Macintosh Browser Smackdown

[Don_HH2K]

The last Netscape browser that supported 68k Macs and Win 3.1 was 4.08. It was released as a suite and a browser only product. See the main Sillydog site for download links.

I'm using a PowerPC processor, not a 68k processor.

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

[Andrew T.]

According to release notes, Netscape Navigator 3.04 was indeed the last version to encompass Macintosh System 7.1.3 in its system requirements. Netscape Communicator 4.0 states that System "7.6.1 or later is recommended," but it doesn't state that the software cannot run under earlier versions, and the SillyDog701 Netscape Browser Archive states that Netscape 4.0 through 4.05 can run on System 7.5, though not 7.1.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win95; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040514

[Antony]

Upgrading Mac OS 7.1.3 to OS 9.1 related posts have been split to this thread.

(Edit - fix link 13.6.2004)

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/125.2 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/125.8

[Haplo]

I did a test recently on the 3, running on a 1GHz eMac with 1GB RAM and a 60GB HD, nothing running in the BG, of course. The first thing to notice is that they actually did update camino with all the new crap in firebird. As far as startup, the new camino runs on par with safari, while firebird has turned into bloatware and slows slow as crap. As far as rendering, from what I could tell, safari and camino were pretty much equal. Safari itself is a good deal smaller than either camino or firebird, which is something to note, and somewhere along the lines, mozilla inc. decided not to optimize for crap for OSX, so firebird is a waste of time. This was probably a big mistake by them because nowadays people look for things like speed, simplicity and usability in browsers, which theirs lack entirely on OSX. When rendering larger sites like blizzard.com, safari typically does it slightly faster than camino. Also, the little top bar with the navicons is smaller in safari than in camino, and much smaller than in firebird. Just to compare CPU usage, it was suggested that I opened top in terminal, and what I found was that Safari uses the least CPU resources most of the time, followed by camino and then firebird, and that when hidden, safari is somehow coded to surrender it's resources and drops to a steady 0.0%, while the other browsers continue to bog down the system.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/125.2 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/125.8

[Antony]

Another browser comparison article, Browser Wars 2.0 - Part 1 by Martin Pikington (18th Nov 2004).

He tested out Safari 1.2.3, Firefox 1.0 PR, Internet Explorer 5.2.3, Camino 0.8.1, [sdt=5788]Shiira 0.9.3[/sdt], Opera 7.54 and Omniweb 5.1 beta.

From the article, Safari and Camino are both the fastest, rendering the MT homepage in 9 seconds. Firefox being slightly slower at 10second.

Internet Explorer is being a bit old and slow with fake aqua interface.

Opera has some minor problems, Omniweb is being the slowest browser (18 second)

Read the full article - Browser Wars 2.0 - Part 1 by Martin Pikington (18th Nov 2004).

(Edit, correct URL)

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/125.5.5 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/125.11

[ryaxnb]

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?

also try on icab, icab.de, for size. I t runs on System 7.1 with a few extensions, and on 68020 or later machine.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-US) AppleWebKit/125.4 (KHTML, like Gecko, Safari) OmniWeb/v563.34

[Al]

iCab is nice for older Mac OS versions with the best rendering skills. But Mozilla 1.3.1 is the latest for OS 8.5+

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041108 Firefox/1.0

[Antony]

According to the new official Safari page ( http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/safari/ ), the exciting new feature in Safari is the built-in support of RSS.

Let's check the performance provided by Apple...

HTML page load speed

1. Safari 2.0
   5.8 sec
2. Firefox 1.0.2
   11.5 sec
3. Netscape 7.2
   12.1 sec
4. MSIE 5.2.3
   24.1 sec

Java performance

1. Safari 2.0
   8 sec
2. MSIE 5.2.3
   10 sec
3. Firefox 1.0.2
   10.3 sec
4. Netscape 7.2
   10.4 sec

JavaScript performance

1. Safari 2.0
   5.1 sec
2. Firefox 1.0.2
   8.1 sec
3. Netscape 7.2
   10.6 sec
4. MSIE 5.2.3
   10.7 sec

Application Launch

1. Safari 2.0
   2.1 sec
2. MSIE 5.2.3
   3.4 sec
3. Firefox 1.0.2
   5.2 sec
4. Netscape 7.2
   6.3 sec

Safari 2.0 is clearly the winner. Safari 2.0 is included in [sdt=8740]Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger"[/sdt]

Test system: iMac with 1.8 GHz PowerPC G5, 256MB RAM, GeForce FX 5200 with 64 MB VRAM. Performance tests completed by Apple in April 2005. HTML, Java and JavaScript benchmarks based on VeriTest’s iBench Version 5.0 using default settings. Browsers that failed to automatically complete all test iterations were tested one iteration at a time.

Edited, correct mislabelling

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/412 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/412

[Andrew T.]

Application Launch

2. Netscape 7.2
3.4 sec

4. Firefox 1.0.2
6.3 sec

How could this be, seeing that Mozilla Firefox is a smaller program than Netscape 7.2?

Also, don't "HTML page load speed" times depend on the particular page being shown?

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win95; en-US; rv:1.7.7) Gecko/20050414 Firefox/1.0.3

[Antony]

Application Launch

2. Netscape 7.2
3.4 sec

4. Firefox 1.0.2
6.3 sec

How could this be, seeing that Mozilla Firefox is a smaller program than Netscape 7.2?

Also, don't "HTML page load speed" times depend on the particular page being shown?

Thanks for pointing out. corrected.

As for HTML page load time, I have no idea about Apple's sample base.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/412 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/412

[Mandrake]

Of course. They test a few pages and choose the ones that Safari renders fastest.

UserAgent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)