B. Mann Consulting

It's what's on top that doesn't work so well :wink:

There seems to be a rather large disparity between your response, and what I said. I can see how easy it would be for you to assume I was referring to speed, because after all, raw computational performance is the God of computer cultists. But neither I, nor the reviewer, was talking about speed, we were talking about the qualitative assessment of the "fit" of the application. And I quote:

"Ars rounded up the contenders, threw a few web pages at them, and took note of the results. In this browser smackdown, we wanted to look at three aspects of the browsing experience: user experience, compatibility, and speed. First, how is the interface? Does it fit well with the OS X GUI? Does it feel like a port?"

"The applications reviewed can be grouped into 3 types based on their rendering engines: Gecko, WebCore, or proprietary."

Note: I consider proprietary to mean an independent effort, and I've been abbreviating "independent" to "indy" lately, in line with the lingo of music-savvy people, and it is one-and-the-same with software. Hence, an "indy" port.

"Firebird
Cons:
*Non Mac-like interface"

"Mozilla, Mozilla Firebird, and Netscape are all rock solid, stable, and standards-compliant. My biggest complaint about them is that they do not feel like OS X applications; rather, they feel like ports."

Mac users, gauravrampal, you either know or may learn can be highly qualitative, it is a behaviour almost central to the Mac-user culture. We compare all things to how Apple does them, and thus this is why qualitative assessment was included in the review at all - because it is extremely relevant to Mac users at least on some level. And that is why I call Firebird a horrible indy port. I've never seen the program in my life, but I know precisely what the writer is speaking of, having seen Safari, IE, OmniWeb, Opera, Mozilla, Camino and almost all of the web browsers reviewed. It doesn't look at all like it was written by Apple, and thus we will tolerate it for its performance, and use it, but it is also why a quantitatively inferior browser like Safari, which is vastly superior in qualitative measurements, will dominate while Camino plays the bit-part. It never did make sense that the Mac Mozilla developers never Apple-fied the Mozilla GUI. What are they thinking?

Gaurav -- Firebird is great on the PC. On the Mac, both it and Mozilla use their own UI completely (for the most part), ignoring "native" look-and-feel of OS X.

So, to the average Mac user, who is used to having a high level of consistency amongst all apps, the browsers stick out like sore thumbs.

Very true. I found a good link to Darwin and Mach microkernel that is worth reading.

Full GPL-certification is a phrase that needs no quotes around it, seeing as how the APSL was once Open Source certified, and now Free Software certified, this act of license review and certification is a formal business activity of the FSF and the OSI, it isn't some particular phrase I created.

As for the definition of Darwin, it's good you pointed that out Boris, just in case someone doesn't know what it is.

But there are many advantages to adopting Linux, including (from here on out, when I say "Linux", I am referring specifically to the monolithic Linux kernel):

- Linux is a standard, broadly used and accepted, and Apple is supposedly playing the good samaritin by adopting as many standards as possible. Apple would be doing well for its customers, specifically enterprise customers buying XServe, by adopting the Linux kernel, which is far more accepted (as well as the entire Linux OS) in IT than Darwin/OSX.

- Apple develops and maintains Darwin, volunteers develop and maintain Linux. Hence, all that development and maintenance could be outsourced, and contributed to, rather than entirely repeated in-house. When it comes to OS kernels, they do not have the same economics as an OS, or a CPU, to an independent, integrated computer company like Apple that needs differentiation to maintain competitive advantage and core competencies that make it a worthwhile ongoing concern. Mach was also made with the idea of portability, including kernel portability that it may be replaced, and indeed it has. There are some four or five versions of Mach, some entirely different, that can be interchanged with fair ease because the kernel is portable as well as everything on top of it.

Those two advantages, alone, are enough in my mind to seriously consider adopting Linux. And by opening up OSX, Apple has a way to undermine Windows in a way that co-operates with Linux, they gain a lot, and in return they can return a lot more than just OSF or FSF-certified operating system software pieces.