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I downloaded the latest 0.9.9 build of Mozilla this week, and since my impression has been that beginning with Mozilla 0.9.8 it is now the fastest OS X browser, I thought I would test that impression objectively against the other two OS X browsers I use regularly -- iCab and OmniWeb.

Incidentally, if you're still using Netscape 6.2, your way behind the times, as that browser is based on Mozilla 0.9.4 -- five version upgrades out of date. Mozilla 0.9.8/0.9.9 is a much livelier browser than Netscape 6.2.

Back to the shootout. First: startup times.

Mozilla - 8 seconds
iCab - 3 seconds
OmniWeb - 6 seconds

iCab is the speed champion here hands-down. I had to quit and restart it three times to make sure I had an accurate clocking. Mozilla's eight seconds is very respectable performance relative to legacy OS browser startup standards, but it's definitely not the fastest here.

Just for the record, these comparison tests were performed on a 500 MHz Pismo PowerBook with 640 MHz of RAM, on a dialup Internet connection showing a 26,400 bps connection speed. The disk and memory caches of the browsers were purged before timing Web page loads.

I timed each browser respectively loading five different Web pages. Applelinks; Low End Mac; the National Post newspaper homepage; an Environment Canada weather radar image; and the Code 66 shareware home page (Znippetizer). Here's how they did:

Mozilla
Applelinks - 35 seconds
Low End Mac - 42 seconds
National Post - 56 seconds
Weather radar image - 36 seconds
Code 66 - 21 seconds

iCab
Applelinks - 35 seconds
Low End Ma c- 38.5 seconds
National Post - 1 minute, 10 seconds
Weather radar image - 28 seconds
Code 66 - 24 seconds

OmniWeb
Applelinks - 38 seconds
Low End Mac - 1 minute, 6 seconds
National post - 1 minute, 10 seconds
Weather radar image - refused to load
Code 66 - 24 seconds

Mozilla 0.9.9 was fastest loading two of the five pages, and tied for fastest with iCab on a third. Its margin of victory loading the National Post page gives it a slight overall edge, but not by as much as I had expected based on non-timed subjective impressions. In practical terms, it's a dead heat between Mozilla and iCab.

OmniWeb's speed performance was mixed. It was slowest on two of the test pages (taking nearly twice as long to load the Low End Mac Home page as iCab did); tied for second with iCab on two other pages, and refused to load the Environment Canada weather radar image at all (I quit trying after two, two-minute attempts). I like OmniWeb. It has the prettiest interface of the three browsers and some unique features such as the pop-out history drawer. I've also found it very reliable for downloads. It needs more work on speed and consistency though.

iCab is still partly hobbled by its lack of full JavaScript support, but it's a great little browser for most of the stuff I do (still my No. 1 choice in the legacy OS). I like its Download Manager best, and it handles history more gracefully than any other browser.

However, Mozilla's combination of speed, stability, and JavaScript savvy have tended to make it my first choice among OS X browsers lately. It's now good enough that there's really no excuse for using Internet Explorer.

ViaVoice

From Steve

Charles:

I have been reading your columns for a long time now. When you initally gave the good review of Viavoice, I went out and bought it. I have had many of the same problems with the microphone as you report, but I am on an iMac that does not go to sleep.

My current problem is that the Viavoice will work fine for me. I am a professional with a good speaking voice. My student speaks slowly with too many pauses between words. He has only been able to read 7% of the first story before Viavoice will not let him get past the words. It does not seem to be long or hard words, it only seems to be the amount of time that it takes him to read the word or phrase.

Setup

iMac 500, 512 MB RAM, Andrea microphone (the one bundled with Viavoice).

Do you have any other suggestions?

We tried iListen and the story reading went OK, but the actual dictation process is a disaster.

Steve Noyes
WeBCATT Technology Director

Hi Steve;

The problem that your student is having is not really a ViaVoice issue, but common to all contunuous speech engines. James Fallows of the Atlantic Monthly summed it up nicely in an excellent article on dictation software:

"You would think that the trick to making these programs work is to speak slowly and separate each word from its neighbor. In fact the recognition rate goes down if you speak in an artificial way, because the analysis of each word depends on hearing it with its neighbors. The uh sound in English, which linguists call schwa, means little on its own, but in the words pronounced "I wannuh Coke" and spelled "I want a Coke," a good system recognizes the schwa as the word "a." David Leffell is a professor at the Yale medical school who began using Dragon two years ago and now uses it for most of his writing, from e-mail to journal articles. 'I speak quickly,' he told me in a (dictated) e-mail message, 'and was delighted to discover the paradox that Dragon NaturallySpeaking actually doesn't work well with people who speak slowly. I have a colleague who has been unable to train his system because of his slower speech style.'"

Charles

Exiting ViaVoice

From Stephen J. Shepard

Hi,

I just wanted to offer you another option for exiting ViaVoice or any other non responsive program under OS X which fails to show up in the "Force Quit Applications" dialog box without restarting the system. You could easily launch the ProcessViewer application (included with OS X ,located in your Utilities folder), select the process or application and simply select "Quit Process" under the Processes menu. There are several other utilities that offer access to all running processes without launching the ProcessViewer application.

I use a menubar program called Process Wizard which very nicely lists all running processes by type and also gives the option of changing their "nice" values or killing them individually. I use it regularly to correct a bug VirtualPC seems to have where it leaves it's services running even after the program has been quit. This causes an error message to be displayed if you try to relaunch VirtualPC at a later time. The error message simply states that there is already a copy of the program running on the system. Once I quit the process I can launch VirtualPC and go about my business with no further problems.

Think of ProcessViewer as the equivalent to the Windows Task Manager under OS X and you'll soon be using it to get you out of problems you thought were unsolvable WITHOUT restarting your system.

I hope this helps,
Stephen J. Shepard

"Whenever you find you are on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect."

Hi Stephen;

Words to live by. ;-)

Thanks for the info.

Charles

Killing processes with a GUI

From Mark Abrams

Hi Charles,

Although using Terminal to list and kill processes is surprisingly fun (who knew? -- I myself use 'top -u' to find an app's process ID before killing it), Apple does provide a GUI app to do the same thing.

It's called Process Viewer, in your Utilities folder, and unlike the Force Quit dialogue box, it will list invisible processes as well as visible. Just double click on a process to end it.

best,
Mark Abrams

Cool!

I'll check it out.

Charles

OS X stability

From Dr. Rick Kirschner

I've been running my TiBook in OS X for over two and a half months now, and I never want to go back to 9.

X is beautiful, functional, and I do not have the crashing problems others are writing about here. In fact, I love the way an app can go down and the system just shrugs it off (Apps that crashed include PowerPoint, Word, and IE ...anyone see the pattern?)

I find no serious flaws in X, including Internet Connect which I use when I travel (which I do a lot), airport, ethernet connectivity, battery power, sleep, etc. Learning to use X isn't that much of a challenge either. It is remarkably familiar, and the differences are useful ones. Though I have to let go of most of the geek knowledge I learned since getting my first Mac in 1986, I'm happy to let go of it in exchange for this brilliant bit of design and engineering.

OS X RULES!

Sincerely,
Dr Rick Kirschner
Author, Speaker
http://www.talknatural.com

Hi Dr. Rick;

Delighted to hear that you're having such a satisfactory experience with OS X. Wish I could say the same!

As I have said, I'm not disposed to gratuitously finding fault, but using both OS X and OS 9 simultaneously on two different machines, as I do, does tend to highlight X's shortcomings and rough edges (as well as strengths) by comparison.

When the strengths outweigh the shortcomings, I'll switch to OS X for production, but for now, I just need toget my work done.

Charles

Re: Odyssey 71 (MacsBug)

From Jonathan Tyzack

Hi Charles,

Quote:

"With MacsBug, it is a rare occasion indeed when you can't summon the debugger console by pressing Command + Power Key. I'm surprised you had such poor luck with MacsBug in the legacy OS. I've probably used it hundreds of times over the years, and more often than not, it will kill the errant app. when I type "es" and deliver me back to the Finder, although some apps. are more stubborn than others. In that case, you just restart using the "rs" command."

Regardless, the freeze you are getting with PPP is the equivalent of a total GUI freeze in OS9 where even the MacsBug console would be of no help as you wouldn't be able to call it up. However, unlike OS9, the system will eventually recover as it isn't technically crashed, it is just doing something that requires 99%+ usage of the CPU which prevents the GUI from responding. Once it has finished doing that the system is as it was before the "freeze".

FWIW, the Internet Connect button not working is something else that is being discussed a lot in the "Getting Online" forum at the Apple.com Discussions site. I don't know if the patch will help you with that one.

Cheers,
Jonathan

• Damn, if I haven't literally just remembered about the recessed debug button on the side of the iMacs... groan!

P.S. I have a tip for you that shouldn't be ignored if you use iDisk at all. Go to VersionTracker.com and get Goliath. Use this freeware app (there is a version for both 9 and X) to connect to iDisk and you will not believe how it is possible for iDisk to be so slow in the 9 or X Finders. With Goliath, it almost feels like using a local volume (and this is on a 56k modem as well).

Apple obviously has a *lot* to do with respect to their WebDav implementation.

Hi Jonathan;

I concur that the USB keyboard may well have been a big part of the problem you were having with getting MacsBug to work. Luddite that I am, I remain unconvinced that USB input devices are as good or dependable as ADB. ADB just works better.

And yes, if one is patient, OS X does eventually sort itself out. I just detest the waiting. I could have rebooted OS 9 several times in the time it takes for OS X to regain its equilibrium.

Re; iDisk, the first order for me is to get the ^%#%$^% iTools thing installed. I've had several attempts, and even (blush) resorted to Internet Explorer in desperation. No joy. Incidentally, I'm having no problem with iTools under OS 9. Goliath sounds good, however.

Odyssey 71 - part 2

From Jonathan Tyzack

Hi Charles (again),

Having read a bit further in your letters than I had when I sent my last response, I came across this:

Quote:

"However, philosophically speaking, IMHO what is "terrible," or at least more than trivially annoying, is the necessity of having to do this stuff. I don't gainsay that you can probably work around almost any problem in OS X by resorting to Unix control, and that is great for Unix-savvy power users, but not much help for less-savvy users.

This Odyssey series is loosely themed on discussing the sort of stuff -- both cool things and aggravations -- that the average, command-line ignorant (me, for instance ;-) ) Mac user will encounter making the transition to OS X from OS 9."

You are contradicting yourself. Here you complain about having to resort to UNIX control in OSX, yet you happily describe your use of the MacsBug console in previous responses and articles. Sorry, but MacsBug is just as (perhaps even more so) confusing to a "non-savvy" person as resorting to the Terminal in OSX (*and* it is also a CLI too). It seems that you are forgetting that you are evidently a savvy OS9 user who knows a lot more about the system than the average user or newbie (they would never even have heard of the MacsBug console, nevermind tried to use it... don't you think that this is as equally "terrible" about the legacy OS?). Basically, what this comes down to is the willingness of yourself to learn how to utilise the power that underlies OSX in much the same way as you obviously had to do for OS9. In this case, the equivalent for you to the MacsBug console in OSX is top and the kill command in the Terminal. However, fortunately, OSX also has a Mac-user friendly GUI app for this - ProcessViewer. Once you understand what is happening with it (which is not difficult to pick up from a minute or so of use), the act of stopping/killing rogue processes is trivial. No knowledge of UNIX is necessary (other than, perhaps, the root/system/admin etc naming conventions). I would consider that to be an improvement over OS9 and the MacsBug console. The "terrible" thing for me is that all this stuff is still necessary for end-users to find out (be it key combinations for starting with extensions off, the MacsBug console, Process Viewer, Terminal, Task Manager, or whatever) because the software (OS or applications) is not 100% bullet-proof. Sigh.

Cheers,

Jonathan

P.S. You'll find people prefer to use the Terminal to achieve the same ends as Process Viewer because it is simply faster and more flexible to do so.

Hi again Jonathan;

OK; perhaps just a wee bit of inconsistency, but MacsBug is extremely easy to use for recovering from application freezes. I've turned many tech-illiterate users on to it. Indeed, in many instances MacsBug will appear unbidden when an app. goes down. All you really need to know are two, two-letter commands (es and rs), and the Command + Power Key toggle to bring up MacsBug.

Charles

Subject OS X Process Control vs OS 9

From Steve Hunnicutt

Hi Charles --

Take a step back and reconsider this passage from your column:

However, philosophically speaking, IMHO what is "terrible," or at least more than trivially annoying, is the necessity of having to do this stuff. I don't gainsay that you can probably work around almost any problem in OS X by resorting to Unix control, and that is great for Unix-savvy power users, but not much help for less-savvy users.

This Odyssey series is loosely themed on discussing the sort of stuff -- both cool things and aggravations -- that the average, command-line ignorant (me, for instance ;-) ) Mac user will encounter making the transition to OS X from OS 9.

It is essentially a legacy OS comparison commentary, because that's where we "old Mac users" are coming from.

I find it odd that you still hold this position, considering how often you've extolled the virtues of MacsBug -- a facility just as arcane as any Unix method.

MacsBug wasn't even included with the Macintosh software bundle. You had to search it out yourself, if you even knew of its existence. All of the OS X methods for stopping unruly processes are included with the operating system!

I understand your attachment to the legacy Mac OS, but even you can appreciate how the OS X force quit feature is superior to that in OS 9 -- just as accessible to the "less-savvy" user, but it allows you to see most processes and stop them with little risk to the rest of the system, much more reliably than the legacy system (you've often recounted how reliable force quit has been for you in OS 9; I have never had such consistently good experiences and neither have most other users).

The process viewer utility affords more control, displays all processes and has a useful window interface. It is an acceptable alternative for most users that don't want to resort to the command line interface.

Then there are the command line utilities that offer other ways to accomplish the same task, although most users will never need to use them.

In this instance, I believe that OS X is far superior to OS 9, both for power users and those less savvy. :)

Steve

OK Steve;

Touche.

See my reply to Jonathan above re: MacsBug, but I can't gainsay your very well-reasoned points. ;-) Old habits die hard.

Charles

Odyssey 71 - Part 3

From Jonathan Tyzac

Erk, sorry Charles... remembered something else to tell you which should ease your pain a little if you are having to logout/in a lot.

Assuming you're using 10.1.3, if you press and hold the shift key just after hitting enter to login, it will prevent applications set to load at login from starting up thus making troubleshooting a little faster.

Cheers once again,

Jonathan

Thanks redux, Jonathan.

I'm still using 10.1.2 and pondering the mixed reports from 10.1.3 users. I downloaded the 10.1.3 upgrader a few weeks back, but haven't run it yet.

Charles

The OS X Odyssey archives may be accessed here:
http://www.applelinks.com/news/odyssey/

CM

Charles W. Moore

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