« Good Gus Meeting | Main | Wal-Mart Responsibly Keeps Eye on Bottom Line... »
December 06, 2002
Web Ginsus Sharper
My two favorite Web softs finally cooperate:
The latest nightly builds of the Mozilla-derived browser Chimera (aka the Galeon of the OS X world) fix an annoying bug that made tabbed browsing work not quite right for purposes of Brett Simmons' NetNewsWire, an RDF browser that makes keeping up with a big chunk of syndicated sites easy.
I hadn't been particularly happy with Web browsing under OS X. Unless you liked IE, it felt a lot like Web browsing in Linuxland two years ago. Chimera has gotten much better lately, though. On top of its rise in quality (and configurability) is NNW, which deemphasizes the bookmark in favor of an interface that makes so much as visiting some sites with a browser unnecessary, since the summary of each RDF item includes the entry text.
The Chimera pitch:
- tabbed browsing, with an option to open all new windows spawned by Web helpers like NNW, ShadowGoogle, or Watson in a new tab instead of new window
- Cocoa-based: if you dig Emacs navigation keys, they work in Chimera.
- fast: Mozilla's UI under OS X crawls. Chimera is much more nimble
- "themeable": I don't care, some people do.
Much like the Mozilla of the 0.9 era, Chimera is best experienced by grabbing a new build once a week or so. ChimeraKnight provides a lightweight GUI that handles downloading a build, backing up your last download, grabbing a copy of the Changelog to peruse while it's downloading, and installing the new build. Lately it even copes with IE's obnoxious insistence on regrabbing status as your default browser with each new download.
Posted by mph at December 6, 2002 10:46 AM