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Chimera 0.6

Originally posted by MacBandit
I just made the switch from IE and I was about to ask about that.

Also it seems to have the speller services implemented in the address bar why not in text entry fields such as here?

Where's the page history?

The preferences seem to be really lacking. There isn't even a pref for cache size.

I've been using Chimera for 10minutes now and the speed is really nice but if there isn't a history file I will be switching back and tossing this crap.:(
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The "speller services" in the address bar are simply an autofill feature--not a service, but contained within the program. This mirrors IE, which is Carbon. Since Carbon apps cannot access services, this shows that it can all be done within the program.

There isn't a browsable history. I remember using this once or twice when I used IE, but didn't realize people considered it an essential feature. Out of curiosity, do you use it frequently? For what?

Use Chimera for a day or two. That speed you consider "nice" now will gradually make IE seem unusable. While it does some things well, it is the slowest browser available for the Mac (and maybe any platform) right now--a real drag to use.

Chris
 
Originally posted by chmorley
The "speller services" in the address bar are simply an autofill feature--not a service, but contained within the program. This mirrors IE, which is Carbon. Since Carbon apps cannot access services, this shows that it can all be done within the program.

There isn't a browsable history. I remember using this once or twice when I used IE, but didn't realize people considered it an essential feature. Out of curiosity, do you use it frequently? For what?

Use Chimera for a day or two. That speed you consider "nice" now will gradually make IE seem unusable. While it does some things well, it is the slowest browser available for the Mac (and maybe any platform) right now--a real drag to use. Also I seem to be filling in forms constantly. I'm not sure why and to not have autofill is a huge waste of time.

Chris
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The speed isn't a huge difference on my Dual/Ghz/DDR with Cable. I use history for a lot of things one of the most obviouse to me is I will be browsing and doing a lot of searching in the morning and will have to go to work before I find or absorbe the information I'm looking for. When I get home I just pop open the history tab and start where I left off. I use it multiple times a day for this and other uses.

I just found another real pain in the ass. When I click a link in my email it pops open a new window instead of a new tab or replacing the page in the existing window or tab. I can't seem to find a preference for this either.

This browser is most definitely unready for primetime. Not user friendly at all. I give everyone from her until this afternoon to find a reason for me to keep it. The speed as I said before isn't that great. The difference is maybe a half a second for most of the pages I go to.
 
Originally posted by MacBandit



The speed isn't a huge difference on my Dual/Ghz/DDR with Cable. I use history for a lot of things one of the most obviouse to me is I will be browsing and doing a lot of searching in the morning and will have to go to work before I find or absorbe the information I'm looking for. When I get home I just pop open the history tab and start where I left off. I use it multiple times a day for this and other uses.

I just found another real pain in the ass. When I click a link in my email it pops open a new window instead of a new tab or replacing the page in the existing window or tab. I can't seem to find a preference for this either.

This browser is most definitely unready for primetime. Not user friendly at all. I give everyone from her until this afternoon to find a reason for me to keep it. The speed as I said before isn't that great. The difference is maybe a half a second for most of the pages I go to.
Click to expand...

dude...its there. its in the tab prefs. Under Navigation.

The history browsing is coming in the near future. They are going to try and figure out a way to implement it in a nonobtrusive way. Being that hardly anyone uses this feature, it might be a while.

IMHO and many others, the usability is great. It doesnt bog you down with useless options. Its a browser stupid.
 
This is a great improvement even over 0.5- the Flash support now seems much more solid, the pages are lightning fast and there's an overall feeling of quality about the whole thing. It looks like an OSX browser should.
And it's FREE!
Whatever they may tell you, nothing from Microsoft comes completely free...
 
I tried out chimera for the first time last night and I must say that it has got to be the best browser I have ever used. The tabbed browsing is VERY handy. I really like this browser and its not even at 1.0 yet!!! It's only going to get better.
 
I use history for a lot of things one of the most obviouse to me is I will be browsing and doing a lot of searching in the morning and will have to go to work before I find or absorbe the information I'm looking for. When I get home I just pop open the history tab and start where I left off. I use it multiple times a day for this and other uses.

I just found another real pain in the ass. When I click a link in my email it pops open a new window instead of a new tab or replacing the page in the existing window or tab. I can't seem to find a preference for this either.
Click to expand...

Open up the Preferences, go to the 'Navigation' pane, and select the 'Tabbed Browsing' tab. There's a checkbox there that will cause it to open pages requested by other applications in a new tab rather than a new window.

There's also a history feature, in the sidebar. It wasn't enabled by default in 0.5 -- you had to muck around with a preferences script file manually to enable it. I'm not sure if it's enabled by default in 0.6, since I'd already enabled it manually, and 0.6 just picked up the prefs I'd specified in 0.5. Here's what you can do, though:

First, check to see if the history is already enabled: Open the sidebar (cmd-/). If there's a tab in the sidebar that looks like a clock face, click it: that's the history.

Now, if the history isn't already enabled, you'll need to edit a prefs file. Exit Navigator, then find the file <home>/Library/Application Support/Chimera/Profiles/default/<SOMETHING>/prefs.js. (<SOMETHING> will be a directory with a name that looks like gibberish. It's the only subdirectory under 'default'.) Open the prefs.js file in a text editor, and add the line:

user_pref("chimera.show_history", true);

to the end of this file. Restart chimera, and the tab in the sidebar that I described above should be present. However, I should warn you: The history UI is very slow, and not organized in a very coherent manner; I can understand why they keep it hidden by default, right now.

Personally, I'll gladly tolerate a dearth of bells-and-whistles (that I never used in other browsers, anyways) and some minor glitches for the massive improvement in speed. I have DSL, but I frequently browse sites that produce very large pages; The amount of time that I spend looking at the beachball when I load large pages in IE is a much bigger pain in the ass to me than the inability to adjust the browser cache size.
 
I am going to download it onto my mac, and see how it measures up to IE on my PC. IE will probably be faster, but Chimera will be fast enough.
 
History

Thanks for the tip, Somebody. It was interesting. The history feature is still hidden by default. You're right that the UI is slow--maybe enough to dissuade people who actually make good use of this feature. Doesn't look like they're too far off, though.

I guess the truth remains that which browser is "best" depends on what features you use and what sites you visit. Not using history and hating the slowness of IE (on my TiBook 667 w/DSL), Chimera is simply the best fit for my needs.

Chris
 
Originally posted by Somebody


Open up the Preferences, go to the 'Navigation' pane, and select the 'Tabbed Browsing' tab. There's a checkbox there that will cause it to open pages requested by other applications in a new tab rather than a new window.

There's also a history feature, in the sidebar. It wasn't enabled by default in 0.5 -- you had to muck around with a preferences script file manually to enable it. I'm not sure if it's enabled by default in 0.6, since I'd already enabled it manually, and 0.6 just picked up the prefs I'd specified in 0.5. Here's what you can do, though:

First, check to see if the history is already enabled: Open the sidebar (cmd-/). If there's a tab in the sidebar that looks like a clock face, click it: that's the history.

Now, if the history isn't already enabled, you'll need to edit a prefs file. Exit Navigator, then find the file <home>/Library/Application Support/Chimera/Profiles/default/<SOMETHING>/prefs.js. (<SOMETHING> will be a directory with a name that looks like gibberish. It's the only subdirectory under 'default'.) Open the prefs.js file in a text editor, and add the line:

user_pref("chimera.show_history", true);

to the end of this file. Restart chimera, and the tab in the sidebar that I described above should be present. However, I should warn you: The history UI is very slow, and not organized in a very coherent manner; I can understand why they keep it hidden by default, right now.

Personally, I'll gladly tolerate a dearth of bells-and-whistles (that I never used in other browsers, anyways) and some minor glitches for the massive improvement in speed. I have DSL, but I frequently browse sites that produce very large pages; The amount of time that I spend looking at the beachball when I load large pages in IE is a much bigger pain in the ass to me than the inability to adjust the browser cache size.
Click to expand...


Thank you very much. Also thank you Sparkley. I hadn't noticed the tabs in the preference window after selecting a preference category. After you told me it was there I looked closer and ended up with a big red palm print on my head.:rolleyes: :)

I think the speed of IE and the speed of the history bar in Chimera must be exrtremely dependent on you computer. I have never gotten a beach ball in IE when the cable network was working correctly. Also the history bar works very well with no lag on my computer.

Why is there an option in the prefs for how many days of history you want to save if there is no way to access this information by default. Am I missing something. Is there trick I can do to get the recent pages easily. I have the history tab implemented now but I was just wondering if there was something else also.

Now if only it had autofill.
 
Originally posted by MacBandit
Thank you very much. Also thank you Sparkley. I hadn't noticed the tabs in the preference window after selecting a preference category. After you told me it was there I looked closer and ended up with a big red palm print on my head.:rolleyes: :)

I think the speed of IE and the speed of the history bar in Chimera must be exrtremely dependent on you computer. I have never gotten a beach ball in IE when the cable network was working correctly. Also the history bar works very well with no lag on my computer.
Click to expand...
The slowness of IE is not a beachball thing, but simply how long it takes to render pages, especially large tables. To check this, go to TV Guide.com and load your local satellite TV listing in each. On my TiBook w/DSL, this was the result:

IE: 19 sec.
Chimera: 6 sec.

Again, this only really matters if you go so sites that Chimera renders significantly faster. As near as I can tell, Chimera renders just about everything in about 50% of the time (TV Guide is an extreme example, as it takes advantage of one big superiority of the Gecko engine--rendering tables). If you have a fast computer and a fast connection, this matters less, but it still matters.

Also, it doesn't have a way to fill in forms at sites you haven't been to, but it can fill in ones at sites you have visited before. Not the same, but better than nothing. And Mozilla does this very well, so I imagine it's not far off.

Chris
 
Originally posted by MacBandit

Why is there an option in the prefs for how many days of history you want to save if there is no way to access this information by default. Am I missing something.
Click to expand...

Yah.. the history also keeps the URLs of the sites you have visited, so if you don't turn on the history browsing, then that history preferences will keep only the URLs. So, if you have it set for 15 days, it will remember all the URLs you've typed in the address bar for 15 days, and it will show up in the list beneath it as you type it in.




irmongoose
 
Originally posted by chmorley
The slowness of IE is not a beachball thing, but simply how long it takes to render pages, especially large tables. To check this, go to TV Guide.com and load your local satellite TV listing in each. On my TiBook w/DSL, this was the result:

IE: 19 sec.
Chimera: 6 sec.

Again, this only really matters if you go so sites that Chimera renders significantly faster. As near as I can tell, Chimera renders just about everything in about 50% of the time (TV Guide is an extreme example, as it takes advantage of one big superiority of the Gecko engine--rendering tables). If you have a fast computer and a fast connection, this matters less, but it still matters.

Also, it doesn't have a way to fill in forms at sites you haven't been to, but it can fill in ones at sites you have visited before. Not the same, but better than nothing. And Mozilla does this very well, so I imagine it's not far off.

Chris
Click to expand...


I went to TVGuide.com and opened a listing for local sattelite. I did this to be fair because I have cable and I wanted a fair comparrison with no chance of cacheing.

IE:2.5secs
Chimera:2Ssecs.

As I stated before the speed difference is only like 1/2second for most sites. This seems to be extrememly dependent on computer and internet connection.
 
Has anyone else been unable to get it to install? I get a read/write error (-36) when I drag it to the applications folder. I've tried deleting everything I can think of , and all the files that it claims to use, but no joy.

However, if I then try to reinstall 0.5, it installs without problems.

Al
 
Originally posted by sparkleytone

now that Chimera has matured to thins point, I will probably slow down on my nightly addiction. I have been downloading the nightlies pretty much every day, unless there was no code change.

i think now ill wait until a good bit of changelog has gone by.
Click to expand...

just when i say that...they add some really nice features two days later. the latest nightly (11/07) has a bookmark dock menu, better context menu options, and finally a "copy image location" context menu for images! go get it baby.
 
chimera has been my default browser since .3, but to be honest, i have not seen any speed or stability improvements since .4 (netscape 4.7 in os9 is still faster). i would not trade it for any other browser, and of course i realize that it's only at .6, but it seems that some people are tend to exaggerate exactly how fast the newer builds are. hitting the back button still takes too long to load, and pieces of text are often invisible until i select them (or they just flicker). still the best browser for osx (although i'm hoping that they will somehow be able to incorporate cocoa spellcheck like omniweb).
 
When are they going to give a Close tab option?

I really like the .6 version, but i still think Mozilla is more stable. I think with this version i am going to use Chimera more than Mozilla. And i really want the "Close Tab" on the right corner to close one tab at a time. Right now I assigned CMD+W to my PowerMate's Click. So its easy to scroll to view the pages and click to close the tab.
 
i just started using navigator .5

i never thought it would work very well, but i have been pleasantly surprised . the only time i dont use it is when i try to do online banking and the like and get jammed (sometimes the sites dont show properly)
 
also another thing i am trying now is disabling the cache. anyone on a broadband connection doesnt really need one anyways.

chimera automatically caches to memory while a window is open, so its not like browsing using back and forward will be any slower. Chimera only writes to the HD cache when the program is closed and/or when a parent window is closed.

just add this to the prefs.js file in your ~/Application Support/Chimera/Profiles/default/salted/ directory while Chimera is not running

user_pref("browser.cache.disk.enable", false);

also make sure there is a blank line at the end of the file, or else it will not save your new pref.

Credit: OSXHints
 
I finally got Chimera on my mac (I haven't used it, only my PC, lately) and it is faster then the nightly of 5.0 I had been using for a while. Not much faster, but a little faster, and a lot more stable. It still quits at this latin translation site I would like to be able to visit (oh well :eek:). IE is faster, but not that much faster.

I have never really understood why browsing is faster on a PC. I have heard people say it is because IE is built into Windows, but then I hear other people say that that makes no difference. I still don't know why it is faster... (Once again - oh well :eek: )

:D
 
that makes plenty of difference.

the fact that core components of internet explorer are loaded into explorer.exe and many critical windows services, it is always fresh in the system. It is resident in memory at all times. Its just going to be faster because of that.
 
damnit chimera lost all my bookmars...for some
reason when i woke up today and logged on to
the internet none of my bookmarks were there.
thats strange....i hade them all set up too....damn.
 
Originally posted by beatle888
damnit chimera lost all my bookmars...for some
reason when i woke up today and logged on to
the internet none of my bookmarks were there.
thats strange....i hade them all set up too....damn.
Click to expand...


Always, always keep your bookmarks and email addresses backed up.

I know this doesn't help at this point but it's just a friendly reminder to everyone else.
 
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