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Yesterday. AppMac announced three new Web browsers, which you can read about in an accompanying news story today. All three are based on the Mozilla/Netscape Gecko browser engine, as is the open source Chimera browser.

However, unlike Mozilla/Netscape/Chimera, the new AppMac browsers are commercial software, selling for $29.00, and rather than competing in the general-purpose browser market, they are targeted at special uses.

The wDesk browser is designed as a secure browser for use in business and institutional offices, and features password-protected preferences that can be configured to block access to porn, gaming, travel, or other types of specified sites, and software downloads are disabled. This is really a variation on the content control used in kids' browsers like AppMac's companion wKids product, and it may appeal to office administrators concerned about employees doing non-work related Web browsing surfing on company time.

I decided to download wDesk and take a look. It's a 13 + MB download, and will run as a free demo for one hour, after which it must be quit and restarted.

wDesk package requires you to run an installer, which took about 4-5 minutes, and as is typical of Gecko-based browsers, the application launch is somewhat slow.

However, once up and running, wDesk presented me with one of the cleanest and most attractive browser interface as I've encountered -- in fact I think it is the prettiest browser I've used with the possible exception of OmniWeb. I wish Apple had gone this route with Safari, instead of the ugly "brushed metal" theme and angular, busy, small buttons, etc..Safari has its virtues, but beauty is not one of them, at least in the eye of this beholder.

Back to wDesk. Performance-wise, it didn't seem quite as fast as Mozilla or Chimera, although I didn't run any timed comparisons. However, it's not much slower, if any. My predominant impression was one of silky smoothness and refinement, another area where Safari fell short, and Mozilla/Netscape/Chimera have their off moments. For example, wDesk loaded the National Post pages nicely and scrolled through them smoother and faster than Mozilla or Chimera do. Text rendering is also attractive.

An email button in the button bar takes you to the Yahoo! Webmail page by default, and you can also disable pop-up ads.

However, pretty and polished though it is, wDesk has some significant missing features and functions beyond the intentional disabled areas. A biggie in my books is the lack of a save function for Web pages, which I think is carrying no downloads a bit to extremes. Also missing is the tabbed browsing featured in the other Gecko browsers (and soon Safari, rumor has it).

wDesk browser windows also don't support windowshading with Windowshade X, nor does this browser support drag & drop from my text editor to the Applelinks cgi news posting form. However, it does retain capitalization in TypeIt4Me macros entered in text fields, which Mozilla and Netscape don't.

When you hide wDesk with a Webpage window open, upon displaying the application again, one has returned to the AppMac homepage. I'm not sure whether this is a bug or intentional. I got one unexpected quit during my 1.5 hour test drive, although my OS X memory was pretty much maxed out at the time, which may have contributed to that.

wDesk turned out to be a bit of a Memory Hog -- slurping up 54MB+ memory after just one half hour open.

The App Mac folks say they are evaluating the KDE-based Safari browser technology from Apple, and a future update or new version of wDesk will perhaps someday use this engine but not soon. They note that Apple's HTML engine is not finished, and that at present they think the Gecko engine is better today for rendering quality of HTML web pages and compatibility of all web sites. I agree.

wDesk is a nice effort, but it needs more work. To be fair, AppMac is billing it as a "new product" rather than a final version. I love the look and feel, but for me and for most general browser users, the lack of software download capability would preclude this product as an everyday browser. However, for its intended market, the content control features could render wDesk a very attractive ofice browser. Are the security features compelling enough to justify the hefty $59 price in a world of freeware Web browsers? That remains to be seen.

Main Features Of wDesk Browser 1.0

• Mac OS X stability (UNIX)
• wDesk uses the Netscape 7 engine (also named gecko)
• Function to enable or disable the URL Field
• Function to secure access to preferences with a password
• Function to manage home page (local or on the internet)
• Function to manage bookmarks
• Function to manage authorized URLs or don't authorize URLs
• Interface designed for office users.
• Manage functions of toolbar
• Can block games, travel sites and X rated web sites.
• Adninistrator can manage the list of authorized web sites.
• Option to personalize navigation toolbar
• wDesk disables the download function. You can't download software with wDesk.
• You can also disable pop-ups.

wDesk supports Flash, QuickTime, Java, JavaScript, https, PDF and TabView

To read Acrobat PDF Files inside wDesk you need to install this PDF Reader Plug-in. You can found it a this address : http://www.versiontracker.com/moreinfo.fcgi?id=16527

System Requirements
• wDesk works on all versions of Mac OS X but Mac OS X 10.2.3 or later version is recommanded for better stability and better performances. You also need to install the more recent version of Flash Plug-in for better stability.

wDesk works in English, French, German and Spanish.

wDesk is demoware. You can try wDesk Browser one hour. After this delay, wDesk quits. You need to relaunch it to test again. Password for access to preferences is not managed in trial mode.

For more information, visit:
http://www.appmac.com

Memory usage in Mac OS X

From Bill Chin

Hi,

I have been following your Mac OS X memory usage saga and I think there is a basic philosophical difference at work here. You seem to be trying to avoid all page-outs... while that is certainly a noble attempt, a virtual memory system cannot bend reality. The goal of a virtual memory system is to try to keep as many memory pages (memory in Mac OS X is divided up into 4k pieces called pages) your system needs right now in real system RAM, while keeping at least a few free pages ready for new requests. Ideally, it will keep your working set - the set of memory that your system is using right now - in system RAM. Anything else it can fit into system RAM is great, but it will page-out anything that doesn't fit. Hopefully, that means that you can have all those applications open and the system dynamically adjusts to what you are currently doing. As you change what you are working on and therefore changing your working set, the virtual memory system has to page-in and page-out if your new working set isn't in system RAM.

The page-in and page-out are pretty well optimized - it should be faster than tossing the contents of memory and re-creating it. In Mac OS 9, with its fixed memory partitions (for the most part), applications dealt with maintaining the working set themselves. When Mac OS 9 applications approached the memory limits allocated to it, it may page out or just give up. That means applications could not easily take advantage of additional system RAM if you have it. That also means that you had to manually deal with memory allocation by quitting applications when your working set hit the limit of system RAM (with Mac OS 9's VM turned off) and setting and resetting the preallocated limit. So if you have 20 applications you use regularly under Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X and the ideal working set is larger than system RAM, here are some of the effects. In Mac OS 9, you have to pre-allocate memory, so you had to guess beforehand the memory limits of that application. If that application really needs to deal with more memory, it would have to page-in/page-out for itself or just tell you that it can't do it. That means even if you have 1 gigabyte of RAM, but you only allocated 64 megabytes to Mozilla, it would have to page-in/page-out even there was plenty of system RAM. Therefore, many people would pre-allocate larger amounts which causes you to run into another problem - when amount of pre-allocation hits the limit of system RAM. Then people have to manually close applications, manually adjusting the current working set. Plus, just because your system ran out of system RAM doesn't mean all that RAM is in use - remember the larger pre-allocation per application? In Mac OS X, the idea is that all of this is automatic - the applications ask the RAM it needs, and Mac OS X deals with the adjusting the contents of RAM to the current working set. That involves page-ins and page-outs. Mac OS 9 does have a virtual memory system that can help, but it is slower and less capable than the one in Mac OS X.

The perceived difference is that under Mac OS 9, the time of the adjustment of the working set was often better defined. Most of this adjustment is done when you quit an application or launch an application. If you ran out of memory, you quit an application which frees memory... and when you have free memory to use an application, you launched it. The adjustment of the working set mostly during application launch and termination. Therefore users attuned to the way Mac OS 9 works have learned to wait during application launches and quits and to deal with the out-of-memory messages that involve closing documents or worse, quitting the application, resetting the memory limit, and re-launching. Users often discount this time. In Mac OS X, the adjustment can happen at any time and sometimes all the time. This spreads out the time spent on adjusting the working set, which may also make the system "feel" slower. The adjustment may also happen at awkward times. Which one is actually faster? In most cases and with all other factors being equal, Mac OS X should be faster when one sums all the work and time involved. However, there will be cases where Mac OS X's VM system won't work as well. Also, the speed of accessing the virtual memory storage and often the concurrency of access can dramatically affect your real and perceived performance. Therefore laptop users are going to be more dramatically affected since the hard drives are typically slow and may involve more system overhead. This is why putting your swap files onto a separate spindle (another hard drive) can provide performance benefits.

There are additional issues with Mac OS X's VM system that can be further optimized. For example, most web browsers keep a cache of things that make up the web pages you visit. In Mac OS 9, it was pretty clear how much a web browser's cache it can keep in system RAM - whatever it can keep within the pre-allocated memory limit. So the web browser is managing the cache memory itself. In Mac OS X, there doesn't have to be such a hard set memory limit. Instead, one can flush the cache based on time - if you haven't needed those contents in say, 10 minutes, then get rid of it. That also means that if you needed to use 512 megabytes within those 10 minutes, then fine - virtual memory system will take care dealing with that working set. In Mac OS 9, the web browser will have to juggle that working set within its pre-defined memory limit page-in or out as necessary. If it had a problem doing that, well... that is one of the reasons why heavy surfing under Mac OS 9 is often a source of stability problems. Unfortunately in Mac OS X, right now there is not a good way for an application to tell the virtual memory system that hey... these pages of memory are nice to keep around, but if you need them, you can have them. Whereas the dynamic file system cache can give up pages of memory when the system needs them for something else, an application cannot mark memory as dispensable. Well, Mach 3.0 does provide this facility - custom memory pagers, but that feature isn't available under Mac OS X (yet) and certainly no current applications are written to support it. As a result, all the memory pages of a web browser's cache, which can grow to immense proportions, are considered as indispensable your documents and may be paged-out. Application lean on the side of using more virtual memory rather than less so that that you can gain speed if the system RAM is available, but you may slow down at unexpected times when there isn't enough system RAM.

Finally, it is hard to come up with a single number that represents memory usage of an application in Mac OS X. Whatever single number you use is wrong. That's because there are differences between how much memory an application has requested, how much the system has actually allocated to it, how much it currently is using on it own, and how much is shared with other applications. The last one is the hardest to resolve into a single number.

This was certainly longer than I had expected, but it all boils down to this - manual versus automatic control. Often the system can do a better job of managing working set of memory within system RAM, providing better performance and a better user experience. However, this may cause a perceived slow down at certain times and causes the system experience to be different for Mac OS 9 users. It is easier to overlook performance gains and harder to overlook a performance loss, even when the gain is larger than the loss.

..Bill Chin
Managing Director, m Dimension Technology

Hi Bill;

Thanks for the musings on memory use. You're probably right about it being partly a philosophical issue.

I'm coming to the conclusion that it is indeed unrealistic to try and avoid pageouts in OS X given may 640 MB of RAM and the way I use my computer. However, the performance degradation once free RAM drops below 50 MB is substantial and frustrating, at least on a 500 MHz G3.

The thing is, I have never come close to running out of RAM in OS 9 since I upgraded to 640 MB -- with Virtual memory on or off. I just allocate a generous RAM partition to each application, and still have plenty left over. I can;t recall the last time an application other than dictation software ran out of memory on me in OS 9.

Which makes this issue just another nuance in the old OS X- OS9 dialectic I guess. I love many aspects of working in OS X, but the performance hit maqkes me grind my teeth.

Charles

Memory

From David Meyer

Charles,

It very much seems like you are your own worst enemy when it comes to memory.
• you have multiple browsers opn
- each with multiple windows
• you have multiple email clients open
• you leave programs open - On The Desktop - rather than closing them

So you want to know where your memory has gone to? There are certainly times when you need THREE browsers open, but might you not settle for ONE except when you are running tests? Same for email clients! As for multiple windows, just how many do you think you really NEED? Put things away when you are not working on them! A couple of browser windows might be needed on a project, but several on each of several browsers? Justify it. No. Not to ME! Each time you decide to do the easy thing, justify to yourself that it's also the RIGHT thing. When you eventually get around to closing down, re-justify to yourself each of the windows you had to close - did you REALLY need to leave it open? It won't take long before your memory problems ease or you decide to live with them.

Dave Meyer

Hi Dave;

As Bill observed above, this is partly a philosophical issue, but for me it's also a functiuonal one. I use three browsers because they respectively do certain tasks better, and it's more efficient to work that way. I also have the text based browser WannaBe open all the time, so that makes four. ;-)

I keep browser windows open because I'm doing production and research work on a 26,400 dialup connection, and it takes a lot of time to keep downloading Web pages that I need to access repeatedly through such a slow pipeline.

I've actually cut down on the number of email clients I keep open -- again because some are better suited to certain things than others -- eg: Nisus Emails' quick send function vs, Eudora's versatility and fast search engine. I also have some 20 email accounts, and using two clients (plus POPMonitor foe spam filtering) is an organizational and logistics aid.

I also keep sometimes more than a dozen windows open in Tex-Edit plus because I am always working on multiple projects simultaneously, and I HATE waiting for applications and documents to open.

However, the point is that I've been working this way for years in OS 9, and have experienced no significant downside in performance or stability, even on a 233 MHz WallStreet with just 192 MB of RAM. I am willing to alter my way of doing things if there is a performance/convenience/efficiency improvement, but not the obverse.

Running with fewer applications/documents/windows open would compromise my efficiency and substantially lengthen my workday, as well as increasing my bloodpressure. My phiolosophical perspective is that the computer should work for me, not me having to conform to the computer's limitations. That paradigm applies much better in OS 9 than OS X it seems.

Charles

MUG Clues

From Anon

Hi Charles,

Well, you're getting closer to your needed answers by beginning to use MUG with MS. However, you are still overlooking some things and, I think, drawing wrong conclusions, still.

One, be sure to not ignore the other two tabs in MUG for 'Other User Processes' and 'System Processes'. As I mentioned in my previous note, you will find two heavy users here; 'SystemUIServer' and 'WindowServer'. These are most likely the services that are actually putting you over the top and demanding pageouts. You would probably be better off displaying MUG in List View; this will consolidate all processes into one window.

Two, as I also noted earlier, just because these are OS X processes, does not mean they are to blame for their heavy and/or unreleased memory; many applications use these services simply to draw their windows and cache menu items and such. Given that you both open and leave open a lot of windows, and that one or more of these applications may not be using these services properly, you are destined to use your physical RAM up and start pageouts.

The problem is, you still seem to conclude that this is an OS X problem (Apple's), when you say, "...but if I have to keep quitting programs to silence the pageout alarm and/or logout/login to clear the memory, these advantages are largely negated...", and not the fault of the poor or faulty programming of the application causing it.

To that issue, first of all, you do not have to listen to MS if you choose not to; it is merely a tool to help you track *possible* problems and when and how they begin. Secondly, instead of concluding that OS X bites and it's demanding you buy RAM you wouldn't need in OS 9, I suggest you continue to investigate the real source of the unreleased memory, and either stop using the application(s) at fault, work with the programmer to fix the problem, or learn to live with them and their problems and stop whining about OS X. I further suggest this whole conclusionary [sic] leap on your part demonstrates the bias against OS X you claim you don't have, but that's another argument for another day. ;-)

Finally, for now, just because you are starting to see pageouts, does not mean that you have a problem. You have previously lamented not the actual pageouts (which you were completely unaware of prior to using MS), but that your system eventually slowed to a crawl and became unusable. In today's column, you made no mention of degraded performance; only that you started to hear lots of pageout alerts. The question remains as to how much longer you might have been able to run, without quitting any applications to avoid pageouts, before your overall performance actually suffered. This is the answer we need to get, in order to then, hopefully, find the real memory pig or, quite possibly, a CPU pig that is the root cause of the problem.

I stress again that OS X itself is very, very, very unlikely to be the blame of your performance issues and perceived inefficient use of RAM; most folks go for days and weeks and longer and never see a performance slowdown as you have previously described; they also routinely generate three, five, ten, twenty or more swapfiles and are thus naturally experiencing magnitudes greater pageouts than you; the difference is that they don't have a faulty application that is jamming either the memory manager and its subsystems, or the CPU manager and its subsystems; and, if they do, they have learned to identify the culprit and simply quit and restart that single component as required.

If we can get to the point where we know which of your apps is the problem, we can write an AppleScript that will automatically quit and relaunch the app (or apps), and, with proper AS support, we can also get a list of open windows, positions and states before the quit command and automate reopening them all so you don't have to reassemble your workspace manually each time. Better, again, to either update or replace such a bad app, but some things are hard to live without or find suitable replacements.

Cheers
Anon

Hi Anon;

I was aware of the other tabs. The WindowServer was using 51 MB the last tiime I looked. Everything else was nickels and dimes, although I suppose it adds up to a substantial chunk cumulatively.

I am getting substantially degraded performance when the free memory diminished to less tha 50 MB, especially with dictation software, window switching (particularly between native and Classic apps), etc.

I continue to maintain that my observations do not denote bias, although I'll cop to perhaps philosophical dissonance (viz: letters above). ;-)

Seriously, I don;t think OS X "bites." I like OS X and want to use OS X, and am working most of the time in OS X these days. However, as discussed in the recent "Justifying OS X" thread on MacInTouch, it is difficult in some respects to make a convincing case for using OS X instead of OS 9 on the basis of efficiency. It is likely not the case for many users, especially if they were plagued by frequent crashing in OS 9 (I never have been), but for me, for what I do and the way I work, I take a roughly 20 percent penalty in speed (calculated on the average amount of time it takes me to get through a morning of Applelinks news production using either OS respectively). This is NOT because I have trouble getting used to "new things" or am unfamiliar with OS X. I am just as intuitively at home in X nowadays as I am in Classic. It's just slower and more hassle, and objectively, I can't justify working in X in practical terms (although I press on and hope for better days ahead).

Here are the main apps. I use for production.

Native:
Tex Edit Plus
Eudora 5.2
Nisus Email 1.6.1
POPMonitor
iCab
Mozilla
Safari
NotePad Deluxe
iListen or ViaVoice
Captain FTP
SpeedSearch
Kunvert

Classic:
Color It! 4.1
WannaBe

Utilities/Hacks
WindowShade X
TigerLaunch
APM Tuner

There are usually several others running as well, but that's the basic suite I keep open all the time. I use the same bunch in OS 9 with the exception of Windowshade X Kunvert, and Tigerlaunch, which are not needed, and I use Vicom FTP Client in Classic. It all works great in th old OS. My stability problems are minimal and I can go for days without restarting. Strictly speaking, I can in OS x too, but the performance deterioration is painful.

Charles

RE: FTP software for OS X

From Corey Fisher

Charles,
I am a fan/follower of your column. Keep up the good work!

Regarding FTP for OS X, I have used Panic Software's Transmit < http://www.panic.com/transmit/ > and been very pleased with it. (Panic Software are hardcore Mac-heads, too.) It comes in both 9 and X flavored.

Yours,
Corey Fisher

Hi Corey;

Thanks for reading.

Yes, Transmit is a nice FTP client. I've sampled both the OS X and Classic versions.

Charles

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

CM

Charles W. Moore

Cool Mac Gear