Mac OS X 10.0.3--How Fast is It? Part III

The main complaint when Mac OS X first came out March 24th was that Finder operations were too slow. We timed application launches for a number of Classic, Carbon and Cocoa applications in Mac OS X 10.0, 10.0.1 and 10.0.2 on our 450 MHz G4 Cube. Each new version was faster than the one before. So how about 10.0.3? Here are the results:

Average Launch Time in Full Seconds

Application	X 10.0	X 10.0.1	X 10.0.2	X 10.0.3
Netscape 4.77	7	6	4	3
Word 2001	5	4	2	2
AppleWorks 6.1b	n/a	n/a	6	5
IE 5.1	9	10	8	8
OmniWeb 4.0cf3	14	13	n/a	n/a
- v4.0rc1	n/a	n/a	9	9
- v4.0	n/a	n/a	n/a	11
Mail	4	4	4	4
System Preferences	3	2	2	2

We added AppleWorks 6.1 beta for Mac OS X and the final version of OmniWeb 4.0. The launch times are the rounded average of three launches following an initial launch. Version 10.0.3 is split second faster for the Classic and Carbon applications. However, Mac OS 9.1 used CarbonLib 1.2.5 for versions 10.0-10.0.2 and CarbonLib 1.3.1 with Mac OS X v10.0.3 which may have affected the results. Curiously, OmniWeb 4.0 final version is significantly slower to launch than version 4.0rc1.