Macs, mice and web browsers

I’ve been a Mac user for well over a year now, and I’m more than impressed with the whole system, particularly of course the operating system. I wouldn’t have touched the Mac if it had not been for the new OS – it has the benefit of the Unix system with a distinctive and effective display system. There have been two big annoyances, however: the single-button mouse and the absence of a satisfactory web browser.

The Mac has always been known for its single-button mouse. The Mac was the first system in which a mouse came as standard and was integral to the user experience. The problem was that when others caught on, they introduced two- or even three-button mice while Apple stuck to one. Even my Amstrad PC1640 which my family bought in 1989, before Windows 3.0 was released, had a two-button mouse. You could use a two-button mouse (at least with recent versions of the Mac system), but Apple didn’t supply it.

Until now that Apple has released the Mighty Mouse, about which Apple boasts “single-button looks, multibutton charm”. With the Apple mouse, it doesn’t even look like it has a button anyway – the entire top of the mouse is its button, which has the annoying effect that when you tap your finger on it without intending to click, it clicks. This thing has a white top with a little grey ball, which can scroll up and down as well as left and right, and also functions as a button. You can also squeeze the sides of the mouse to have a different effect. You can, in fact, program all these effects.

The day I bought the new Mac OS last weekend, I nearly bought a Mighty Mouse as well. I didn’t, because I didn’t like it when I tried it out on one of the Bluewater Apple Store’s iBooks. The mouse wasn’t adequately demonstrated to me by the store staff, which meant that I just pressed the button any old way and didn’t like it when it had unintended effects (like bringing up the Dashboard widgets). I finally got a decent demo at the London store on Sunday, and bought one for £35 including VAT (that’s sales tax for you Americans). I’ve very pleased with it. I’m certainly glad of being able to right-click without having to hold the button down or use the Control key, and bring up the Dashboard with one click. It’s good value.

The web browser situation has given me quite a bit of frustration. There are no less than six available, which basically divide into four families: Internet Explorer, Opera, the WebKit family consisting of Safari, OmniWeb and Shiira, and the Mozilla family consisting of Mozilla itself, Firefox and Camino. And guess what? There is at least one seriously annoying thing about every single one of them.

It’s often quite petty, but with Apple you expect more, because Apple is the presentation machine. Things are meant to look good on a Mac, and usually they do, but it doesn’t mean they work well. The WebKit family derives its rendering engine from KDE’s Konqueror web browser, and has a problem handling JavaScript, which is used for presenting the formatting buttons in Movable Type and WordPress’s editing screens. They just don’t appear in those three browsers. (They do appear in Konqueror, but messes up your whole writing – basically MT and WordPress takes into account that Safari can’t handle the buttons, but doesn’t do this for Konqueror.) OmniWeb, a browser available for OS X even back in the 1990s when it was called NextStep, has these same faults, and you have to pay for it.

Then there’s the Mozilla family. Mozilla itself – the web, mail and chat client all in one – is about to be forked off by the Mozilla Foundation into a separate project called Seamonkey, but version 1.7 is still available for not only Windows but also for the Mac and the X11 window system used by Linux and Solaris. The performance of Mozilla itself is hampered by its sheer size, which is why web-only versions like Firefox appeared; this doesn’t really make itself clear until you come across a self-updating feature (like the counter which shows the alleged cost of the Iraq war) which really slows everything down.

Neither Firefox nor Mozilla show Java applets properly, showing them in the same place even when you scroll down (admittedly, Java applets are getting less and less popular, and they only appear on one of the sites I visit regularly), and neither really look like Mac products. They look like Windows applications crudely ported to the Mac, which is why people decided to start the Camino project, which uses the Mozilla rendering system and the Mac’s native Cocoa display system – so, for example, that buttons on web pages look like liquid blue Mac buttons, not like Windows-style grey 3D buttons. Camino looks promising, but it has serious reliability problems. I once used to use it as my regular browser and had the Camino promotion button on this site – until I lost a whole blog entry because of a scrolling bug, in which it insisted on slowly scrolling up a long MWU article, highlighting all the text along the way. It was going to take ages, and I ended up pulling out the power lead in anger after frantic attempts to stop this failed.

Finally, there’s Internet Explorer, which Microsoft has at last abandoned, claiming Safari is better. It never was the same product as was included with Windows, and never shed some of the trappings of the old Mac OS, which makes it look outdated on OS X. It does not even display Hotmail properly, which makes one wonder how it could be taken seriously. Finally, there’s Opera, with its Google ad banner for anyone who doesn’t want to pay for it. All I can say is, when they get round to having it display Yahoo Groups properly, I might consider paying for it.

Web browsers are an annoyance on probably every platform. On Windows there is the lack of choice and the security issues, and the dominance of the antiquated Internet Explorer. On Linux, the Mozilla family pretty much rules (Opera and Konqueror are also available), but you’ve still got the problem that Linux fonts are for the most part not very good. On the Mac, none of those are an issue, but you are left with one problem: web browsers in general aren’t very good. The author of a book on the FreeBSD operating system, The Complete FreeBSD, noted that web browsers all seem to have one thing in common: they are buggy. I’m not sure if that comment dates from the last printed update (April 2003) or before, but it still holds true today.