Apple's Safari web browser is generally quite good: lean, fast, very good CSS support, simple interface. But it has one very nagging problem: when in HTTPS mode, it slows to a crawl. Maybe people with newer machines than my G4/400 don't notice it so much. But it's very noticeable on mine.
Checking out a couple of our own sites in Safari, which most of us here in the office use daily, I decided to open up a page in the Mac OS X port of Mozilla Firebird. The same page loaded much much much faster in Firebird. So then I decided to try OmniWeb 4.5, a native Mac OS X browser that now uses the same HTML core as Safari. Much Faster, Again!.
While OmniWeb now uses the Safari WebKit core, it still uses other OmniGroup frameworks, including extra networking libraries. So it's not terribly surprising that it could be faster, even with the same HTML kit. But it is annoying.
(OmniWeb also prints better than Safari, which has decided to print ENORMOUS text starting with version 1.1)
This makes OmniWeb and Firebird interesting products. They both take an open source rendering engine and in many places outdo the browser that is supposed to be that engine's champion.
This little baby, full of knobs, should be shipping to me very very soon. I may modify the packaging a bit once it arrives - it's just something I had to have now and couldn't wait for customizations.
A similar (but different) item, with even more knobs, will be done in about three months.
One of these is also being built for me and should hopefully be done by the end of the year.
The website for Harper's Magazine has been redesigned. Among other things, it now features RSS feeds. Besides its excellent Weekly Review and Harper's Index, certain readings have been posted online as well. A great one, published in the magazine last spring, is The Proclamation of Baghdad - a proclamation made by the British in 1917 that is eerily reminiscent of recent proclamations by the U.S. and, well, the British. Hopefully things work out better for everyone involved.