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Rumored Future of Chimera

Sorry if I implied that Chimera was horrible, I was just REALLY mad at it today because it was conflicting with OmniWeb and it crashed all the time! I think Chimera will NEVER get a full feature set because already you can see the developers are not as working on it as hard like they used to. I am all for OmniWeb, Its got TONS of features and is getting pretty quick.

P.S. Alphatech, The people that made chimera released it because they might of wanted to get other peoples opinions/suggestions/comments on it before it reached version 1.0, notice that it is currently at .2.X ;) I understand why you don't like Chimera though!
 
Crap

I downloaded Chimera and it was really good looking at fast, but I could not get the bloody thing to stay on my machine. Everything would become different and it wouldn't stay downloaded. Whatever, I am happy with Internet Explorer.
 
actually development has been pretty feverishly high for chimera lately, its just that no one had the resources to create a build, and hyatt usually does the versioning.
 
Originally posted by icetraxxg5
Sorry if I implied that Chimera was horrible, I was just REALLY mad at it today because it was conflicting with OmniWeb and it crashed all the time! I think Chimera will NEVER get a full feature set because already you can see the developers are not as working on it as hard like they used to. I am all for OmniWeb, Its got TONS of features and is getting pretty quick.
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yeah this release has to be the least stable its ever been. people on the mailing list are going nuts. kinda how development works, as feature sets come in things get buggy and take longer to debug.

as far as the development, its actually accelerating. more people are working on it now. problem is we are losing dave for a couple months, so i dont expect much until he gets back.

omniweb is getting very impressive. i am in so much need of that spellchecker too. if it had tabs, i jump the mozilla ship in a second.

with antialiasing in mozilla and a chimera skin applied, i think mozilla is a tough customer to beat. if anyone can do it its the omnigroup. they are amazing. omnigraffle has officially unseated adium in my book as the best osx application. just wish i had reason to use it more often, but when i do its a pleasure.
 
Originally posted by sjs
Mozilla has nothing unique, its not faster than OW and its UGLY!
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Just not so.

Check the benchmarks. Mozilla is faster. Not opinion, but well-demonstrated. And while tabs are not unique to it, they become difficult to give up.

OW is certainly pretty. The Quartz AA and Aqua icons are great. But do you really think this is ugly? (Mozilla with the Chimera skin)
 

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I sorta just said Mozilla was ugly to get AL riled but he seems to be taking his medication properly now and nothing can ruffle his feathers.

You are so right about TABS... I sometimes use Chimera just for that feature.

I hate to add this, but there is no browser in Macdom that runs as well as IE on a PC.

Hopefully Apple will fix that with OS 10.2 and some time for OW and others to develop.

BTW - what benchmarks show Mozilla to be faster?
 
Funny

That was funny. Sorry I spoiled your fun, but I take credit (rightly or wrongly) for turning AL on to Mozilla. He used to be a big OW booster. Remember this thread from January?

Anyway, the whole sad truth about the lack of a *great* OS X browser is really a drag. It spurred AL's rant back in January, and remains true 4 months later. Hopefully it will change before the end of the year.

One piece of good news from that old thread, though--look at how many people are using browsers other than IE. To some degree I think this reflects the competitors' improvement, but I think it also shows that people on this forum are willing to try new things.

Chris
 
wow, that was a great trip back in time chmorely. i especially like this quote from me:

i havent spent a lot of time exploring it yet (havent even looked at the tabs everyone is raving about... could someone explain the benefits of these to me?)
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laughed out loud when i saw it.


it was also neat to see the thread that introduced all of us to chimera. looks like that happened 2/21.

that was also back when alpha was a really cool guy.

boy have times changed.

pretty nice to see that most people have switched away from ie in the 5 months time between now and then. nice to see people exploring other possibilities. thats what i like about mac people, they are not afraid to go and try new things. woudl any of us know there was something wrong with windows if we never used a mac? wed just assume that that is the way computers were.


tabs - hahaha, sorry that quote still gets me.
 
Ok, i've been using chimera .2.8 for a couple of days now, and my opinion of this build has changed somewhat. I think it's crap. It's been unexpectedly crashing on me every half hour or so, i can't copy links, the page jumps around when i use the space-bar whilst typing responses on macrumors... the list goes on. What the heck have they done to what was looking to become a great browser???

I'm going back to ie and omniweb for the time being, until the next build of chimera is released. I thought it could only get better. I was wrong.
 
britboy: the crashing and what not has been tracked down, and they tell us the next build (.3) already fixes it. so dont get too discouraged. often one lil code error can screw everything up. dont the big disaster some make it out to be. this is the nature of development, as new fetaures come in so do new bugs, but they get squashed in no time... no need to worry.

o and the page jumping around — crazy isnt it, been like that for awhile. hope they take care of this one.
 
I'm not by any means giving up on chimera. Far from it. I merely find it bemusing that a later build can function worse than previous ones. Yes, i know that that's the nature of development.... i just wish it wasn't. A fix has been released already? That was quick :)

I just find some thing frustrating at times... you know?
 
totally understand.

one of the crashes that can be easily reproduced is the following:

open chimera.

close window.

click finder dock icon.

click chimera dock icon.

command-n

=crash

doesnt get much more annoying than that.

and the conflict with omniweb is really odd. dont know if they fixed that too.

but things seem to be moving quickly again, and there is a great discussion on HIG in the list, that makes me think we might see some great HIG changes — finally.

ive been talking to mike about it and he has been very cool. hes forwarding stuff to dave.

i guess thats one of the things that bug me about people who make comments like alpha did, they react violently and negatively instead of trying to help. its open source, the developers need teh feedback. if you find errors with frame and you REALLy feel its important then let them know and do so in a constructive manner. they are pretty cool about it. and it makes you feel good to know the peope who make the product heard you and are using your feedback. — ok nuf with my rant.

this is a very unstable build. but im hoping that since we are going to .3 instead of .29 it might be a big update (a fellow can hope right?)
 
i like this quote from dave he posted on the list:

Exactly.

Beta software means that the user should not expect anything to work.

Programming an application is kinda like working with a beanbag. When you
push at one spot, another spot pokes out. And often changes you make at one
spot will affect another place that you never thought would be affected.

This is the nature of beta software.

But submitting reproducible bugs is essential. If it isn't reproducible
then it isn't a bug. And even if you think someone else has mentioned it,
still submit it. That will give the developers an idea of the severity and
how many people are affected. Then they can focus on the 'most popular'
bugs first.

Cheers,
David
Click to expand...

and from mike:
there was a refcount problem with the security images in 028. my fix should fix a lot of the random crashes.

it'll be in the next spin we release.
Click to expand...
 
Originally posted by AmbitiousLemon
i like this quote from dave he posted on the list:
and from mike:
Click to expand...


Sounds pretty good. I'll be looking forward to the next release. I bet they'll have been inundated with bug reports this time round :p

Are you in contact with the developers regularly AL?
 
:) those arent personal ccommunications. they are emails from the listserve. mike and i have been emailing back and forth a little bit but for the most part im just pulling all this stuff from the list. its all archived, and a lot of it is also on the chimera board.
 
Originally posted by chmorley

Just not so.

Check the benchmarks. Mozilla is faster. Not opinion, but well-demonstrated. And while tabs are not unique to it, they become difficult to give up.

OW is certainly pretty. The Quartz AA and Aqua icons are great. But do you really think this is ugly? (Mozilla with the Chimera skin)
Click to expand...

Umm... how did you get the Chimera skin onto Mozilla? I would LOVE to have that!
 
Originally posted by AmbitiousLemon
http://140.107.24.64/mozilla/navzilla/

(much snappier too )
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Thanks. It makes Mozilla look a LOT better than that %@#* Modern interface. Talk about windows-ugly...

Also, another link on the page took me to a site with Pinstripe, also nice on Mozilla.

As for Chimera, I think it has a LOT potential to be a great Mac browser, but 0.2.8 is still pretty early.
 
Trying new things...

Whether you like Mozilla or not, it's interesting that so few PC users actually even try it. Some might argue that that's because they don't need to because IE is complete for Windows. Besides, using anything other than IE as the default browser caused some problems (and I believe it still does). Still, I'd like to think it's that they simply aren't into trying new things. I believe this is something that sets Mac users apart.

Here are the latest numbers for downloads at VersionTracker.com

Mac OS X
Downloads version 1.0: 14,408
Downloads all versions: 164,049

Windows
Downloads version 1.0: 676
Downloads all versions: 3,903

Especially impressive when you consider how many more Windows than Mac users there are.

Chris

p.s., as far as the "Rumored Future of Chimera", look for a big speed increase. With 10.1.5, they can achieve anti-aliasing in a more efficient way. So now the 45% speed hit they took when they added AA has been reduced to about 5%. Pretty cool, eh?
 
Just a quick comment.

As far as Versiontracker goes I'd like to see what sort of traffic they get in general. I'd venture to say that they receive a whole lot more traffic from Mac users than Windows users. Windows people seem to just go to Cnet cause that's what they are used to.

I'm gonna head over to cnet to check the stats there on Mozilla 1.0 I'll post the data here.
 
Cnet's Download.com

Windows: 3,014
OS X: 176
OS 8/9.x: 93
Linux: 19

Well at least the Windows traffic thing held up.

I'm actually surprised there weren't bigger numbers.
 
how many of you actually download THROUGH these kind of site though? although i would agree few pc users would try mozilla, i still think these numbers dont mean much. i think most people just go to www.mozilla.org so we would have to go there for real numbers.
 
Chimera has gone 0.3!

What's new:

The smooth text implementation now relies on new 10.1.5 features. It is now only 5% slower than the unsmoothed text, and about 30% faster than the smooth text feature in 0.2.8. You'll find that most operations (typing in text fields, resizing of windows, scrolling) are now much faster as well.

The build is much smaller because of a change in build process. This makes page loads a bit faster.

You can now edit bookmarks.

Many crash fixes. :) This build is much more stable than 0.2.8.
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Brilliant! Now i can ditch ie again, and go back to the navigator i so grew to love :)
 
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