[X4U] Safari slow but what about Explorer?

[Eddie Hargreaves]

On 8/2/05 1:43 PM, Germain M. <affaires at vif.com> wrote:

> Hi again and thanks a million times for all the imput on Safari
> becoming strangely slow under Tiger 10.4.2. Many of you another
> browser, Camino, FireFox, Omniweb, Mozilla. But no one speaks of
> Explorer or Netscape. I remember Explorer being quite fast and in
> fact OK under OS 9. Any comments on Explorer or Netscape?

Internet Explorer for Mac OS 9 was a very good browser. Unfortunately, when
they ported it to OS X, it was slow and unreliable. Microsoft's agreement
with Apple to develop Office/Explorer/Outlook Express ended about that time,
so they were not required to do anything more. They continued to make Office
(since they sell that for money) but did not port Outlook Express and left
the OS X port of Explorer stagnant. Apple, unhappy with Explorer's poor
quality, eventually announced they were going to release a browser called
Safari. Not long after, Microsoft officially announced that they'd no longer
develop Explorer. Although Explorer has a number of useful features that
current browsers don't have, it's missing some features that most surfers
now find necessary, such as pop-up blocking and tabbed browsing. This is
probably why no one recommended Internet Explorer: it's a dead product. Oh,
and most Mac users hate Microsoft, so they'll bash anything with the
Microsoft name.

Netscape 6 & 7 were basically just Mozilla with a Netscape logo and some
AOL/Time Warner stuff added in. Most Mozilla users didn't want to use it
because there was no point. And whatever reason anyone had for not using
Mozilla pretty much was true for Netscape 6 & 7. I used Netscape 7 for a
while because Safari was not cutting it, but gave up eventually because of
various quirks (downloading .dmg files, etc.) Netscape 8 uses Firefox as its
core. So, again, if you use Firefox, there's probably no reason to use
Netscape 8 (although I've heard it has an IE-compatibility mode). And if you
don't like Firefox, you probably won't like Netscape 8. I haven't tried
version 8 yet because Safari 2 works well enough for me.

Eddie Hargreaves