A Month with a Mac: A Die-Hard PC User's Perspective
by Anand Lal Shimpi on October 8, 2004 12:05 AM EST- Posted in
- Mac
Web Browsing
Safari is a tabbed browser much like Firefox and its usage is pretty straightforward. I've been a die-hard IE user ever since IE4 and have always appreciated its rendering speed and enjoyed its compatibility with the majority of websites out there. For an IE user, or any user for that matter, Safari is real easy to get used to.
But before I get into the little features that make Safari a good browser, let me address its biggest shortcoming: rendering speed.
Back before Firefox's release on the PC, the one argument that I'd always hear against IE was that it was too slow compared to lesser used browsers such as Opera. Having used Opera, I could hardly tell any performance difference in rendering speed in comparison to IE. It was the lack of any appreciable difference coupled with no real application level benefits over IE that kept me from using it on the PC.
But when comparing Safari rendering speed to IE, the difference is much more noticeable. Webpages render instantaneously under IE compared to the multiple second delay that exists under Safari. In order to show the difference, I ran a couple of informal tests:
| IE (PC) | Safari (Mac) | ||
| www.anandtech.com | 2.825 | 4.073333333 | 0.306464812 |
| www.cnn.com | 2.75 | 4.123333333 | 0.333063864 |
| www.slashdot.org | 2.33 | 2.373333333 | 0.018258427 |
| www.apple.com | 2.625 | 4.073333333 | 0.355564648 |
| www.microsoft.com | 2.365 | 2.44 | 0.030737705 |
What we see here is that IE on the PC is consistently a lot faster in rendering webpages than Safari, and although the numbers may seem small themselves, they make the Mac (and actually your internet connection) feel a lot slower when browsing normal web pages. Considering the amount of web browsing that we all do on a regular basis, Safari's rendering performance is nothing short of unacceptable.
One solution would be to use Firefox, which is available for OS X, and in doing so, performance is improved tremendously - although Firefox under OS X continues to be slower than IE on a PC.
The performance problem, although alleviated by Firefox, is still a serious issue since I found that I personally preferred using Safari under OS X over Firefox. Safari feels much more polished and looks much more like the rest of the OS. The other problem with Firefox is that scrolling in Firefox is much less smooth than under Safari, and can get annoying when reading large web pages that require lots of scrolling. The other issue I had was that I couldn't seem to find a keyboard shortcut to switch between tabs in Firefox and for whatever reason, the autocomplete URL keyboard shortcut for a .com URL would never work for me in Firefox. Some can get used to these quirks of Firefox and won't have a problem, but I wasn't one of them.
So, now that we know what Apple needs to improve about Safari, what is so great about this browser?
Built-in pop-up blocking and tabbed browsing support are both must-haves with any current generation browser.
Safari also includes a built-in Google search bar and a download manager; again, nothing revolutionary, but a nice must-have for a web browser.
As with the rest of OS X, keyboard shortcuts are plentiful in Safari. As you would expect, Command-T will open a new tab while Command-N will open a new browser window. There is no auto-complete URL function, unfortunately (e.g. no equivalent to IE's CTRL-Enter). Although, just typing in the URL sans www. and .com will eventually find the site that you are looking for after a short lookup delay.
While Safari lacks an autocomplete URL keystroke combination, it does make navigating to a particular directory on a website easier without unnecessary typing. For example, if you want to visit www.anandtech.com/mac/, you can simply type in anandtech/mac and Safari will fill in the www. and .com for you in the appropriate places. It's not a huge time saver, but it's a nice feature to have.
The IE equivalent for shifting focus to the address bar is Command-L in Safari, which quickly became one of my most frequently used keyboard shortcuts under Safari (much like F2 or CTRL-Tab were for me in IE).
Unlike IE, regardless of how many Safari windows or tabs I have open, there is never any slowdown and definitely no slowdown in spawning new windows - both very important things to me as I tend to have a good number of web browser windows open at any given time.
Website compatibility, for the most part, wasn't an issue with Safari, but there were some definite compatibility issues that required me to have Firefox installed whenever a website wasn't working properly. The issues usually revolved around things like car configurators on car manufacturers' websites, or certain forms not working properly. Everything that didn't work under Safari had worked without a problem under Firefox, but the choppy scrolling under Firefox and lack of an integrated feel resulted in me being a Safari user - one who just had to put up with its shortcomings in terms of speed and compatibility.
When we were redesigning the AnandTech website, I had the pleasure of being the only Safari user on the team and thus, the only one with random weird problems that would crop up during the design phase. It quickly became evident how many Safari incompatibilities can crop up - most developers don't have an OS X box with Safari on which to test their websites. Needless to say, if I hadn't been running Safari at the time, AnandTech wouldn't have been the most Safari-friendly website.
I'd say that Safari is probably the weakest link in Apple's OS X package, and it's one that they absolutely need to fix. After all, you can argue that not everyone games, but when a $300 eMachines computer browses the web faster than a $3000 Powermac, it's time for an updated web browser.
Internet Explorer for the Mac is basically a piece of garbage. It looks like an old version of Netscape, it is horribly slow and it is nothing like the Windows version of IE. For me, Safari was the web browser of choice under OS X, with the occasional launch of Firefox whenever there was a compatibility issue. With the latest preview release of Firefox, the situation has been much improved for OS X browsing, but the OS still lacks a truly solid browser, which is very important in my book.
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jecastej - Friday, October 8, 2004 - link
Sorry, they updated the review with G5 2.5, dual Xeon and dual opteron. New path:http://www.barefeats.com/pentium4.html
CindyRodriguez - Friday, October 8, 2004 - link
I'm not looking for Anand to praise the Mac, I'm looking for a good article and sorry, i'm not seeing it. If Anand lauded praise on the Mac and got all the details about the machine and the OS wrong, I'd be complaining about that too.This is an experience piece, but as I said, I'd have appreciated it much more if would wrote it as a newbie then actually learned about it to comment out the junk.
#27 Your explanation for why Apple is "forced" to make dual machines is laughable. It's merely a matter of MHz? The PPC 970 is shipping at 2.5 GHz while the Athlon64/Opteron is shipping at 2.4 GHz. AMD has Apple/ibm beat on memory performance but a 970 can perform more operations per clock than a *hammer core. They are both good chips.
Not only that, Apple initally released the line with two single processor models and one dual, then they moved to two duals, then they moved all dual as they speed bumped 25%.
The reality is more along the lines of.. the machine is designed for dual cpus so the cost of nearly doubling performance is minimal compared to a PC where you need a lower volume dual board with a potentially different chipset and dual ram banks for opterons.
#22 You brought up an excellent point. With the release of 10.3, the official gcc tree had NO optimizations for the PPC 970. The IBM Design lead for the 970 told arstechnica that they modified gcc to optomize the G5 a bit like a Power4 and a bit like a G4 because it shared characteristics of both chips, but it was more different than just the amalgam of them.
Current OS X software is horribly under-optomized for the G5. Our researchers have been using IBMs xlc and xlf compilers with real PPC 970 and G5 support and his code is way faster than gcc code. Initially they were seeing an average speed up of 30-40 percent but he recently told us that some code is running twice as fast.
cosmotic - Friday, October 8, 2004 - link
You didn't compare things like ... benchmarks to the speed of a PC... Granted the Mac *feals* sluggish, look at benchmarks and real-world preeformance of things like PS Filters, rendering, etc.http://www.barefeats.com/pentium4.html
Also, your forgetting that Mac's come with Firewire 800, optical audio in/out, etc. PC Workstatioins don't come with this.
As for OS Sluggishness, Many times Apple traded performance for smoothness. How often do you resize a window or minimize or whatever and theres a redraw issue on a PC... ALL THE TIME. Not so on a mac. All windows are stored in VRAM and thats where windows draw to then are compositited. On Windows, when a window needs to be redrawn because its now visble, the OS asks the app to draw, which is far less "smooth" than on a mac. Also, compare the text on a Mac to text on a PC. The text looks a LOT better on a Mac.
Much of the greatness of using a mac is the overall feal. Anand, how does it FEAL to use a mac over a long period of time? You dont get fustrated, things dont get corrupted, you dont need to reinstall, etc. It may not be as snappy on a clean install, but a Mac's performance doesnt degrade like a Windows machine.
-Charlie
jecastej - Friday, October 8, 2004 - link
Now the top of the line G5 2.5 ghz comes with the Radeon 9600 XT with 128 mb.And this site (barefeats) provides some informal benchmarks comparing the G5 2.0 with a dual opteron 2.0, price too.
http://www.barefeats.com/g5op.html
Yeah - Friday, October 8, 2004 - link
One thing that made me laugh a bit after reading the first part was how Anand mentioned how he was an old DOS guru but then went so far as to say that: I quote"Multi-tasking
It is somewhat ironic that I would praise Apple for the multi-tasking capabilities built into OS X, given that the Mac OS trailed Windows in its support for preemptive multi-tasking.
I remember working at Babbages when the first version of 'multitasking for DOS' came from a company called Quarterdeck the same people who develloped emm386 (extended memory manager for pc's and DOS) I think the name of it was DOS X windows or something like that. The reason that Microsoft came out with windows (which I also remember when it first came out after DOS 6.62). Was because the MAC system was Already Capable of running multiple programs at once and soon after, Microsoft Acquired Quaterdeck and Windows was borne. How could Anand forget that part of history? I am a PC user not a Mac user and even I know that MAC lead the multitasking industry.
manno - Friday, October 8, 2004 - link
CindyRodriguez, thanks for elaborating on the program installs.Anand and thanks for the awesome review. I'm a die-hard cheap bastard. That's a non-biased die hard cheap bastard mind you. I still use a win 2k equipped Pentium 3 700. I'm sure I'll upgrade some day and this article is going to be the reason while I'll even consider making my next system a Mac.
As for the people flaming the review out there I think you need to realize that he's taking the perspective of an independent reviewer, not the perspective of Apple's/Microsoft's marketing department. The purpose of the review wasn't to slam, or praise the system. (While you may have been hoping that's what it did, to justify your close minded view of the world) It was to give you an assessment of what it is to use a Mac from a PC users perspective. In addition to that he's writing to a MUCH savvier audience than most so he can take some liberty in pointing out certain caveats (like the fact that it took him time to adjust to the short cut keys in Mail) and understand that we're not going to look at them as black-marks against the system, but realize that's just him reporting the situation.
If he had come out and told me how piss-poor the Mac was, or how Apple's Jobsian vision of the future is the new ray of hope in the computer industry, I would of probably completely ignored the article. But I found it to be a very candid review on the G5. That in it, and of itself makes it a very rare thing on the web these days. Andandtech.com, theiquirer.net and arstechnica.com seem to be part of a dwindling few places you can get good factual (not opinion based) reporting now-a-days. and I appreciate it.
Again thanks for the review, it was extremely helpful.
MaxxPower - Friday, October 8, 2004 - link
The 9600 shipped with the G5's are not full fledged PRO's per ATI specification. They are underclocked to just over 350 MHZ core plus they offer only half what the PC version offers in terms of VRAM. Keeping in mind that the non-pro PC versions of 9600 are clocked around 325, with at least 128 MB of ram, the 9600 shipped with the G5's are somewhere between a pro and a regular version.Marsumane - Friday, October 8, 2004 - link
My god, almost all of these replies are angry, frusterated, or just totally objective mac users.Kishkumen - Friday, October 8, 2004 - link
#20 - Again, what? I didn't say anything about comparing architectures. You we're arguing that PPC based workstations maintain a similar price to performance ratio for x86 workstations. That's not even close to being true. I am sure that some people do use Xeon's and Opterons for workstations, but in my experience those tend to be pretty high end and are typically used for servers such as those that powers Anandtech. It seems to me that Apple uses dual CPUs for their workstations more out of necessity to keep performance up due to an inability on the part of IBM to ramp up clock speed. Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of the Power PC architecture, but your equivalent price to performance argument of the two platforms is flawed.brichpmr - Friday, October 8, 2004 - link
I enjoyed the article, although I think Anand has just scratched the surface in terms of cool apps available for Panther. Also, I'm running a 1.33 ghz G4 tower with 1.5 gig ram and don't find Office 2004 to be slugish at all....keeping in mund that 60% of my work day is spent on a WinXP box. As others will remark, the current lack of malware on the Mac platform is a real differentiator that saves me time and money, and like many of you, my time is pretty valuable. I hope Anand will continue to explore the OSX experience and share his findings...it's great to have viable alternatives to what comes from Redmond.