Reading RiR here, at an interesting time. I just discovered the Chimera

project which is a native web browser for OSX using the Gecko rendering

engine from Mozilla. I am, infinitely, fucking impressed. I think

maybe I can explain it somehow to you in a meaningful sense.

First off, I love OSX. Ever since I've been working on UNIX, I've learned

to HATE X11. It just doesn't do it for me, no matter how many tacky and

bloated applications and window managers and themes you stick on it, the

protocol is still shitty and slow, and it relies on a very very inefficient

form of IPC, and so on. It's poo from a technical perspective, and I

really dislike the lack of an integrated feel everywhere except IRIX. On

IRIX everything uses Indigo Magick widgets via Motif, and it all works

like I want it to. The Toolchest stays out of my way until I want some

lovin', and I can do anything from a Winterm.

With OSX, I can be talking to my girlfriend via AOL Instant Messenger in

one window, complete with the lickable GUI elements that have made Aqua

the "widget-look-of-choice" among so many crowds, and yet I can switch to

a NeXT-style Terminal.app, work on a YACC grammar for some toy language

I'm doing a compiler for, and I can double click on any open/close pairs

of braces/brackets/parens/..., and have the matching part of the set become

my selected region.

Secondly, browsers. IE for OSX is fantastic, it's intuitive, and it is

pretty. It's also marginally snappy. Not as much as IE on WinNT 4 on the

comparable IA32 hardware, but this is life. And IE comes with Mac OS X,

and works right out of the box, though HELLO WAY TOO MANY FUCKING TOOLBARS

BY DEFAULT. Mozilla for OSX is stable. I run nightly builds of it, and

while the build from two days ago would frequently die in its ass, the

one from today seems good.

But I never liked Mozilla that much on OSX, because it's dog slow, it doesn't

follow Apple's HCI guidelines *at all*, and generally is still the same poorly

designed Win 3.11 application that Netscape 2 was. When will these people

learn that HELLO THE CONFIGURATION PANEL SUCKS.

But the Gecko rendering engine? I love it. I pondered doing a small frontend

for it, using native Cocoa elements and Aqua widgets. It's a fast engine, it

renders things nicely, and it's relatively friendly in terms of license. It

has many clueful people working on it and debugging the hell out of it. There

are hundreds upon hundreds of people who run nightly builds of various bits of

Mozilla like I do, and end up testing Gecko just as much as they test the

particular frontend.

So I saught out looking for soemone who had done a native browser using

Gecko. And I found it, in Chimera. And Chimera, my friend, is incredibly

wonderful.

Animated GIFs (GIF89a) don't seem to go through frames quite properly, but

this is just a nightly build, and for all I know, the last release or a

nightly build from tomorrow might work. But Chimera is native, and it shows.

The aesthetics of this browser are perfect, I honestly cannot put it any

better, no matter how I try. I might want to get rid of the textual labels

for toolbar elements (hello, toolbars are to keep you from having to read,

they are for visual identification. the way I see it, once something has

been run 10 times, those labels either NEED to go away, or the people doing

design of the toolbar need to try a lot harder to make them intuitive.

most likely they need fired, cause they don't know their job), but other

than said elements of superfluous text, it's just lovely.

And fast. I can go through strips of Jerkcity MUCH faster than I can with

the native IE, and at *least* as fast as with native IE on Win32. That's

my benchmark. I'm talking about *nothing* but Mozilla or IE running much

MUCH slower than Chimera running with AIM, ICQ, and Mozilla also open.

I don't know if that leads you anywhere you're interested in going, but I'm

glad to be able to spread the good word, and let you in on some absolutely

wonderful insight, or so it has seemed to me today, when I dumped Mozilla.

Take care,

juli.