Mac OS X Internet Browsers
By Damien Gallop

March 23rd, 2002

Last week we built a supercharged internet browser called Dillo. It is an X Window application that runs on Mac OS X. It stacks up surprisingly well against Internet Explorer and OmniWeb, the OS X heavies.

Internet browsers have come a long way since the early days. The Mark Andreessen story makes perennially good reading. His original Mosaic browser opened up the possibility of the internet as we know it today. As things became possible, more things were imagined and in turn realized. Security became an issue too, and is fast becoming an integral part of many day-to-day internet tasks. The internet browser is the center of it all.

Mac OS X ships with Microsoft Internet Explorer, arguably the first major Carbon application. Starting life in beta, it worked pretty well back then, and has come a long way since. OmniWeb was the first native OS X browser. While not free, it's reasonably priced and can be used for free indefinitely, if you don't mind an occasional "unregistered" plastered across your web page. Dillo was originally written for unix, and indeed builds as a unix application on OS X. It displays in an X window, which presumes the presence of an X server running on your machine. Each one has its strengths and weaknesses.

There are also Netscape 6 and Mozilla, which I consider to be developer applications, as well as Netscape Communicator, my personal favorite browser, which must run in Classic mode. I have mild hope of the X Window version of Communicator being ported to Mac OS X by some clever individuals someday. In addition to other browsers for OS X heretofore not introduced to Yours Truly, there are also some text-based unix browsers such as Lynx, of interest to Linux types, that run perfectly well in a Terminal window.

I suppose I will continue to use Internet Explorer as my default browser, in that it has served and continues to serve me well. Its early glitches ironed out long ago, it is still a Carbon application, and you can tell. It has that "compatibility mode" feel about it. Pages just don't quite snap the way I think they should. I use Eudora Mail with a similar experience. Both of these products snap instantly in their native (read: Mac OS) environments. Additionally, my eye tells me that IE doesn't make full use of the Aqua interface technologies of Mac OS X.

Open the same page in OmniWeb, and see the difference immediately. Apple did something truly wonderful with the screen fonts in Aqua. Every font shows its true beauty. If readability is important to you, then look no further than OmniWeb. However, I distinctly noticed that pages do not snap here either. In fact, there was a measurable lag between clicks. I expected that snappy response which I learned to take for granted with Netscape and Internet Explorer in their native operating environments. There is a bottleneck somewhere in the OmniWeb source code. Nevertheless, this browser is a work of art, or perhaps this is the price to pay for those wonderful fonts. There is an additional feature worth its weight in gold, which I've not seen in any other browser. It's the mouse "Open link behind this window" menu item. Fabulous! Why didn't we think of that? OmniWeb: destined to become "the" OS X browser.

Dillo never knew anything about OS X. It is a true X Window application. In that sense, it's color-blind to the underlying operating system. Like much unix software, its source code is free for the downloading. It runs on Mac OS X for two reasons: OS X is unix; and there is an excellent X Window server application available for OS X. Dillo has a simple little face that bears a distant resemblance to the original Mosaic browser of days gone by. Its interface is quite consistent with other X Window applications such as The GIMP. Pages truly snap. Java and/or Javascript support may not be state-of-the-art, though. My secure web tests indicate that, unlike the other two, Dillo doesn't support secure web connections. Cutting and pasting links between Dillo and OS X applications does not work either (remember this in IE Beta?), though I highly suspect it to be the fault of the X server and not Dillo itself. Like Internet Explorer, font display in Dillo is fine but not exquisite the way it is in OmniWeb. Dillo is a good choice for reading the news and other casual browsing if you run X routinely.

In my own experience, all three of these browsers are stable, as far as that term goes. Eventually, after days or weeks of continuous running, Internet Explorer runs out of steam and that last page click produces the spinning cursor of death. Xfree86, the X Window server ported to OS X, wouldn't be setting a precedent if it were to come crashing down either, but it's definitely manageable. I have no reason to believe that Dillo as an application is unstable at all. Like Dillo, OmniWeb has never crashed on my machines, though neither one has logged a lot of mileage around here to date. That may just change. Soon. Ciao.