fazaal24
03-04-2007, 10:21 AM
In the online technology forums, there is perhaps no greater battle than the one that inevitably ensues when tech geeks get together to decide which is better, Macs or PCs. A close second to that battle, however, is which is the better web browser.
On the Mac side, it essentially comes down to Firefox vs. Safari (yes, I know there are others, but let’s be realistic). The main arguments most people use in defending or criticizing a browser are 1) its ability to accurately render a page, and 2) the speed at which it does so. For the most part, I do not notice a big difference in the page rendering accuracy between Firefox and Safari. Most sites I go to, including banking sites, work just fine in both. I’m sure there are exceptions, but for 95% of my surfing, it hasn’t been an issue. As for speed, well both browsers perform very snappy on both my home and work machines thanks to high speed broadband connections, and while one may render certain pages faster than the other, it has never been noticeable enough to bother me. But what I have noticed (and what made me write this article) is there are 2 ways to look at speed when talking about web browsers.
Redefining “speed”
While how fast a browser can render a web page is certainly an important weapon in the browser war arguments, the difference is usually a matter of seconds at the most. To my mind, a more important measure of speed is how a browser affects the overall speed of your SYSTEM.
http://www.macenstein.com/images/safari_slow.jpg
I noticed this quite by accident the other day while rendering out an After Effects animation I had done. I had made a spelling change in one of the graphics, and re-rendered a composition I had rendered the day before. When it was finished, I noticed in the Render Queue that it had taken 15 minutes longer to render than it had the day before. This seemed odd to me, as like I said, all I had done was changed the spelling of one word in the animation.
So I began to think why this would be. I had not restarted the computer since the day before, nothing had changed hardware wise. The only thing different was that I had been surfing the web a bit while the render was going on that day, where the day before I had not. “Surely surfing the web on a mulit-processor machine shouldn’t add 15 minutes to a render”, I thought. Well, yes it does actually, if you’re using Safari.
READ FULL STORY (http://macenstein.com/default/archives/540)
On the Mac side, it essentially comes down to Firefox vs. Safari (yes, I know there are others, but let’s be realistic). The main arguments most people use in defending or criticizing a browser are 1) its ability to accurately render a page, and 2) the speed at which it does so. For the most part, I do not notice a big difference in the page rendering accuracy between Firefox and Safari. Most sites I go to, including banking sites, work just fine in both. I’m sure there are exceptions, but for 95% of my surfing, it hasn’t been an issue. As for speed, well both browsers perform very snappy on both my home and work machines thanks to high speed broadband connections, and while one may render certain pages faster than the other, it has never been noticeable enough to bother me. But what I have noticed (and what made me write this article) is there are 2 ways to look at speed when talking about web browsers.
Redefining “speed”
While how fast a browser can render a web page is certainly an important weapon in the browser war arguments, the difference is usually a matter of seconds at the most. To my mind, a more important measure of speed is how a browser affects the overall speed of your SYSTEM.
http://www.macenstein.com/images/safari_slow.jpg
I noticed this quite by accident the other day while rendering out an After Effects animation I had done. I had made a spelling change in one of the graphics, and re-rendered a composition I had rendered the day before. When it was finished, I noticed in the Render Queue that it had taken 15 minutes longer to render than it had the day before. This seemed odd to me, as like I said, all I had done was changed the spelling of one word in the animation.
So I began to think why this would be. I had not restarted the computer since the day before, nothing had changed hardware wise. The only thing different was that I had been surfing the web a bit while the render was going on that day, where the day before I had not. “Surely surfing the web on a mulit-processor machine shouldn’t add 15 minutes to a render”, I thought. Well, yes it does actually, if you’re using Safari.
READ FULL STORY (http://macenstein.com/default/archives/540)