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Safari Beta 2 Available
pldms writes "Safari Beta 2 is available via Software Update or from the Safari page. This is build 73, for those who've had 'exclusive' access to previous development versions since beta 1 ;-) The blurb: 'Safari Beta 2 introduces tabbed browsing to conveniently see and switch between multiple web pages in a single window, and AutoFill to instantly fill out web forms and password fields. This update also features increased standards compatibility and improved application stability.'" I had to set Lax Certificate Checks in the Debug menu to use it with Slashdot ... and its secure cookie check is still quite broken (either saves secure cookies without the secure flag, or sends out secure cookies to insecure sites, which would violate
RFC 2965
where it says "no less than the same level of security").
I had my doubts about Safari. After a few days of "testing" it out, I forgot how painful it was to use IE. Sure there are occations that Safari won't open a page or something, but this beta is better than most 5.X brosers that have been around for a while.
The new tabbed interface is VERY well done. I'm very happy with it now. Could be the perfect browser....for me at least.
My
I wish Apple had combined the tabs feature with their right-mouse-button click Google search feature. If you haven't seen this, RMB click on any word. One of the options is "Google Search". Selecting it will (surprise, surprise) take you to google.com to search for the word you had selected. I wish instead it opened a new tab to do the search. Seems like an obvious place to use tabs.
fh
What is it that makes this browser so much better then the others?
I have some friends now that recently switched to the apple side of computing, and I can't help but laugh at them on some of the stuff they applaud Apple for. This browser is one of them.
They claim it is faster, but I just don't see how that is possible. The bottleneck in most all browsing I do is the network. Have they simply found a way to make it seem faster? Have other browsers on the Mac been slow in the past? I don't get it.
As a reference. I use IE at work, and Phoenix (or should that be the browser formerly known as Phoenix) at home. While I do appreciate some of the benefits of Phoenix over IE, I honestly think it is a toss up between them.
I think most of my problems nowdays are with sites that are just ugly. However, I can't tell the difference -- or maybe I just don't care -- between the way any browsers handle fonts and whatnot. I also can't notice most of the differences between how sites render. I do appreciate the fact that most sites appear stable in all browsers now.
So... what is so great about Safari?
I was an Regional IT Director for the Bush Campaign. Most people in the campaign used PCs (Dell) but there were some departments that used Macs. I didn't work in those departments though. I used to have a picture of Bush using a Dell PC but I have seemed to misplace it.
There's a major font size issue and something mildly wonky with margins.
--- Ban humanity.
One of the things which makes me use iTunes on certain machines is the indiscriminate search feature and how it works so well with both librarys and playlists.
I would really like to see it added in someway to Safari as now it is my main browser my bookmarks, despite attempted organisation are beginning to get out of control.
Swapping the Google search panel for a bookmark search interface (when you flick the bookmark switch, which checked titles and URLs) would be cool, and as a 'power' feature if you could searched cached versions of the bookmark's pages as well it would be excellent (please inform me if another browser already has that functionality)...
Opera is all but dead (is it even being supported?), Mozilla is so bloated that it includes components I neither want nor need, IE crashes randomly, and OmniWeb... is pretty good, but I've not used it much. My recollection is that it was slow to render.
Safari renders pages fast. Very fast, when compared to other browsers. Sure, my 56k line is by far the limiting factor, but for some reason, the added complexities of HTML, SHTML, style sheets, etc have bogged down most browsers on the Mac (I don't see the same issue on the PC).
Safari is based on the open source Konquerer, I understand, and Apple are putting improvements to the rendering engine back out there. That's got to be a good thing for non-Apple users, having a large company devote time to improving an open source project.
It's only at second public beta, but it does what I want - provide a small footprint browser that's clean, fast and compatible with standards.
so far, this thing flies. i have only 2 minor complaints so far:
tab switching is kind of slow at times, even with only 2 or 3 tabs open.
i'm still waiting for them to get the 'check spelling as you type' pref to stick between sessions.
other than that, this browser is truly amazing. loads pages lightning quick,looks great, and the feature set is starting to set it at par with the other big time browsers for mac.
*** For a better tommorow, change your life today ***
The "open in tabs" feature is somewhat buggy. Any existing tabs disappear; and the "back" button after all of the new tabs show up takes the browser back to the previous tabs.
I think this is actually the desired behavior. It allows you to treat a collection of links as a single "location" you can go to, instead of treating each separate tab as a wholly separate instance. While it might take some getting used to, I kinda like it. I can open up my 'News' pages in a single click and, after browsing all the tabs, return back to whatever I was doing beforehand with another single click.
That's something I always appreciate about Apple -- their willingness to push a UI feature to its limits....
But in general, Opera is cluttered by comparison with IE, leave alone Safari. It has a modest measure of feature creep -- mail client, a "Contacts" list as part of my browser? Between the two Opera versions I can see without standing up, here, it seems not to particularly respect the API of the OS. (One version is treating non-modal "Transfers" dialogs so that I can't drag them outside the program's overall frame. Dang it, get outta the way! The other, new one includes some pretty whacky, sometimes ambiguous stuff like check boxes and radio buttons together in the same right-click contextual dialog. I just tried to close the sidebar deal -- I hate that -- but along the way I accidentally removed a few of the buttons from it. Also seem to have dragged a tab down into the list area, and it showed up there but I don't know what that actually means. Oops. Well, it's gone now.)
We all like tweakability in principle, but why are there three different basic preferences items on two different menus in version 7.10? Why do I have my Google search box in a completely different spot from the three other search boxes in the default layout, again? Why are there 16 different icons in the basic Nav toolbar? You'd really use maybe three of those, unless you honestly buy "Magic Wand" and "Fast Forward" as basic Web approaches(?). The "mystery meat" ones you have to mouse over to figure out are just cholesterol. Seems like a bit of work to get to a clean Web browser.
Sort of the difference between a gaudy leatherman tool and a solid pair of pliers. Just my take, and no offense intended. Some people carry their leatherman everywhere, but I just want a pair of pliers handy when I need 'em.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
I've been using Safari since the first beta was released but it was only this last weekend when I realized that I couldn't find something in it: MIME-type configuration.
I ran into this when I realized that I couldn't tell it how to handle Bit Torrent but had no problems with Mozilla. You know, some way of teaching Safari how to handle a new type?
Does anyone know how this is supposed to be done?
--Richard
Safari is less about Apple trying to make their own end-all be-all browser and more Apple wanting to add a good HTML enginer to the Cocoa framework. Safari is as much of technology demonstration as it is an actual product. When WebCore becomes a system framework anyone will be able to implement their own browser on OSX with quite a bit of functionality at that. OmniGroup is planning to ditch their homebrew HTML engine for WebCore in the next OmniWeb release. They get all of the functionality and compatibility of WebCore and add their own interface and organization to the browser. It will still be OmniWeb but will just have WebCore doing the heavy lifting.
As for Camino, it is using the work of paid and unpaid developers on the Mozilla project to do the heavy lifting and merely adding an interface. If Safari beats it out in popularity it will be because Camino stopped adding features people wanted or needed. There's tons of Camino users that have stuck with it despite Safari's release specifically because it has more features than Safari does. Hence Camino for them is a better browser, if at some point Safari becomes "better" for them Camino will have to improve more to be even better. That sort of competition is a very good thing for end users because they end up with the best product.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.