Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Safari 3 vs. Firefox 2 and IE7

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the not-worth-it dept.

Bobcat writes "Ars Technica has a 'first look' at Safari for Windows, which is interesting because it's written from the perspective of someone new to Safari. It was tested against Firefox 2 and IE7 and aside from the slightly faster page loading, Ars didn't find much to recommend it to Windows users. 'The modest increase in rendering performance is hardly worth the deficiencies, and Safari's user interface simply doesn't provide the usability or flexibility of competing products. If the folks at Apple think that providing Windows users with a taste of Mac OS X through Safari is going to entice them to buy a Mac, it's going to take a better effort than the Safari 3 beta. Even if the final release is more polished and completely bug-free, it still won't be as powerful or feature-loaded as Opera or Firefox.'"

33 of 559 comments (clear)

  1. Pshhh... by Mockylock · · Score: 5, Funny

    I prefer Netscape Navigator 1.0. Simple, yet barely useable.

    --
    "Please, shut up. Just when I think you can't say anything more stupid, you speak again." -Archie Bunker.
    1. Re:Pshhh... by CaptainPatent · · Score: 1, Funny

      Pfft...

      You youngins and your fancy graphical internet browsers.

      It's all about Links running in my terminal screen!

      --
      Well, back to rejecting software patent applications.
    2. Re:Pshhh... by Mockylock · · Score: 3, Funny

      Links? What are Links? I'm using binary!

      --
      "Please, shut up. Just when I think you can't say anything more stupid, you speak again." -Archie Bunker.
    3. Re:Pshhh... by jdray · · Score: 5, Funny

      Links? Slacker! In my day, we read the HTML document raw. We had to interpret the tags ourselves. No DNS, either. We kept lists of IP addresses written on shirtsleeves. And they weren't our shirtsleeves, either. We had to steal them from our neighbors...

      --
      The Spoon
      Updated 6/28/2011
    4. Re:Pshhh... by molarmass192 · · Score: 4, Funny

      IP addresses ... we used to dreeeeeeeeeeam of IP addresses. We had to dial into the site modem ... and we didn't have a fancy monitors or modems either, we had to screech into the handset and listen for the raw HTML raw ... in EDCDIC!

      --

      Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws-Plato
    5. Re:Pshhh... by oliverthered · · Score: 5, Funny

      You had it easy, back in my day we had to post all our data on punch cards, send them off, wait a week, hope there wasn't a error in our request and then read the HTML back one like a time

      --
      thank God the internet isn't a human right.
    6. Re:Pshhh... by Lillesvin · · Score: 5, Funny

      $ telnet slashdot.org 80
      GET / HTTP/1.0
      Host: 127.0.0.1

      ...

      Human parsing FTW! :-p

      --
      "Live free or don't."
    7. Re:Pshhh... by MBGMorden · · Score: 4, Funny

      I just figured it was trying to type out those sounds he was screeching into the modem. Kinda hard to tell somebody they mispelled yow-yow-buh-sh-sh-ti-shhhhhhhhh.

      --
      "People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
    8. Re:Pshhh... by Lemmeoutada+Collecti · · Score: 5, Funny

      Shoot kid, back when I started using these computer things, we had to send a fox to the guy with the server, with or without a rock (we called em bits) tied to it's back. With a rock was one bit, without a rock was 0 bits. Then he would send the fox back, with or without the bit on it's back.

      Sometimes the fox would lose the bit, that was a dropped bit. We had a lot of dropped bitsback then. And man in the middle attacks, those danged nobles liked to hunt our foxes and take our bits for themselves. We quickly learned not to send coins as bits, as those financial transactions were always targets of those horse riding hackers.

      All that foxing back and forth was great high tech stuff, though. It meant that we could find out what happened to the hero in our latest serial we were following. Stories over fox took a while to load, but no longer than a torrent does now days... about two weeks to the chapter.

      Then some smarty came up with a bit bag, which we could put several bits in at a time, and send the whole packet with the fox. Then packet loss became a bigger problem, but bit loss pretty much disappeared.

      You kids now days with your quality of service and TCP/IP. You don't know how good you have it!

      Now get off'n my lawn!

      --

      You can have it fast, accurate, or pretty. Pick any 2.
    9. Re:Pshhh... by MarkGriz · · Score: 2, Funny

      "Human parsing FTW! :-p"

      Watch out for XSS vulnerabilities. Someone might hack into your girlfriend.

      --
      Beauty is in the eye of the beerholder.
    10. Re:Pshhh... by Dolly_Llama · · Score: 5, Funny

      In my day, we read the HTML document raw. We had to interpret the tags ourselves.


      So that's what the blink tag was for...
      --

      Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known. -- Carl Sagan

    11. Re:Pshhh... by Bluesman · · Score: 2, Funny

      A fox, eh? Spoiled rich kids who could afford foxes would have been laughed out of my neighborhood.

      We had to slingshot the bits, but since there was no way to know if you got a zero, we had to paint the bits first. Red was 1, blue was 0.

      A clever way we increased throughput was to use a repetition code, so each volley would have about 5 of the same bit. It was tiring to do, though, and a lot of bits were wasted when they hit trees.

      --
      If moderation could change anything, it would be illegal.
    12. Re:Pshhh... by cephus440 · · Score: 2, Funny

      ... I've retired to my hole and shot myself twice for being stupid ...

    13. Re:Pshhh... by El_Muerte_TDS · · Score: 4, Funny

      we read the HTML document raw
      After a while you don't see the code, but a women in red, a brunette, a blonde, ...
    14. Re:Pshhh... by Stonent1 · · Score: 2, Funny

      Hansets? Luxury! I had to glue a small magnet to my eardrum and hold a coil of wire next to my head!

    15. Re:Pshhh... by megaditto · · Score: 2, Funny

      Watch out for XSS vulnerabilities. Someone might hack into your girlfriend.

      That's won't work since he uses Linux.

      --
      Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
    16. Re:Pshhh... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

      No, he probably has many girlfriends, concurrently

    17. Re:Pshhh... by g-san · · Score: 2, Funny

      Pshaw! I click links then yank the fiber out of the switch and stick it in my eye!

  2. Is he kidding? by d474 · · Score: 5, Funny

    Since when are Safari's ever "bug free"?!?

    --
    Authority questions you. Return the favor.
  3. Firefox? Safari? IE? by serviscope_minor · · Score: 5, Funny

    What about lynx, or better yet, telnet 80???

    Bonus points for running the javascript in your head.

    --
    SJW n. One who posts facts.
  4. Safari is requesting a page to be loaded... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    Hi,

    Apple: Im a MAC
    PC: and Im a PC

    Apple: PC why do you have that colorful news page with customizable Ajax widgets on your shirt ?
    PC: well thats my new web application loaded on Firefox ! I can get all my news, weather and sports media based on my preferences.

    Apple: oh wow !, very nice...
    PC: Mac would you like to try the new web application out?

    Apple: I would love too, however my safari has a few dead animals and I can only support frames at this point... but I can play my ITunes waiting for the non-flash page to load and quicktime to boot up!
    PC: Sheesh.. and he calls me bloated...

  5. Re:Safari, and Mac OS X, are better. by s4ck · · Score: 5, Funny
    Come October, Mac OS X will serve everyone with one price, one version, one install: one vision of simple 64-bit desktop goodness.

    one faith, one land, one volk, one fuhrer!! zeig heil!

    Does it come with a brown shirt?

  6. This is the first Safari with Windows by ciaohound · · Score: 4, Funny

    Historically, mosquito netting was the best you could expect to keep the bugs out. Hardly seems sporting, old boy.

    --
    Oh, yeah, it's not easy to pad these out to 120 characters.
  7. Re:Horrid UI by Doctor+Crumb · · Score: 5, Funny

    Funny, all of my apps are well behaved, and only put a single entry in the logic part of my application menu. Maybe your apt-get is broken?

  8. Re:Horrid UI by truthsearch · · Score: 5, Funny

    What conventions? "I'm so great, I'll put shortcuts in your start menu, quick launch, two tray icons (including an autoupdater) and now I have a custom UI so I look special." That's every Microsoft app. Microsoft doesn't follow their own UI guidelines on their own platform, so why should anyone else?

    --
    Developers: We can use your help.
  9. Re:Not the point by zaren · · Score: 3, Funny

    Precisely. Everyone's howling how this can't possibly replace Firefox or IE. Well, guess what - it's not supposed to do that. What it's supposed to do is get the iPhone's web interface out to all those developers that are clamoring for an iPhone dev kit, because His Steveness announced that the way you get apps on the iPhone now is to make them AJAX friendly web pages. And since there's only going to be one web browser on the iPhone, you better be able to test functionality on it, regardless of where you're designing the app.

    Also, how everyone mewling about how buggy and unfinished it is... HELLO! It's a first release BETA, of course it's unfinished!

    Some people... jeez, if Apple released a handheld cure for cancer, they'd complain that it only came in a brushed metal case.

    --
    Come to the University of Mars! Classes starting soon!
  10. Re:Review summary: "It's not the same as FireFox" by pherthyl · · Score: 2, Funny

    But it comes with a free frogurt!

  11. Re:Who says it's about making Windows converts? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    In fact, I hope Apple succeeds in dissuading PC users from buying Macs. All the PC-minded converts recently have really ruined some of the old Mac community hangouts. These people aren't interested in art, politics, love, the aesthetics of Cocoa and Objective-C—they just want to funnel beer, grope titty, and port Visual Studio to the Mac. These fucking post-fratboys should dump their Mac pretensions and move to Murray Hill where they belong.

  12. 7 3 2 Duh!? by bbosley · · Score: 2, Funny

    It is so obvious... IE is already at v7 cleary releases ahead of the other two... and even though Safari just came out on WinTel it's already at v3 blowing past Firefox. Just think if IE incremented their version number for every bug. It would be at v410607 showing it's superiority.

  13. Re:Safari, and Mac OS X, are better. by corifornia · · Score: 1, Funny

    Right on! How dare the parent provide us with an opinion and information, FIE ON HIM FIE FIE FIE!

    --
    crap.
  14. Re:Safari, and Mac OS X, are better. by NZBeeMan · · Score: 3, Funny

    Come October, Mac OS X will serve everyone with one price, one version, one install: one vision of simple 64-bit desktop goodness.

    one faith, one land, one volk, one fuhrer!! zeig heil!

    I was thinking "and one ring to bind them"

  15. How Is this Perspective "Interesting"? by Mr.+No+Skills · · Score: 2, Funny

    Ars Technica has a 'first look' at Safari for Windows, which is interesting because it's written from the perspective of someone new to Safari.

    Based on all the server logs I look at, just about everyone is someone new to Safari.

    --
    Sleep is for the Weak
  16. Re:Safari, and Mac OS X, are better. by snuf23 · · Score: 2, Funny

    "Does it come with a brown shirt?"

    No, but it does come with a black turtleneck.

    --
    Sometimes my arms bend back.