After checking the site at work on an old PC I tried looking for the TV listings for tomorrow at home in OS X.

What a slow piece of shit. The speed difference viewing the same site in Windows was ridiculous!

After all this time witnessing how much the system sucks at pretty much anything I try to do with it I still get surprised by stuff like this. It never ceases to amaze me how bad this thing is.

Nothing surprises me anymore. The PC is so totally superior with web surfing, that it's actually frightening to me. There is NO WAY a $5000 computer should be slower on the web than a $500 PC. It's just wrong. Music doesn't soften that blow.

I seem to be able to surf that olympics site at acceptable speeds with Safari, acceptable that is, for the Mac... maybe it's my connection, or the load lighter than when you checked; but then I jump on the PC and get a wake up call. Noticably faster.

It's going from shoulder shrugging, crap-settling, "just OK"... to the way web surfing should be. Well, I want the friggin' MAC to be what web surfing should be.

I keep waiting for the Mac to SURPASS Windows at something really significantly. Even iTunes seems to run a bit more smoothly on the PC.

Unfortunately, I don't own my big design apps in PC versions. I'm almost scared of the performance gains I might notice.

Yeah, I pretty much hate the XP interface, but no moreso than I hate Aqua. And at least in XP the fonts are clearer. Still, the one thing that the Mac has that Windows doesn't, is CLASSIC. The legacy interface. That's really still the best selling point for me. That once, in its shining history, Apple friggin' GOT IT. It'll be a whole new ballgame if Apple went and unbloated the operating system and its interface.

That's going to make all the difference. Here's the FOUR things that have to happen to get me really fired up about the Mac again:

1) fix the interface. Make it graphically simpler, more streamlined, faster and more responsive, and make more sense.

B) fix the FINDER. The Finder always needs to be the penultimate tool of the Mac user. Right now, the Finder is extremely third rate. It's slow, breaks easily, forgets things, and is barely customizable. Don't get me wrong, it's got yards and yards of junk-drawer customizability. But none of that adds to productivity. I'm constantly fighting the Finder. In the legacy, the Finder assists me, helps me visualize. Does what I say. Gives me constant and timely visual feedback about the state of the OS and my stuff.

III) fix the font rendering. Fonts are everything in the designer's world. Apple needs to aim for accuracy, clarity, readability and reliability. Fonts going corrupt and being difficult to manage are the bane of my existence in OS X.

4) Improve Application reliability, performance, and speed. Stop making apps the whipping-boys of the platform. Stop blame shifting the shortcomings of the OS onto apps. An OS that can't run apps well is worthless.

That includes Safari. There's just no excuse for an Apple web browser, designed by Apple engineers who know the OS inside out, to be as slow and unreliable as it is in an IE world. We're at a crossroads. IE is dropping the Mac, and IE on the PC is an order of magnitude superior to any Mac browser for speed and reliability. Safari is one of those things that won't be worth a damn until it can raise eyebrows from PC people as well as crap-settlers.

Isn't the way a website renders more about how the people design the website than anything else?

There are internet standards but aren't there also Microsoft Internet Explorer standards that break the standards the rest of the community uses. This creates websites that render great for Windows and Internet Explorer but choke on other browsers.

Those websites suck.

CNN within the last month changed something about their website. In the past I could single click a link but now to open a link I must double click on a link. If I do not the page just spins and spins. Double click the new page opens. One click nothing.

Who is to blame?

Camino or the numb nuts over at CNN.

quote:

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Isn't the way a website renders more about how the people design the website than anything else?

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Nope. It's about how well the browser can parse code. If it chokes the app or the OS, something is wrong. If the same exact code, say java, works in one browser and not another, it ain't the designer's fault. It's becoming impossible to craft code that works with everything, and still pushes a bit of the envelope. Part of that is nobody obeys the standards, but the REASON they don't, is because Microsoft don't. And everyone knows that if you can't get a site to look good in IE, forget it. You're dead meat. Safari is a much lower priority.

If it doesn't work ANYWHERE, yeah, it's probably screwed up. But that's not the case with the olympic site. It works, it's just SLOWER in Safari than IE on a PC.

Sad, but 100% true.

Every mediocre standard PC beats the fastest Macs in browsing and general UI responsiveness. It's so annoying and much more sad. Even my fathers old 300mhz Pentium crap-box offers FAST UI, i tear my hair out every time i see it. (that's why i'm bold now)