andrew carter

Parallels released version 3.0 the end of last week. Based on my weekend with the trial version, Parallels has now earned a permanent spot in my Trash Can.

Parallels announced 3.0 in a very odd fashion. About a week or so ago, they started to promote a “pre-upgrade” that would expire in only one week. They also had a rather impressive list of new features including Direct3D and OpenGL support for virtual machines. I found the timing odd. About a week away from WWDC and they launch this cryptic upgrade offer without a firm launch date for the software itself. Something didn’t seem right.

Then Friday Parallels 3.0 is launched with a trial available. Note that any references to 2.x versions are now gone from the website. You can’t even download patches for the old versions. So I grabbed the trial and gave it a try. Calling this software “beta quality” is being generous. It may be the single worst commercial release I’ve ever used. The 3D support is nowhere near release quality. It can occasionally run but makes an absolute mess of both the Windows virtual machine and in some cases, a mess of OS X. Yes, you read that right. Running Parallels with 3D support can screw up your windows in OS X. I had to reboot to get the finder back to normal. I had windows that were cutoff and couldn’t be resized. Clicking on regions of the windows didn’t work. It is absolutely shocking.

Even ignoring the 3D mess, the software is unstable, slow, periodically crashes, and is generally a pain to use. I’m not about to cut Parallels any slack at all here:

• Reason #1 is that they claim they are supporting Direct3D/OpenGL and it is not a beta version (unlike VMWare Fusion).
• Reason #2 - they mess up the host OS.

Of all things to get right in a virtual machine package, leaving the host alone would be one of my priorities. This is sandbox software to isolate another OS from the host. They have fundamentally violated the very notion of why their software should exist.

I was increasingly displeased with Parallels before 3.0 anyway. I’ve had kernel panics running Parallels 2.5. USB has always been flaky. They don’t seem to have any intention of writing Linux VM drivers to speed up Linux guests. It’s slow. It’s a resource hog. On and on.

My opinion? Parallels rushed this thing out the door because Apple or VMWare is going to lower the hammer on them come Monday. And good riddance I say. VMWare Fusion at Beta 3 is already significantly better than Parallels. And VMWare has the sense to call beta features beta (and not charge people for it). And VMWare has Linux drivers. And they have a long history of getting virtualization right (even before the hardware was helping them out).

In the end, Parallels is flash with little substance. Coherence is cool the first time you see it and annoying after that. It’s a parlor trick and therefore incredibly hard to get reliable. 3D support is very desirable. But seeing Half Life (the first version) in a small window is cool for about a minute. Seeing your FPS under 10 is not usable. I’ll give them credit for being the security blanket people needed to migrate over to Intel-based Mac’s. But their time is up and I want software that works.