Where Is (Are) Apple's iBrowse?
Apple released the latest version of Mac OS X a few weeks ago now. The general reception has been that after an extended public beta, Jaguar (the name of the latest version) is the first real production version of OS X. That has not been my experience.
The most persistent problem that I've faced since upgrading has been with browsers. Internet Explorer and the Mozilla-based browsers (including Mozilla, Chimera, and Netscape) all have text rendering problems (perhaps because their rendering engines are Carbon components). Those are, as far as I know, the only free browsers available for OS X. Every other consumer operating system that I know of has at least one free working browser available for it.
There are also two non-free browsers for OS X: Opera and OmniWeb. I've tested the latest version of Opera, which is also Carbon-based, and found that it certainly did not live up its claim to be "the fastest browser on earth," at least not on OS X. It's UI elements and its rendering were painfully slow compared to other browsers that I tried. OmniWeb may be the best choice, but as Eric can tell you, it seems to do strange things when posting comments to Radio Userland Weblogs.
OS X has been available for more than a year now, and the browser problem should be resolved. It's surprising to me that Apple hasn't developed it's own Cocoa-based HTML rendering component (either based on Mozilla's Gecko or from scatch). This is the same company that includes e-mail and chat software in the operating system, and freely provides CD/MP3, photo management, and video editing software and, soon, calendaring and synchronization software. Given the time and meticulous effort that Apple has spent on making the user experience as pleasant as possible, how come they have left the provision of something so central to the user experience as a browser to third parties?
7:45:08 AM 
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