10.2. Its rendering engine is based on KHTML from KDE. Announced in January 2003, version 1.0 became available late last spring and it is rapidly becoming the most popular browser for Mac users.

The speed test chart showed that Camino is the fastest, followed by Mozilla 1.4, Firebird, then NS 7.1. Apple's Safari is not that fast at all.

For more detail, please read Macintosh Browser Smackdown (by Eric Bangeman) (ArsTechnica).

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/85 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/85

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MozInfo701 | MacCentre701 | AntBlog701 | don't steal music.

[Mandrake]

Interesting . . . I remeber seeing some kind of comparison on Apple's site, proudly displaying Safari as quicker than IE for Mac, Netscape 7 for Mac and Camino.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030624

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[Antony]

[hartlandcat]

[Antony]

Just to add a bit of my personal review.

Comparing Safari and latest Camino and Firebird.

Safari, a good and fast browser, fast to launch (in my slow Mac at least), beautiful user interface (of course, it's from the company that made the most friendly and easiest to use graphic user interface since early Mac OS). Beautiful display (main browser window)
Problem with Safari: a selective support of standards, same attitude as Opera? And the biggest problem... does not support the interlace of picture format (this is a serious problem for dial up users.

Camino, still not yet mature, still have quite a bit of work to do to catch up its sister product - Firebird (for Mac). However, it is definitely a good and sufficient tool for everyday usage.
The bad: slow start up. does not support sidebar, does not display webpages as pretty as in Safari, but good standard support. And the tooltips in the wrong position (sometimes). Not stable enough


Firebird: A good browser with good standard support.
The bad: a bit slow to start up, has the same tooltip problem as in Camino.

What is the tooltip position problem? For example, the tooltip sometimes displayed on near top of the page when the link/image or whatever with Title attritude is located on the lower part of the page. This does not occur all the time.

Edited - added screenshot

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.6a) Gecko/20031018 Camino/0.7+ (MathML-Enabled)

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MozInfo701 | MacCentre701 | AntBlog701 | don't steal music.

[Mandrake]

Firebird is slow to load? I could only say that comparing it to K-Meleon, apart from that I've not seen a browser that loads as fast as Firebird.

As for the mac UI, I think the whole thing is a toy, rather than an OS. At least in XP I can throw out the toyish UI, and setup the classic interface from win2k and use my computer for it's intended purpose, as opposed to going "oooh!" to yet more annoying effects and other eye candy.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.5) Gecko/20031016 K-Meleon/0.8

[ryaxnb]

[ryaxnb]

[ryaxnb]

[Mandrake]

I don't know what kind of hardware you are using, but Firebird loads instantly for me. But I've never used Safari, so I can't and won't compare the loading speed. But you can't really get much faster than instantly, can you?

UserAgent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0; APC)

[Antony]

[ryaxnb]

[ryaxnb]

[Don_HH2K]

Right now I'm using Netscape 3.04 on my old MacOS 7.1.3 machine. What was the last release that supported that old version of macOS?

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030624 Netscape/7.1 (ax)

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[Josh]