A friend -- a switcher -- is having some web browsing/slow-down issues on his Mac at work, which is looking bad alongside a bunch of PCs which are zipping through the web. Any suggestions? Here's his info:

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iMac PowerPC G4 (2.1), 800 MHz, 768 MB RAM, OS X version 10.3.9


I have a mac question for you. I have an older imac at the office here and it is getting more sluggish all the time. It happens particularly with internet use. All the other computers in my office are PC's and none of them seem to be having any trouble navigating on the net. We have a pretty fast connection here. The mac, however, is very choppy. For example, on EBAY, there seems to be a delay between hitting the key and when the text appears on screen. Extremely annoying. It doesn't matter what browser I use (safari or Firefox). I can't even scroll down the screen that well. Other things are slow too, photoshop, Word etc.

I've repaired disk permissions. Is there anything else you'd suggest? I run very little on this computer. Mainly use it for Word. No games or any other major programs. Seems to me all computers become this way after a few years of use.

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I hate to say it, but browsing speed is much better in Windows.

Check the drive for corruption? Is his hard disk full? Is he running a lot of apps at once?

there's obviously a problem somewhere.

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no, there's no corruption. Browsing speed has always been far superior in Windows, and continues to be that way to this day.

Pound for pound, Windows browsing is faster. Do yourself an experiment: on an Intel Mac, install Windows and all the Mac drivers. Do some testing on Safari, then boot into Windows and do the same testing within IE.

If you'd like, go agnostic: do your testing on Firefox (same version) on both platforms.

Welcome to the real world. The web has been optimized for Windows.

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In the words of DharmaDog: "it may or may not be utter horse@#$%&, but it shouldn't be dismissed simply because it doesn't agree with your opinion."

Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.

Trying is the first step to failure. -- Homer Simpson

You can speed up Firefox a little bit by enabling pipelining as described here:

[www.macworld.com]

Even in the OS 9 days I've been able to configure a Mac browser to run faster than IE on Windows. Some of the speed tests between OmniWeb 5.5 and WinIE show OW is faster in some areas.

ebay is a JavaScript mess. Chances are she either needs more HD space or a faster processor. I'm going to bet that 800MHz just isn't going to cut it.

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Firefox slows to a crawl for me occasionally, and, so far, a restart has always fixed the extreme slowdowns like your friend describes. I suppose he's already done that? I use only Firefox on a Mac, so I have no point of comparison with other browsers or with Win machines.

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MGS_forgot_password
I hate to say it, but browsing speed is much better in Windows.

I hate to say it, but that's not true.

Have him uncheck "Other forms" in Safari's Autofill preferences. Tell him to clear history and cache. Then he should quit and re-launch the browser.

Safari is generally faster than FireFox.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/15/2006 11:51AM by Article Accelerator.

Web browsing is almost unusable on my QS G4-867, so much so I use my Dell on the web. That is likely comparable to the iMac in question. I don't think it is a configuration issue--it is the machine. Probably going to spring for a new Mac after the holidays.

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Article Accelerator

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MGS_forgot_password
I hate to say it, but browsing speed is much better in Windows.

I hate to say it, but that's not true.

Web browsing on the Mac is DEFINITLY slower than on the PC. This is a verified fact.

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Zoidberg
I cannot believe we raised Bobby for 12 years without the Internet. You know, Hank, parents without the internet should have their children taken away! - Peggy Hill

You won me 5 Bux!
My Roomie and I were watching the "King of the Hill" episode where that quote came from last night, I bet her that would be someone's SIG on the forum within 24 hours. Thanks Zoid!

BGnR

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"Good heavens, Miss Sakamoto! You're beautiful!"
"If we dig precious things from the land, we will invite disaster."
"Near the day of Purification, there will be cobwebs spun back and forth in the sky."
"A container of ashes might one day be thrown from the sky, which could burn the land and boil the oceans."

What are the specs of the PCs you're comparing against that old iMac? CPU type/speed, RAM, &c?

Yes, I'd say IE on Windows is faster than anything on the Mac: it's pretty heavily optimized to the OS and hardware in almost all ways. Firefox is not very optimized on the Mac at all, though you can wring a little more performance out of it by using a processor-specific build of it (G4, G5, Intel).

And yes, on a lot of modern sites that use JavaScript, you pay a performance penalty for being on the Mac -- or at least on a PowerPC Mac.

Also, I have to say that Safari feels a lot faster on Intel Macs than it does on PowerPC Macs, though I haven't done a lot of compare and contrast between IE on Windows and Safari on an Intel Mac. My sneaking suspicion is that Mac OS X was never truly optimized for PowerPC (remember that its roots are OpenStep, which ran on x86), or perhaps web browsers are very heavily dependent on integer math calculations, which the PowerPC was never as good at as x86.

You can also speed up Firefox 2.0 considerably by turning off prefetching.

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Silencio
My sneaking suspicion is that Mac OS X was never truly optimized for PowerPC (remember that its roots are OpenStep, which ran on x86),.

NeXTStep was built on the 68000 CPU, then moved outward.

"NEXTSTEP is the original object-oriented, multitasking operating system that NeXT Computer, Inc. developed to run on its proprietary NeXT computers (informally known as "black boxes"). NEXTSTEP 1.0 was released on 18 September 1989 after several previews starting in 1986, and the last release 3.3 in early 1995, by which time it ran not only on Motorola 68000 family processors (specifically the original black boxes), but also generic IBM compatible x86/Intel, Sun SPARC, and HP PA-RISC. About the time of the 3.2 release NeXT teamed up with Sun Microsystems to develop OpenStep, a cross-platform standard and implementation (for Sun Solaris, Microsoft Windows, and NeXT's version of the Mach kernel) based on NEXTSTEP 3.2."

BGnR
MS gave away free webkits by the millions to make the internet their own.

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"Good heavens, Miss Sakamoto! You're beautiful!"
"If we dig precious things from the land, we will invite disaster."
"Near the day of Purification, there will be cobwebs spun back and forth in the sky."
"A container of ashes might one day be thrown from the sky, which could burn the land and boil the oceans."

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TLB
Web browsing is almost unusable on my QS G4-867, so much so I use my Dell on the web. That is likely comparable to the iMac in question. I don't think it is a configuration issue--it is the machine. Probably going to spring for a new Mac after the holidays.

i surfed on my 867 with NO issues on OS 9 and IE 5.

empty caches, reset safari, try firefox whatever -- its not the machine

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Edited 999 time(s). Last edit at 12:08PM by jdc.

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C(-)ris
[Web browsing on the Mac is DEFINITLY slower than on the PC. This is a verified fact.

"Verified," eh?

I got your verification that you're wrong right here:

[forums.dealmac.com] (Read the whole thread)

I showed you mine, now you show me yours.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/15/2006 02:58PM by Article Accelerator.

Here you go. Right from the threads you sent me too....

[www.anandtech.com]

Page rendering with Safari was much slower compared to IE on the PC. Intel Macs and Firefox may have eased the pain, but it sitll isn't completely fixed. My PIII 867 is about 2 seconds faster than my 1ghz powerbook on the same connection rendering the same, non cached paged. Both running Firefox 2.0. Also, most Java brings Mac web browsers to a crawl for some reason,

I have a mixed platform office and with evry box optimised there's no difference.
There are sites that will choke and crash IE on the PC and there are sites that will choke and crash Safari. Same with firefox.

I can set up the peecees to appear to be horrible compared to the macs and visaversa.

Everyone seems to prefer firefox on their peecees and rather mixed on the macs.

Three years ago mac surfing was "slow". We don't see a difference here anymore.

BGnR: there's a conspicuous lack of PowerPC hardware on that list of platforms that NeXTStep/OpenStep ran on. The Motorola 68k family ain't the same thing.

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Silencio
BGnR: there's a conspicuous lack of PowerPC hardware on that list of platforms that NeXTStep/OpenStep ran on. The Motorola 68k family ain't the same thing.

Yea, okay, if you say so.

BGnR

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"Good heavens, Miss Sakamoto! You're beautiful!"
"If we dig precious things from the land, we will invite disaster."
"Near the day of Purification, there will be cobwebs spun back and forth in the sky."
"A container of ashes might one day be thrown from the sky, which could burn the land and boil the oceans."

first, how full is the hard drive? If it doesn't have at least 10 gigs free, make some free space. OS X's virtual memory partition needs some breathing room or it slows down the whole system.

second, dump firefox and safari. Download Seamonkey. I know it is based on the Gecko engine,like Firefox, but it loads pages faster than either firefox or safari, imho.

third, make sure your internet connection preferences are correctly set in system preferences.


Oh and yeah, in OS X, the browsing experience is as fast, if not faster than that experienced on a p.c. IE takes forever to load pages in Windozes.

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Bryan
______________________________________________________
Mac Studio 2022
MacBook Pro 14 inch 2021
iPhone 14 Pro
Location: Cincinnati

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C(-)ris
Here you go. Right from the threads you sent me too....

That's but one test of many discussed in those threads. Most of the objective tests showed that Macs are actually faster at browsing than PCs, contrary to popular opinion.

There is no "verification" of your assertion.

An 800MHz G4 with 768MB RAM will never be a screaming demon but it should be a little better than how it's described.

When he's talking about typing not keeping up and Word being slow, there might be something eating CPU cycles. Have him check with Activity Monitor.

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AllGold
An 800MHz G4 with 768MB RAM will never be a screaming demon but it should be a little better than how it's described.

When he's talking about typing not keeping up and Word being slow, there might be something eating CPU cycles. Have him check with Activity Monitor.

Yes, it should not be THAT slow. How often is maintenance done on that Mac? How full is the HD? etc.

Some advice amongst the hijack and infighting. I'll pass it on and see if I can provide more info. Will probably start a new thread.

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Zoidberg
Some advice amongst the hijack and infighting. I'll pass it on and see if I can provide more info.

Good.

Don't forget to pass on the advice I gave regarding configuration of Safari for best performance.

I have; thanks AA.

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