Wednesday, April 3, 2002


Speaking of OmniWeb, The Omni Group today released OmniWeb 4.1b2. I have been using sneakypeek builds of OmniWeb for quite some time. 4.1 is a huge upgrade over 4.0; loads faster, works with almost every site out there and has some awesome new features. Version 4.1 has been my default browser for some time.
10:59:17 AM  pontificate    

Nicholas Riley says: I also downloaded and installed the latest Mozilla nightly build on Windows. Running on a Pentium III/700 with W2K, Mozilla is very usable, compared with my dual Power Mac G4/533 (barely usable). It's the same code running there, folks, for the most part: CFM bridging, Mach-O, and OS X's general slowness certainly take their respective tolls.

You can strike out the Mach-O and OS X part of the general slowness from that statement. I'm running OmniWeb 4.1 and it is pretty damned snappy on my 500mhz TiBook. As well, saying that it is the 'same code' is just plain wrong. There are vast differences between interacting with the user and rendering graphics on Windows vs. OS X. Even if the code driving the rendering layer is the same, the rendering layer-- itself-- has to be significantly different to support Win32 rendering vs. Quartz rendering.

Unless it has been optimized for the platform, all bets are off.
9:14:44 AM  pontificate