For the Love of Chimera

I made the switch from IE5/Mac to Chimera when 0.5 came out, and I'm never going back. The ability to reap most of the benefits of Mozilla without the snail-like performance is something I'm recommending to everyone I know who uses a Mac.

Tabbed browsing (indispensible now and forever), Cocoa-code, nightly builds, enlarge/shrink text toolbar icons - it just doesn't get any better than this.

I'm right with you on the caveats of Chimera - for Flash-heavy sites I still need to switch back into IE, but I suspect this will be fixed somewhere along the way. Also, I find myself more and more infrequently visiting Flash sites anyway - I think that process began when K10K took its break; the beginning of my reunion with HTML and CSS.

I'm surprised you didn't mention the rumors the Apple is going to turn Chimera into iBrowse. Still a rumor, I know, but one that gets my mouth watering. With the advent of the financial and technical muscle of Cupertino, I'm quite sure all the performance lags and bugs could quickly be stamped out. Building on the already meth-addict-like rendering speed would quickly lead to a serious contender in the browser world.

I've been getting the nightly builds and couldn't be happier - only a few bads days and increasingly fewer app crashes. Still waiting for a history-viewing feature, and it wouldn't kill him to add in a tab-caching feature that would keep track of your open windows in the event of an app crash - allowing you to restore the sites you were looking at right before the app died, but that's just my personal wish list.

I've been promising myself to get involved in the bug reporting effort for Chimera - even going so far as to sign up for the e-mail Chimera Digest - but I can't say I've been very active with that. I'm going to do my best to be better about that - I want to contribute to this app in the worst way, as it has improved my browsing experience exponentially.

Question for you - what font preferences do you currently have? I've had great success with the following (running my 19 in. monitor at 1024x768):

Proportional (Serif): Georgia Regular, 13pt
[with the Quartz text-rendering, Georgia is beautiful and quite readable]

Monospace: Monaco Regular, 13pt
Sans-serif: Myriad Pro
Cursive: Lucida Grande
Fantasy: Gadget

Yeah I use Chimera as well, but I am working on an UI hack and expanded feature set browser based on Chimera in part, Called Cunning. It sports a much better UI, Metal or Aqua and a spellecheckable text field for BBS board and blog nuts like me, and a dock menu that holds your bookmarks.

Give it a try, http://concepthause.com/dev/

Chris

I surely will. I've already "faked" the Metal look by applying a Duality theme, but having it native would be great for those who don't want to risk their systems with such hacks.

update - Cunning looks pretty nice. I particularly like the placement of the favicon outside of the address bar, and their presence in the favorites bar. Ah! It also seems you have the history tab added to the bookmarks sidebar. Is this something that is simply turned off in Chimera, or something that you've added?

note: the 'progress' icon doesn't seem to fit with the metal scheme.

Chris said:

“I’m surprised you didn’t mention the rumors the Apple is going to turn Chimera into iBrowse.”

Oops, Chris. You missed the last line of Todd’s entry...

“Perhaps someday, just maybe, into the fabled iBrowser.”

That I did. Forgiveth...

Man I'm going crazy. I'm trying to change my default browser to Chimera, but it keeps switching back to IE. What's the deal? I changed it in the preference pane, I deleted com.apple.internetprefs.plist, I stuffed and deleted IE and OmniWeb, and that solved it for awhile. But once I put them back it switched back to IE. What am I missing?

ChimeraKnight is great!

Corey, check out the known issues section here. The solution involves removing specific cache files.

Chimera rocks, been using it since 0.3 as my default browser, and like others in this thread, I am never going back to anything else. One of the Chris' in these comments asked for a way to enable the history tab, and it's done quite easily: Somewhere in the depth of ~/Library/Application/Support/Chimera lurks a file called prefs.js. Quit Chimera, and open this file in your prefered editor, and ad this line to the end of the file:
user_pref("chimera.show_history", true);
Fire up Chimera once again, and you should have the history tab enabled in the sidebar.

Uh, correction. it is
~/Library/Application Support/Chimera,
and not:
~/Library/Application/Support/Chimera. Sorry 'bout that.

I have been using chimera as my default browser, but it crashes whenever it runs into Flash! Has anyone else had this happen? Is there any solution?

I switched recently to Mac from PC (at home, still using Wintel at the office). Since I love Phoeniz on Windows, Chimera was a natural choice for OS X. I love it and hope that the openoffice project comes up with a free package that is as good. If Apple is listening, maybe Chimera could become iBrowser and openoffice could become iOffice -- then they could tell Bill and Co to jump in the lake once and for all. For my part, I want nothing MS on my iMac and Chimera is the best alternative in the browser wars. Spread the word!