The world according to Sven-S. Porst
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Recently I grew quite attached to using Chimera as my webbrowser. While it's interface isn't as slick as OmniWeb's or Internet Explorer's yet and it can't do quite the same job as iCab as far as keeping my life ad free it is still doing well in theses areas and it's rendering HTML quickly and correctly.
Nice recently added features include support for the Mac keychain and finally the developers getting their act together and re-introducing Command-arrow shortcuts for the 'Back' and 'Forward' commands wherever feasible.
I've also grown quite fond of tabbed browsing, which with the arrangement of new tabs 'under' the old ones serves me much better than the Mozilla I use on the Linux box in my office. Perhaps Mozilla could open tabs in the same way - but who wants to work through all of it's preferences (which seem to be aiming at emacs like complexity) to find out? Not me, for sure. So I guess, the distinct lack of preferences is a good thing about Chimera, too.
Of course it's not all great. There are still a couple of things that are hopefully taken care of sooner rather than later:
- After opening a window by clicking a link, the 'Open Location�' command will not affect that new window but the original one. This seems to be a known bug. In addition, bookmarks chosen in the Bookmark bar of the new window will also open in the old one. Perhaps I should report that as well.
- Entering text in Chimera isn't fun. Again, a known problem. Thus there's no spell-checking [typos anyone?], no Services menu, no composing accented characters (Japanese "ことえり" text input and using umlaut keys "äöü" works, though), no using the extra keyboard shortcutes Cocoa text fields provide etc.
- The 'Open Location' function using a sheet just is nowhere as neat as that in OmniWeb or Internet Explorer when the toolbar is hidden.
- Downloads definitely should download into the Downloads folder automatically when clickes. Answering the dialog box over and over will drive me crazy at some stage.
- And of course automatically launching helper apps like Expander for unstuffing has been around since the golden days of System 7. But again, these problems are probably already being taken care of.
All this said - I think the Chimera people have already done impressive work and noticing that they seem to be aware of and possibly working at the obvious rough edges already, I am quite positive they'll keep up with the good work. There could be an easy-to-use, standards-compliant, popup-free browser for the Mac soon. I consider this good news.
September 25, 2002, 23:37