Snow Leopard needs to be more like Tiger

[dotdotdot]

Remember Tiger, the rock-solid Mac OS that looked as great as it performed?

Apple recognizes the fact that Leopard is slower and less stable than its predecessors, which is why Snow Leopard is all about removing bloat and making it scream. I'm very excited at this prospect, because it isn't obvious how badly Leopard needs an overhaul until you go back to Tiger, as I did last night.

After I installed Tiger from the discs that came with the PC, the first thing I noticed was how bright and inviting it was. The menu bar, with its bright white colors and aqua blue Apple and Spotlight buttons, looks so much better than Leopard's transparent, gray, depressing menu bar.

I launched Safari, and brushed metal filled the screen. I recognize why Apple got rid of brushed metal in Leopard, but what I don't understand is why it became so much darker. Brushed metal's outsides were as dark as Leopard, but as the metal got closer to the center text it became lighter and much better looking.

Not only does it look better, but it performs so much faster. I installed Office 2008, and am used to Microsoft Word taking at least 12 bounces to open. It is significantly faster in Tiger.

I miss the pinstripes that are present every time an application isn't in focus. I miss the brightness of the multiple themes, disorganized amongst the many apps and yet coherent. I miss the color, the vibrance of the OS. I miss the rock-solid performance and the speed. I miss Tiger, dislike Leopard, and hope Snow Leopard takes one step backward before going two steps forward.

 

[xUKHCx]

Firstly apple doesn't recognise that Leopard is slower than Tiger with the aims of Snow Leopard. Apple took the opportunity to consolidate all the changes that OS X has had since it inception and decided to use Leopard as the base of this and take this forward, so in this view it is actually taking the opposite view.

Also you are probably noticing artifacts of running a new install rather than an old install.

I use Tiger every now and again. To be honest 10.5.4+ is now just as stable as 10.4.x was ever for me. I find the Tiger look quite dated (pinstripes look ever so old now).

Leopard with comparable install lengths is generally more snappy then Tiger and with features such as Quicklook my workflow is actually a whole lot faster.

With the themes this is where apple needs to add more customisabilitiy for the end user.

Yes Tiger did something better but if Snow Leopard heads towards Tiger then imo it is a step backwards.

 

[mkrishnan]

Now I think I absolutely agree that Apple should focus on launch fundamentals with SL, especially considering it's not a user interface / application update but mostly an overhaul of subsystems.

On the other hand, I have to play devil's advocate here...

1) What was the dot version of Tiger when you first tried it? Tiger became stable around 10.4.4... before that, some users had very satisfactory experiences, but complaints were far from sparse.

2) It sounds like you got Tiger on a computer that shipped with Tiger. I'm guessing you upgraded to Leopard from there? Have you ever bought a Mac that had Leopard on it, or did you upgrade a computer from Tiger to Leopard? With Tiger, most of us having problems were people who upgraded from Panther to Tiger (and this was also at 10.4.0). On clean, new installs, it worked fairly well from the beginning a much larger percentage of the time (but not 100% even then).

So, you have to be careful to compare apples to apples... Expecting SL to run as cleanly on a computer where you upgrade from Leopard to SL and continue to run older software that you installed and set up using Leopard, is going to have some possibility of unpredictable behavior associated with it. This is probably always going to be true. And you have to also remember that, while Apple seems to fix its problems fairly promptly, I don't think OS X really has an excellent history of doing well on its 10.x.0 releases ever. The problems may not be as bad as Vista's launch problems, but they've been there.