MAC / Safari users having problems?

[Phil Rhodes]

Hi,

 

> The NeXT operating system was the Unix based forefather of what we know today as Macintosh OS X.

 

This is a common misconception. NEXTSTEP used the MACH kernel with bits and pieces of BSD. OSX uses the XNU kernel with bits and pieces of BSD. Jobs seems to like to promulgate this rumour, presumably to make him feel better about the gigantic failure of NeXT after he rather stupidly lost control of Apple and left in a fit of pique. NeXT was great, but then again so was the Amiga, and while my heart bleeds for both of them neither can be held up as an example of martyred greatness.

 

My, what an outburst! Sorry. Um, happy, happy, happy, joy, joy, bunny rabbits, daffodils!

 

> Many websites are still designed to work better with Internet Explorer. Safari will load that page slower

> than IE is able and their really is nothing Apple can do about that.

 

That's nothing to do with the way the sites are designed. IE, for its flaws (its many, many flaws) is a blisteringly fast browser for the simple reason that a lot of it is part of the shell code on the operating system under which it most commonly runs. I'd love to hear of a coding technique that allows IE to load a page faster than Safari!

 

Phil

[Sam Wells]

I just added the I-Frame ads to the Test Skin.

 

Let me know if that causes any Safari problems.

 

Not for me. Both Cine Skin and Test Skin seem fine on Safari.

 

I've never really had any weirdness with Safari - which I've used since Day One here - on this site.

 

 

In general Safari is faster for me than IE altho haven't tried IE here

 

-Sam

[Tenolian Bell]

This is a common misconception. Jobs seems to like to promulgate this rumour, presumably to make him feel better about the gigantic failure of NeXT after he rather stupidly lost control of Apple and left in a fit of pique.

 

This is no misconception propagated by Steve Jobs. A basic google search of the history of OS X will show its history begins with NeXT.

 

All of the details between the two aren't exactly the same because technology has changed over the past 16 years. The ideas, direction, and functionality of NeXT were the basis of OS X.

 

-OS X is based on Mach and BSD the same as NeXT. XNU is a hybrid of Mach, FreeBSD, and C++ that Apple developed for OS X and released as an open source Unix operating system.

 

- OS X Cocoa API framework and Objective-C library are direct descendants of NeXT.

 

-Jobs worked with Adobe to use Display Post Script as the display engine in NeXT. Today OS X's display engine is based on Adobe's PDF the progeny of Post Script.

 

-NeXT was the first operating system to use an icon dock, icon shelf, 3D widgets, system wide drag and drop, real time scrolling and window dragging, publishing color standards, transparency, sophisticated sound and music processing, advanced graphics primitives, and modern typography. All of these features are distinct characteristics of OS X's eye candy.

 

The failure of NeXT was largely due to the fact that it was ahead of its time. Hard data drives where not very common at the time and were very expensive (640 MB cost $5000). NeXT operating system was so large that it would fit on a stack of floppy disks and needed dedicated storage. Instead of floppy's or hard drive the NeXT system shipped with a new type of magneto-optical storage device with disks that cost $100 each. The operating system required a lot of RAM for the time and its hardware was shipped with 8 MB which cost $3000. The entire system cost $10,000.

 

The high cost of the system and the meteoric rise of Windows is why NeXT ultimately failed in its initial introduction to the market. The system proved to be a good idea as at this point all operating systems use its innovation to some degree. The reincarnation of NeXT in OS X has come about in a time when hardware is able to run the software at a price the consumer market is able to pay.

 

I'd love to hear of a coding technique that allows IE to load a page faster than Safari!

 

Other criticisms, mostly coming from technically proficient users and developers of websites and browser-based software applications, concern Internet Explorer's support of open standards, rather than use proprietary extensions to achieve similar functionality. Internet Explorer supports, to some degree, a number of standardized technologies, but has implementation gaps and conformance failures — some minor, some not — that have led to criticism from an increasing number of developers. The increase is attributable, in large part, to the fact that competing browsers that offer relatively thorough, standards-compliant implementations are becoming more widely used. Internet Explorer's ubiquity, in spite of its perceived inferiority in this area, frustrates developers who want to write standards-compliant, cross-browser code. It can also prevent widespread adoption of new technologies. Web developers must work with the least advanced technology across all browsers they wish to support, and Internet Explorer is often criticized for often having the least advanced support.

 

Microsoft's Internet Explorer page is not even close to being valid HTML. The current standard is to create web page content in HTML (or XHTML) and define the style separately in Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), but Microsoft FrontPage, their web site design tool, does not create separate CSS or valid HTML. Their current development tool, Visual Studio with ASP.Net, does not create valid XHTML or CSS. Nor does Microsoft Word. Internet Explorer's notorious lack of properly handling CSS causes many web developers to create IE specific web sites.

 

But the biggest challenge facing anyone who wants to take on IE is that most Web sites are built to work best with Microsoft's IE simply because it's what sits on most PCs. That means some sites may not look quite right or may not be accessible at all via a browser other than IE.

 

The HTTP standard requires file types to be based on the MIME type string sent from the server. The browser must handle the file appropriately for the MIME type passed. As of version 6.0, Microsoft® Internet Explorer determines a file's type by its extension, not conforming to the standard. For a conforming browser and development library see Mozilla and netlib

 

Netscape 8 takes the best of both worlds. It runs both IE and Mozilla's engines, should sites you want to visit render properly only with IE.

[Phil Rhodes]

Hi,

 

I'm not going to drag this off into a gigantically offtopic technical discussion of internet standards, but it needs to be said that if Microsoft choose to implement feature "foo" with simple one-step command "wibble", then Safari and Firefox are entirely free to implement that same one-step functionality - this is basically what we're talking about here.

 

I'm as aware as anyone of the need for standards and compliancy, but equally it's hard to fault Microsoft if they're implementing things which are speedy and popular. That said I'd hate to see everyone chasing the Microsoft feature set, although I often think the W3C could use a few pointers.

 

In short - "it's not in the standard" doesn't mean "you must not implement it", although this is all too frequently taken to be the case. If people are using it, write the damn code, don't try to excuse it. It's extremely bad form of the Safari devs to whine like that.

 

Phil

[Dominik Muench]

neither safari nor mozilla are the fastets web browsers for mac and certainly not opera, which sucks on pc and mac equally....according to the test of a big mac magazine in germany.

 

try this one: http://www.caminobrowser.org/

 

 

that is basically a mozilla browser, but specialy designed for the mac cpu cores, which makes them faster.