Wetlook World Forum

I did a layman's speed benchmark using SETI@home, comparing my 200 MHz StarMac clone against the 333 MHz iMac. The iMac was about 2.5 times faster, i.e. it's a pretty sweet machine. A friend reckons that a PC has to be 450 MHz to run UT. The Web is pretty fast on my 333 MHz PC, in Firefox.

I don't know what browser to recommend. WaMCom (Web and Mail Communicator, not Wet and Messy!!) is a good one -- it's a Mozilla variant and is by far the fastest browser at rendering pages on Mac OS 9 and earlier. The user interface itself, though, was painful. The best browser overall -- when not crashing -- is Internet Explorer 5. Not too fast, not too slow. iCab 2 is about the same speed (a bit faster on the really large pages than IE) but its terrible CSS and JavaScript support makes it pretty hard to use on many sites. iCab 3 fixes a lot of that, but is painfully slow -- it might be passable on a G3 (I have a 500 MHz G3 iMac, OS X, and it's still not very speedy).

It IS hard. Mac OS 9 and earlier are a total bitch to surf on. I've long since given up bothering and use Firefox in Windows. iCab 2 I was OK with, but as sites go AJAX etc it became more and more useless. IE 5 crashed the system routinely so I dropped that, although if anything, it's the most supported of any browsers. People still try to keep sites working in Mac IE. I don't know how good WaMCom is, I only used Mozilla 1.1 (the last release for Mac OS < X) but WaMCom is based on a later Mozilla. 1.4 maybe?

But yes, dial-up users should be turning off Web features that cause slowdowns. iCab is the way to go in OS 9 and earlier for that. It's complicated and hard work, but I can (off list!) explain it all to you or anyone -- use of the Filter Manager and View menu to control loading of images, JavaScript, Flash/QuickTime etc. JavaScript is best left off for most sites, as is Flash, QuickTime etc. Images too although that becomes tricky when it comes to sites that use images for menu items with no alt properties. (You can force-load an image by ctrl-clicking on it, and selecting Load Image, or load all images via the View menu. You can also stop and start GIF animation for any or all images, as GIF animation eats CPU time like nothing on earth).