I use a Mac at home (Powerbook G4 1.5Ghz) and a Windows machine at work (Win2K P4). I have to say in my experience the Windows machine is a hands-down winner for web browsing. I find web browsing on the Mac (in firefox, safari, camino, opera) is

- overall slow in response, especially when typing and when switching tabs
- clunky and 'unsmooth' at scrolling pages
- hard work when you have heaps of tabs open

And no, I don't have to have heaps of tabs/apps open - these issues occur all the time (I only have Firefox running with 3 tabs now).

On Windows I find IE and Firefox faster, smoother, more responsive and overall a less frustrating/painful web browsing experience than on the Mac. It makes it difficult considering the web forms a large part of my work.

Does anyone have similar experiences or remedies for this? Will it get better when i get an Intel Mac?

There is no science to this, but my 12" powerbook was slower at web than the Blackbook I use now!

The science equates to what isp you are using, what the processor speed is capable of, how much RAM U have... should i go on?

It's a pity IE dev for mac stopped at v5.5.

Firefox is a croc of shite on both platforms IMHO.

Safari is actually pretty good, and lightning fast with tabs and such - your computer's grunt is what sucks, don't blame safari.

IE for PC is full of holes, malware, vulnerabilities, annoying shit etc, but is the quickest browser i've ever used.

Why don't you go back to the lightning fast speeds of Mac OS 7 or 8 or 9 (which your computer was built for), and use either IE5 or Netscape.

Both will be much quicker.

This is different from my experience. In my experience even my 1.33Ghz Powerbook used to flatten the P4 3.2ghz I used to use at work for browsing.

My Macbook also flattens the Centrino I currently use but that's not very surprising.

Maybe there's something peculiar in your setup.

Are you using the powerbook with a mouse or the trackpad?

I know i love using the net on my blackbook and even the eMac but i'll admit that on my emac it does sometimes perform a bit slowly.

I say on an older mac like that forget about firefox and opera and just use Safari, FF and Opera have a lot of new features these days which you don't really need that use precious system resources so i use opera on my pc and macbook but Safari on the emac.

The system is a Powerbook 12" 1.5Ghz 1.25GB RAM (Rev D purchased in 2005). Im using it with a wireless mouse, BT keyboard and spanned to a 20" monitor.

It's a shame cos it'll have to be the only significant complaint I have about using my Mac - mainly cos it impacts on my eficciency to work.

Anyway, I'll revert back to Safari a bit more to see if its better.

Let us know how you go.

Well, I use an iMac combo drive (bought back in in 2002), PowerPCG4, 700 MHz and only 512 MB of RAM, and I find both Safari and Firefox equally fast, and both just as good as IE Explorer on the PCs at the National Library here in Canberra. This is not my only standard of comparison, as friends who have used my computer tell me that it is just fast as anything they have used at their workplace. It may be mostly a matter of the ISP and the connection; I'm pretty pleased with Transact cable.

Rob in Canberra - enjoying the cool evening after a little thunderstorm

Speed's never been an issue for me, but Firefox running on my G4/500 (with OSX 10.3.9) is just as responsive (ie, only moderately sluggish) as Firefox is on my 2 GHz Athlon based Windows XP box. But! Firefox on the little 1 GHz Pentium III machine that's running Windows 2000 is faster than both of them.

And, IE6 on the Athlon is only marginally faster than Firefox, but on the P3 2k box it is very fast. Funnily enough, the fastest Mac browser I have is Wamcom Mozilla, which I run inside Classic, and it's faster than both Firefox and Safari. Camino & Opera just bog my machines down to the point of un-usability.

It's not so much the platform nor browser that's slowing you down, it is the operating system and all its associated baggage.


B.

I'm happy using Firefox on a PC (2.6Ghz Athlon, 1GB RAM) and Safari on a Mac (most often a G3 450Mhz Pismo with 512MB RAM) - and the notebook always wins out, partly because it's such a nice machine to use, and Safari is just as fast as the PC, except scrolling.

I'm surprised that browsing the web on a Mac deters you from using it. The Quartz engine underlying OS X does definately cause scrolling and resizing to be slower than that of a PC, but the other benefits - particularly a lack of spyware/malware that results from casual internet use, and the benefits of OS X - far outweigh the disadvantages with performance.

JB

BRains you're absolutely right as usual.

That's what I was trying to say to you before - its actually OSX that's slowing you down not safari.

OSX is built with all kinds of features and bells and whistles and other such bullshit but at the expense of computing power and noticeable speed and responsiveness.

XP is the same over 2000 - flashier but way slower.

Vista will be the same over XP - flashier but way slower.

The solution is get a top of the line, lightning fast computer (by comparison to what you've got now), to satisfy these OS's hunger (OSX anyway).

Your computer was not built for OSX, and will run it but at the expense of speed /responsiveness. The place you've noticed this happens to be in safari.

You can get an older computer to run a new OS (e.g. OSX) by giving it heaps and heaps and heaps of ram but this will only solve the problem up to a point.

If you load it up with RAM, it's your frontside bus speed that's limiting you anyway.

SO - FOR YOU - either go back to OS 8.5 and enjoy speedy browsing, or put up with the downside of being able to run OSX (that is, put up with slowness and blame OSX for being too demanding), or get a quicker computer (and secretly start to hate OSX/Apple for making you need a quicker one).

Don't hate apple though, MS does it too (2000/xp/vista)

No, doesn't deter me ... it just makes things a little frustrating when im trying to work. Yep, I strongly agree with the benefits you mention. Another is that web pages tend to look nicer on Mac browsers, which comes back to the Quartz rendering also.

LOL... I started with 10.4 so I ain't taking two giant steps back to 8.4! In any case I agree with your point and have long held the belief that a hardware developer could never build a machine that couldn't get bogged down by the latest OS.

Having said that, I will be getting a Macbook next month, which is made for 10.4 but will probably get bogged down by 10.5. So will I be back to square one?!

Are you serious? His PowerBook G4 IS built for OSX. It won't run OS 8, 9 or any other pre OSX iterations. It will however run pre-OSX applications slowly and clunkilly in Classic.

I find that is you have MANY MANY MANY bookmarks all in catagories and sub catagories then ..well Safari becomes worthless for browsing..