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Safari 4 Released, Claimed "30 Times Faster Than IE7"
CNETNate writes "Apple has released the beta version of Safari 4 for Mac and PC, with claims that its Nitro rendering engine is '30 times faster than IE7,' and three times faster than Firefox 3. Other new features include 'Top Sites,' which shows users the most frequently visited Web pages, 'Full History Search' for searching through not only the URLs and titles of visited pages, but also the complete text within the page itself — something Opera has been doing for a while."
Anyone know if this is a new engine or just Squirrelfish renamed?
Looks like Safari might be the first Acid 3 browser to the market. Opera's version 10 is Acid 3 compliant, but it's still in Alpha testing.
I noted this feature in Opera 10. The results shown in the demos were rather impressive. The web pages had more of a print-layout look to them without the classic trick of relying on images to cover all the content. This has the potential to completely change the look of the web for the better.
I'm still trying to figure out how being able to use Canvas as a style to apply to web elements is useful, but the idea definitely sounds cool. I suppose one could always set a fixed web page background as a canvas, then make it look like they're on an acid trip as they scroll. :-P
I'm downloading the beta now. If it lives up to the hype that Apple is giving it, it will be an amazing piece of software.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
IE7 is actually getting a bit outdated as it is, so this claim isn't as bold as it seems. Why didn't they compare it to IE8? Or better yet if they really want to talk about speed, Google's Chrome is pretty fast.
Chrome beat them to it.
Its like saying you beat the kid with a fake leg at sprinting, or beating the a preschooler at a spelling bee.
Obligatory blog plug: http://www.caseybanner.ca/
I love Safari and just installed the 4th version, and the Web Inspector is very pretty, but as long as extensions are not officially supported, I will use it for 24 hours only and switch back to Firefox (as I do for every new version of Safari).
I'm posting on it right now on a mac. It has some really innovative ideas and has made my day.
However the titlebar now looks cluttered. Also, when you click on the title bar to focus, you might not get the window you were (half-) looking at. This is a bug they should fix.
Here's the actual claims from Apple's website:
"Using the new Nitro Engine, for example, Safari executes JavaScript up to 30 times faster than Internet Explorer 7 and more than 3 times faster than Firefox 3 based on performance in leading industry benchmark tests: iBench and SunSpider.
In addition to superior JavaScript performance, Safari offers top-flight HTML performance -- the best on any platform -- loading pages 3 times faster than Internet Explorer 7 and almost 3 times faster than Firefox 3."
I'm not too familiar with either of these benchmarking programs, so I can't really pick at the results too much, but the actual claim is 'up to 30 times faster' which means that for some function it's 30 times faster, but for most it's probably not at that level of magnitude. It seems as though some of this important information was lost in the game of telephone that is internet news.
Also, I'm more interested in how it stacks up against Firefox, Opera, and Chrome. Comparing it to IE7 is a little bit like Ford comparing their new car to a horse and cart. No offense meant to the browser, but from every chart I've seen it's the bottom of the barrel in terms of speed.
If IE and Safari can look at Firefox's source code and see exactly how FF implement's something, how can FF maintain a competitive advantage as a core browser. By core browser I mean without all the plugins/themes/extensions. IE/Safari already have a distribution advantage in that the browser comes with the OS. I'm going to a assume that the folks over at Mozilla would not declare victory if Apple/MSFT decided one day to reskin and rename FF and package it with their OS.
It's a unfair advantage that the OS vendors can see the source code of FF, however the reverse is not true. So if Safari has this great performance, how can the FF figure out how Safari does it?
For what i saw in safari site, the functionality is pretty similar to Opera builtin Speed Dial and Firefox's Fast Dial extension.
Is not trivial to innovate over what Opera do since years ago, at least in the meaningful features.
The new top sites feature is cool. It shows the sites you visit most often all in a window.
Quite embarrassing if you ask me.
>Chrome beat them to it.
Not on the Mac, they didn't.
http://www.google.com/chrome/intl/en/mac.html
So if Safari has this great performance, how can the FF figure out how Safari does it?
By heading over to WebKit.org and downloading the open source rendering engine it uses?
WTF?!?!? It still looks out of place...even the screenshots can't make it blend in with vista. Native look and feel means a complete skin replacement, not just window chrome.
"So if Safari has this great performance, how can the FF figure out how Safari does it?" By looking at the Open Source Webkit that drives Safari.
Given that this alleges to be a beta version and according to its own EULA:
why do Apple insist on removing any existing Safari 3 install when installing?
If we are supposed to evaluate and develop, then surely it would be prudent to allow a stable version to also be installed alongside for mission-critical usage.
Surely it's a TERRIBLE idea for non-stable, evaluation software to disallow the use of an alternative stable version?
It would seems to me people with ideas are always ahead of people copying ideas.
Do you D?
> how can the FF figure out how Safari does it?
Man they'd have to like, use the Internet or something: http://trac.webkit.org/browser/trunk
That's the source code to webkit, the rendering engine behind Safari. It's licensed under the LGPL.
The reason, in case you were wondering, is because it was started from an open-source rendering engine called KHTML, which was written by the KDE project. The LGPL made sure that when Apple started improving it their improvements would stay in the open.
And so you *can* in fact see all the nice things Apple has done with Safari and all the speed tricks they're working on.
I touch computers in naughty places
Safari has Webkit @ it's core.
FF devs can look @ the Webkit source. FF devs can also look @ the Google Chrome Source, which is also based on webkit.
In fact, webkit is licensed under BSD + GPL, so IANAL, but I think this mesans FF can even *use* webkit's code directly in their browser ...
Why aren't you encrypting your e-mail?
And what if IE has great performance, too, how will Firefox ever be able to keep up with that?
Apple loves to put in meaningless benchmarks with no real-world meaning to hype their products.
For example, the "3 times faster than a Pentium II" claims back in some of the older PowerPC days - this was true for a single Photoshop operation that at that point had Altivec optimizations on PPC but was running straight scalar code (no MMX) on a P2.
For nearly all other applications, the P2 was equal to or faster than the PPC. But Apple hyped their systems based on that one single meaningless-for-most-people benchmark. (As opposed to AMD's speed rating system which for the Athlon XPs was based on a suite of benchmarks and their average comparison to a similarly clocked P4, which was typically pretty accurate.)
Here, how is Apple magically eliminating network latency and providing infinite network bandwidth with browser changes? For nearly all users, the network is the bottleneck.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
BSD + LGPL actually. Which means *anyone* can use webkit's code in their browser, even a closed-source project. (And many do!)
I touch computers in naughty places
Through the power of open software many developers can group together allowing many more times the programming ability than MS or Apple could ever pay for. What you mean you've never considered giving back to the FF project. This will always be a "disadvantage" (if you want to call it that) of Open software in a proprietary product world. But TBH who cares. If Safari and IE get better because of FF then FF has done its job as much as if it became the only browser in use. Software popularity is something only a pretentious prick would aim for. Actually impacting others development and making all software better - now thats a worth goal.
Er... sorry, that should read "webkit" not "webkit's code"
LGPL or GPL rendering engines can use webkit's code, but closed-source projects have to use the whole engine or publicly provide the alterations they make.
I touch computers in naughty places
Ok, in this case PC is MS Windows. So it doesn't run on GNU/Linux. Considering the current Macs are build using almost the same components as any other PC (the only real difference being the lack of the old BIOS) they might as well drop the useless distinction and simply refer to MS Windows.
So it looks like the Safari 4 beta causes the growl plugin for the mail.app to crash the mail.app
great.
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
And what if IE has great performance, too, how will Firefox ever be able to keep up with that?
Anyone believe that this will ever happen?
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
Falling Leaves Animation: http://webkit.org/blog-files/leaves/index.html
Bouncing Box Animation: http://webkit.org/blog-files/bounce.html
Rotate and Fade Animation: http://webkit.org/blog-files/pulse.html
CSS Recipes for Effects: http://developer.apple.com/safari/articles/webcontent/cssrecipes.html
CSS Gradients: http://developer.apple.com/safari/library/documentation/InternetWeb/Conceptual/SafariVisualEffectsProgGuide/Gradients/chapter_2_section_1.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40008032-CH7-SW11
Video tag (requires Quicktime): http://webkit.org/blog/140/html5-media-support/
CSS Gradients: http://webkit.org/blog/175/introducing-css-gradients/
Background Shaped Clipping: http://webkit.org/blog/164/background-clip-text/
Local Database Example: http://webkit.org/misc/DatabaseExample.html
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Firefox wins over users by offering a better product.
Let's say IE8 was a repackaged Firefox, what would we learn?
Firefox is where innovation happens. IE could not compete with Firefox. People who use IE8 will now have a better browsing experience because of Firefox.
Why would anyone already using Firefox switch back? There's no reason. But a real reason still exists for IE8 users to move forward to Firefox.
That's the magic of open source. The competitive advantage is that they want people to copy them. Who chooses the copy over the original?
Though not automatic - Opera beat them to it. Although yes I am an Opera "fanboy" (if you will) I genuinly prefer to know what is where on that list. The main reason is Opera binds Ctrl+[1...9] to the "favorites" as a shortcut. You need them to stay static to have any hope of remembering them.
It's like all those things but in a contest that doesn't even matter, like the kid who can eat the most worms or something.
Okay, maybe I'm just being ignorant, I guess there are people who it matters to but personally I've never come across a website that I couldn't "run" because my browser wasn't optimised enough. Even IE7, the supposed slowest of the bunch has run every website I've ever been too fine although I nowadays always use Firefox.
I guess it's more about future potential though? as Javascript performance improves then maybe we can see it become more useful for more things too.
Anyone know why Javascript performance is repeatedly mouthed off as such a big deal? Is it to do with future hopes for Javascript or is it about making existing sites work on even the most low end of systems- would that even matter to Apple when they don't really even sell particularly low end systems?
- Scrolling this /. page is extremely slow in safari.
- The tabs in the window's title bar is just plain annoying and feels really out of place.
- Just like Google's Chrome this browser also doesn't blend in well with MS Windows UI. It's feels alien to the other programs.
I've tried pointing that out before, but you're probably wasting your breath. The tin-foil hat crowd here at slashdot seems to think that Apple is keeping all the juiciest enhancements for themselves. I know it's not true because I run Safari on my macs and have run some webkit browsers like midori on my linux machines, they're about as fast, certainly faster than firefox. I'd use midori as my full time browser, but it's not as full featured as firefox and is unstable (or was last version I downloaded, like 0.0.21 or so).
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the war room!
How is it unfair? Firefox can look at Safari's code source and do the same things it does.
And who cares if Firefox can compete more? It already has a good distribution, and Firefox's point isn't to "compete" or gain a monopoly, or any such thing, but to deliver a good, standards-compliant browser to help foster more standards-compliance in the marketplace. The best situation is to have a number of web browsers that are all fully compliant and have a minimal popularity to be sustainable.
If he explores all forms and substances Straight homeward to their symbol-essences; He shall not die.
The average user, is entirely unaware of this whole heated battle of the browsers nonsense.
To them, all they see is "new update to Safari available", and they install it, and suddenly they have all these new amazing features, because to them, they are new.
Stability and consistency is far more important than the latest and greatest toys. Personally, I have no real use or preference for Safari, but I'm not going to attack them for simply bringing in some features their users might like. Chances are pretty good that every feature of every single browser, of every platform, was already created somewhere else beforehand.
Likewise, especially if you are a fanboi of whatever browser you use, you will rant and rave about how it has this feature that no other browser has, yet, you don't actually use it.
And lastly, it's not exactly an instantaneous thing, there are quite a few factors they have to take into consideration, it's not just as easy as "hey thats cool, lets add that to ours" and 2 days later its coded, tested, packaged and posted. Much like any software, there is a 1 to 1.5 years between major releases, and you can't exactly force every browser to align their releases.
Besides, Safari 4.0 has been around for almost a year as a developers preview.
P.S. Opera User.
They do compare it to Chrome.
http://www.apple.com/safari/whats-new.html#performance
Next.
Just type data:%80,; into your address bar!
By having different goals.
For example, Chrome could copy FF's adblock extension. But they won't, because they don't want to. FF (and probably Opera) is mostly for the user (though FF has arguably compromised the users' interest in favor of the commercial CAs); Chrome is for the advertiser and javascript web app maker; MSIE is for the intranet proprietary web app lockin; Safari is probably intended to address a mix of various concerns (but overall very pro-user as well).
The OpenBSD and Linux projects can see each other sources, but they've nevertheless gone in different directions, because their goals are different.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
The screenshots make it look very similar to iTunes, but presumably Safari is pretty fast. What they need to do is find a way to make iTunes not run like a pregnant cow...
This author takes full ownership and responsibility for the unpopular opinions outlined above.
Safari has had Private Browsing for ages. I'm not hot on my browser history, but I believe it was one of, if not the, first to do this. (correct me if I'm wrong)
Safari has had that, at least Mac-side, for a while--Command-[1...9] are bound to the first nine bookmarks in the Bookmark Bar.
Benford's Corollary to Clarke's Law: "Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced."
Is it faster than not executing the scripts at all? (NoScript for Firefox)
We shave to design web sites for the lowest common denominator.
{{.sig}}
NOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
F*** you, Google, now everyone's going to start using this f***ed up idea.
Furthermore, wouldn't Apple want developers to keep a copy of Safari 3 around for compatibility testing, even after Safari 4 goes out of beta? Yeah, I know that you can only have one official Webkit install that the rest of the system uses, but there is nothing preventing Apple from providing a standalone version of the the beta, or repackaging Safari 3 to be standalone when you install the Safari 4.
Anyway, Michel Fortin was nice enough to do that for all the major stable releases of Safari. Enjoy.
Reverse engineering is fun. It can also be consider illegal but so is kneeling on a skywalk in Spokane, WA. (see law below)
Reverse engineering should be commended, not prohibited but U.S. laws are often moronic. Here is the example I promised above:
Listing 10.10.060 Skywalks -- Prohibited Acts.
A. No person may commit any of the following acts within the pedestrian skywalk system or within any pedestrian mall:
1. sit, kneel, lounge, lie, or otherwise recline upon floors or stairs;
(Ord. C-28629)
Effective Date: 4/1/1987. Passed On: 2/23/1987
If you need to tie your shoe, you better have good balancing skills or be very flexible.
Meh. It is an issue at work. My top site is my company's intranet, thank god, but everything else is marginally work-related.
Learn about Photography Basics.
As the parent noted.. nearly all of the "killer features" that other web browsers "boast" about these days were in fact first seen in Opera, usualy many years before anyone else.
Tabbed browsing since 1994 (nineteen fucking ninety-four)
I'm sick of hearing about how great Firefox is, when its really just a bloated pig like internet explorer and safari. You need a fucking extensions for this? for that? everyone uses that one too? Jesus Christ. You heard me.. a bloated fucking pig. Deal with it, FOSS worshipers.
"His name was James Damore."
For anyone that has both a Mac and PC, one of the minor frustrations you face is constantly having to remember to use different keyboard shortcuts when you move back and forth. Safari on the PC was an option for me for this reason alone. Sadly, the Mac-look, odd window handling, terrible font rendering and random long pauses (something to do with advertisements I think) made it an option only - I had to keep Chrome and FF around for some sites.
No longer. Safari 4 is now my default Windows browser. And not just because of the keystrokes, it's faster than any of the other (always up-to-date) browsers on this machine, renders everything perfectly (Chrome still has serious problems here), the font problems are gone (now Chrome is the one that looks bad), the random pauses are missing, etc.
So basically Safari now does everything any of the other browsers does, plus more, plus its faster, AND it has the same keystrokes.
Still not perfect though: I'm still trying to get the font sizes right (the readable text above is fine, but this editor has HUGE text) and I want to remove the Chrome-like tools menus (I like real menu bars, thanks), and there's some oddity when scrolling long pages. But nevertheless the problems are less than those in Chrome and the speed of FF in comparison makes me willing to overlook them.
Maury
Private Browsing was introduced in version 2.0 of Safari, back in April '05.
The "cue the foo posts in 3, 2, 1..." posts will commence with no subsequent foo posts in 3, 2, 1...
What about Opera?
Which loads faster for me than any of the 3?
I'd test the new Safari, but as my friend pointed out it fucks up Windows Live Messenger, so I'll wait until they fix that. If they ever do.
In Firefox it's called Smart Bookmarks->Most Visited. And no porn sites there for me.
No ascii art.
It's a unfair advantage that the OS vendors can see the source code of FF, however the reverse is not true. So if Safari has this great performance, how can the FF figure out how Safari does it?
First off if people have to copy you then by definition you are in the lead.
I write Open Source code and don't see it as a disadvantage. The reason I make it open source is that I WANT others to use it. I have a day job to pay the bills.
You have to look at the motivation of the people working on the software. Some peo9ple just like to make things, some paint, some make photos some make software. All of this beats watching TV.
Apple build WebKit with the same compiler and build settings as everyone else. There's nothing stopping you from grabbing the XCode project from webkit.org, building it yourself, and comparing the results to the version Apple ships. Or you can just grab the nightly builds from webkit.org and replace the Apple-supplied version. Or you can troll on Slashdot. It's your choice.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
They're comparing it to Microsoft's latest and greatest. Seems fair to me, even if it is like beating a one-legged man.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
for searching through not only the URLs and titles of visited pages, but also the complete text within the page itself - something "Mac OS X Spotlight' has been doing for a while. I turned on the feature on Safari to never delete history, so that I could always find an article I read last month on fossils of mammoth.
Probably by looking at the source code. WebKit, WebCore, and JavaScriptCore are all open-source. This is why they're used everywhere, including in recent GNOME browsers, QT 4, on Symbian, Android, and WebOS on the Palm Pre.
Opera 10 has been out months with these features, and it's javascript speed is very good on REAL WORLD SITES, not just the Webkit optimized SunSpider synthetic benchmark...
I am interested in trying this beta, but it caused a problem with Apple Mail. I used the Uninstall package that came with the image and removed it. End of problem. I reported the problem and I am looking forward to the stable release.
Let's say IE8 was a repackaged Firefox, what would we learn?
[...]
Why would anyone already using Firefox switch back? There's no reason. But a real reason still exists for IE8 users to move forward to Firefox.
That's the magic of open source. The competitive advantage is that they want people to copy them. Who chooses the copy over the original?
Lots of people chose Ubuntu over Debian.
I believe its the grid of webpage thumbnails he is referring to when he says Opera beat them to it. The difference with Opera's compared to Chrome is that Opera doesn't automatically pick what goes there, the user has to do that. It looks like the same goes for Safari and also Safari has a smoother visual for it.
The Control 1-9 is just his justification for why he likes that Opera doesn't automatically pick what sites go there. Its not the feature he is emphasizing.
1 (short ton / firkin) = 89.1432354 slugs / keg
During the early days of Safari 3.0, I was in charge of making sure my companies product was compatible with Safari.
I have built WebKit from their xcode project. I have submitted bugs. And I know that sometimes the fix arrives in Safari months before WebKit.
I have much respect for that development team, but to say that Apple (as close-lipped and proprietary as they are) isn't holding anything back is just naive.
Online Starcraft RPG? At
Dietary fiber is like asynchronous IO-- Non-blocking!
That's the most retarded thing I've heard all week.
If you look at the source code already linked to, you can see for yourself. Webkit source code is always ahead of the official release that comes with Safari. Safari != Webkit either. The download of Webkit basically comes with a Safari like interface but it not Safari.
Are you suggesting Apple uses some magical build that is not related at all to the publicly available Webkit source? Because if you do then you're pretty ignorant on that topic.
I love it, especially how they redesigned tabs. The only thing I'd love to see is ability to configure (on Mac) COMMAND+1..9 shortcut to switch between tabs. I haven't found a way to achieve that yet, has anyone?
o_O
The average user, is entirely unaware of this whole heated battle of the browsers nonsense.
The average user doesn't read slashdot and is entirely irrelevant to the current conversation. If they are here, they are probably confused as fuck.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I have to second that annoying tab bar. The problem with having the tabs located on the actual title bar on mac is that you inadvertently minimize your whole Safari if you sometimes try to switch to a tab.
I've done this many times... first click to try and switch to a tab I move the mouse slightly (Safari sees this as an attempt to move the window and does not switch to tab... yay!, then I try again, and this time it picks up that I've now double-clicked and the default on OS X is to minimize.
Argh. Yup, it seems I'm still going to be waiting for Chrome... at least then I will have my tabs in separate processes and will finally be able to kill only the tabs which are using up all my memory.
Though in beta it is buggy as all hell, and in so many ways. It doesn't look like safari of old. It isn't really any faster. Watching screen redraws, watching page scrolling, watching page load times, it just isn't any faster. Maybe javascript is, but overall it isn't.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
Infinity divided by thirty is still infinity.
I switched to Firefox for two reasons. One is that Safari is a major memory hog. It can use like 3x the memory as Firefox for the same thing. (And I'm talking about fresh starts. I know all about how VMs can swap unused pages to disk.)
The other missing thing from Safari was something as basic as session saving and crash protection. You have to buy Saft for that. With Firefox, it's free.
I wonder if Apple has done anything about these issues.
Searching through the text of every page you have ever visited? Isn't that what Google is for? :-)
Think Deeply.
Requirements:
Mac with an Intel processor or a Power PC G5, G4, or G3 processor and built-in FireWireî
um, looks like the latest Macbook isn't up to spec. nice one, Apple.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Nitro has more street cred.
Squirrelfish sounds like a slimy little douchebag trying to get out from under a last call chick who has him pinned at the end of the bar.
an image of Steve Buscemi flashed before my eyes. SquirelFish is so Mr. Pink. Nitro is mr Blond
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
since Opera and Firefox with Noscript can run JavaScript at infinite speed. Until Safari has this capability, along with ad blocking, it is Full Of Fail.
Presumably by "this capability" you mean the ability to selectively block Java, JavaScript, and Flash; Safari 3 lets you disable Java and JavaScript in toto, and there's the ClickToFlash plugin (requires Leopard) to prevent Flash from running until you click.
The same thing I said last time someone said this to me: prove it. I'm not trolling here, and I don't think it's beyond what Apple is capable of, but I need more proof than your assertions before I believe you. Do you have any evidence, or at least an example bug, of when this has happened?
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the war room!
Speaking of not knowing what you're talking about ... you're full of shit.
I downloaded it onto a MacBook with 3 gigs ram Core2Duo 2.0 ghz latest Leopard 10.5.6 and the first thing it did was replace my stable Safari install WTF!!!???
Then it beach balled as soon as it launched on apples own web site.
So I went through a renaming rigarolmole to see if I could run both 3.21 and 4 beta running (I couldn't).
Then it crashed mail.app when reading rss feeds with a message about being incompatible with growl.
So then I had to run the uninstaller and reboot (again), grand total 40 minutes down the drain with nothing to show for it. If you want to tests squirrelfish use the far more stable nighties:
http://nightly.webkit.org/
Tired of all the isms, don't exploit people as an employer, or a government, mmmmK?
I wonder if Apple has done anything about these issues.
Do they involve browsing/organizing/searching thumbnails of some form of media?
:-(
Then no
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
If Apple distributed modified versions of WebKit without releasing the changes in source form then they are in violation of the LGPL and you should let someone with standing to sue (e.g. any of the KHTML contributors) know. If, on the other hand, you are just trolling, please be quiet.
As with LLVM, they often hold back changes and only merge them into the public repository on the day when they release their product (check out the LLVM ARM backend changelog for the day the iPhone SDK was announced), but I have yet to see any evidence of them distributing a modified version without distributing the source, especially not for WebKit where that would count as copyright infringement (distributing KHTML code on a massive scale without a license) with statutory penalties greater than the value of the company.
That's not to say, of course, that they don't build additional things on top of WebKit and not distribute the sources for those.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
The big problem Safari faces is that Opera users already dominate the snobby-over-nothing niche Apple usually occupies :-(
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
What incentive would they have to hold code back? They are bundling it with OSX. It's built into the iPhone. Are there really that many people that are eschewing Safari and downloading the Webkit nightly builds or OmniWeb that they're going to lose money from directing Google searches? Or are you suggesting that they're worried about Firefox stealing the code? I just don't see the reasoning for it.
These are very serious allegations. Please link to your bugzilla report.
The difference is that the average user couldn't give a shit whether it runs on Linux or not.
Statistically that is a correct statement.
I reject your reality and substitute my own.
... Except of course LLVM isn't released under the LGPL license, but a BSD style license that doesn't require changes to be made public. However, my experience working on LLVM is that all the Apple developers check their changes directly into the main (open) LLVM repository anyway.
I don't know what the situation is with webkit, but I expect it's something similar.
Nice. Webkit is based on KHTML, and there's no way to get a Linux build.
Sure there is, and that's just the browser that's been named in the comments on this article a dozen times. Also, this.
/var/run/twitter.sock is a twitter socket puppet.
Here's how to turn tabs-on-top off on Mac: Disable "Tabs on Top" Feature in Safari 4 Public Beta
This doesn't work on Windows, alas, even if you patch the property list. The tab bar does move from the title bar to the right location, but it doesn't work as a tab bar...
The jump in speed versus Firefox (on my Mac, anyway) is actually noticeable. There seem to still be significant memory leaks; but, unlike Firefox, Safari 4 remains responsive even as it sucks up more and more RAM.
But still - extensions are the reason I keep going back to Firefox, and it doesn't look like that'll change in the near future. I prefer Webkit to Gecko overall; but Firefox's extensions are too big a deal to pass up.
#DeleteChrome
OMG SIGBUS LOL I wouldn't go as far as to use this data: sillyness to point out a browser's instability, but it is a bug allright. The fun part is that it only crashes with %80 (128 in dec) and higher, when I replace that with 7F it just displays a semicolon.
/var/run/twitter.sock is a twitter socket puppet.
I tried helping but I wasn't able to test the results properly because my browser crashed when I tried to input that. Must be windows.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
Google's browser uses the same rendering technology (WebKit) with a distinct JavaScript engine.
Could it be that no comparisons are made against Chrome because
V8 vs Nitro performance... perhaps a car analogy is needed here? :)
Is this perfomance due to the innovative use of the onload function or is this some new way of rendering web pages and starting the clock later?
The rest of it was choking and sputtering.
To be fair it should be better over time. It's just trying to generate loads of images for my bookmarks which I'll probably never really appreciate.
I don't understand why Safari still offers no automatic session restore. One little option in the prefs is all I ask! Every other browser supports this better than Safari. In Safari to restore my tabs I have to remember to choose a menu option that has no keyboard shortcut, and doesn't even always work (sometimes tabs are inexplicably blank).
The session *is* saved, and you can restore it using History - Reopen All Windows From Last Session.
If you want this to happen automatically when Safari starts up, you could install SafariStand, which does this and a whole lot more for free.
As for the memory issues... I don't know which browser uses more memory, but I sure know which one feels slow and unresponsive on my machine, and it's not Safari.
/var/run/twitter.sock is a twitter socket puppet.
The other missing thing from Safari was something as basic as session saving and crash protection. You have to buy Saft for that. With Firefox, it's free.
I wonder if Apple has done anything about these issues.
I don't know about the first issue, but certainly the second is fixed. Go to the History menu, and "reopen all tabs from last session". It doesn't let you save arbitrary sessions, but it does give you crash protection.
Safari 4 has restore session now.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I just installed Safari 4 beta under Leopard, and now cannot access Gmail. I have rebooted, cleared history, cleared the cache, etc., but to no avail. Navigating to Gmail brings the URL for a successful login (I can still reach google.com/ig and login and logout just fine), but the screen stays white.
This was working fine with Safari 3 -- however, Firefox seems to exhibit identical behavior. Oddly, I can access the "corporate" version of Gmail (based on sites), but not the "primary" Gmail. Note that I have been using Google Gears with offline storage option, which might have contributed to this.
Anyone else seen this?
Paul Gillingwater
MBA, CISSP, CISM
The latest safari nightly (r41176) compiles and runs just fine on my stock Ubuntu Hardy box. The only pain I encountered was the libsoup 2.25 library dependency which I had to pull down and compile myself instead of using the older library supplied from the Hardy repository.
Not only is WebKit open-source, it also seems like Apple has gone to great length to ensure that this piece of software is portable to other operating systems. The key is to actually do the "wget, autogen.sh, make, make install" steps yourself. It's really not that hard.
Friend, I'm on a Mac.
The toolbar and bookmark bar are ALSO logically above the tab bar in the hierarchy. They do not change: the content of one toolbar widget, the location box, changes... but the rest of the widgets are fixed and the location box itself is fixed. They should be above the tab bar.
So, no, it makes no sense from the Mac side either.
i have a ~9 year old pismo powerbook (tiger, g3, firewire) which is at the very low end of the supported hardware. in my limited experience with safari 4, it seems to perform about as well as firefox 3 memory wise. also safari 4 gets 100 on the acid3 test.
by the by if anyone wants to contribute to the buy me a new laptop fund call 1-800-.....
lose != loose
Session restore? SafariStand works great, and brings a whole raft of other features as well, such as click-to-play Flash.
Ad-blocking? I use SafariBlock with Rick752's EasyList.
Both are free.
I can't comment on your issue with Safari's memory usage, as I haven't experienced the same problem.
As a developer working on WebKit, this is completely wrong and more than a little insulting.
The versions of WebKit included with Safari releases are built directly from the public tree. There is no secret version of WebKit that Apple fixes bugs in for Safari releases before eventually landing the changes in the WebKit tree. The WebKit tree is Apple's official WebKit tree, and is where all of Apple's development on WebKit for Mac OS X and Windows takes place.
For sake of reference http://trac.webkit.org/browser/releases/Apple/Safari%204%20Public%20Beta contains the exact source code of WebKit that was built and released as Safari 4 Public Beta earlier today. There are no secret changes in the version of WebKit that Apple shipped. The changes are all there in the open for the world to see.
Hm, is that why Opera is at last emulating FireBug with Dragonfly?
FF3 is actually quite a slender piglet without any extensions; it's just that they're so darned useful.
That performance looks awesome!
Been available here for Safari for a long time.
Apple isn't claiming their entire rendering engine is 30x as fast as IE's Trident and 3x as fast as FF's Gecko- they're saying their JavaScript implementation is 30x as fast as IE's and 3x as fast as FF's (that would be the SpiderMonkey 3.0.x JS performance, not the 3.1 Tracemonkey performance which is also a lot faster than 3.0.x). That's an entirely reasonable claim.
I think this mesans FF can even *use* webkit's code directly in their browser ...
Oh yes; if only we could have a lightweight, non-bloated browser with a narrow focus on "just browsing"... ~
Opera still supports all the way back to Windows 95, which may be your only choice for a browser that's still being actively maintained. Otherwise, there is Firefox 2 which was maintained all the way to December 2008 so it's still fairly up to date. IE6 is still supported on Windows 2000 but I think 98/ME are S.O.L. as far as that goes.
defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugSafari4TabBarIsOnTop -bool NO.
Seems fair to me, even if it is like beating a one-legged man.
Hate to be pedantic here, but you have to specify what kind of contest. Otherwise, it is ambiguous.
For instance, if it were a hopping contest, the one-legged man might have the slight edge.
Since webkit and the new JS engine are open source (and have been) Linux enthusiasts can create a webkit based browser for themselves. I thought that was much of the point of FOSS. Make the code open and we will built it ourselves. Now you want Apple to do it for you?
Dragonfly is a perfect example of how Opera continues to innovate.
... but goes much much further. Like everything done at Opera, they do it superior. There is very little that it half-assed comming out of Opera.
Sure, inspired by FireBug
"His name was James Damore."
Please Jesus, Please.
If you are interrested in a browser that runs on more than mac's and pc's... the most widely ported browser ever is called Opera. Give it a try.
"His name was James Damore."
No, LLVM isn't LGPL'd, but Apple still act as if it were. They release their changes in source form as soon as they release the binary products. This is what I would be very surprised if they didn't do the same thing with WebKit. If a company does something when they are not legally required to, it would be slightly confusing if they didn't do it when they were.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
http://www.apple.com/safari/features.html - Safari 4 introduces the Nitro JavaScript engine, an advanced bytecode JavaScript engine that makes web browsing even faster. In fact, Safari 4 executes JavaScript up to 6 times faster than Internet Explorer 8 and up to 4 times faster than Firefox 3.1.
and what?????? what is good?
If IE and Safari can look at Firefox's source code and see exactly how FF implement's something, how can FF maintain a competitive advantage as a core browser. By core browser I mean without all the plugins/themes/extensions.
The thing is, the plugins/themes/extensions pretty much is FF's main competitive advantage, what with the apparent de-prioritization of standards and performance. Discounting extensibility isn't really fair.
So if Safari has this great performance, how can the FF figure out how Safari does it?
Pretty much the same way Safari figures it out for FF: by downloading the source code. But it doesn't really matter, because the core architectures of Safari and FF (and IE, for that matter) are so different that a lot of the performance stuff in each browser can't really be applied across them. You can use some of the higher-level stuff, and both FF and Safari have done this with one another in the past, but the low-level stuff just doesn't translate all that well. The best you can do in cases like this is to use the code as documentation to help write your own, and even then it will come out looking very different.
Mod this up. SafariBlock is superb, and it even works neatly with this new beta version 4.
I don't even use Linux full time (have a hobby Ubuntu box) and even I know about Midori.
Please hand in your trolling card at the front desk, you're fired from Trolls R Us.
Follow the support discussion thread.
You're not even a funny troll.
Crashes every time in vista x86 when trying to visit this site. http://www.theaa.com/breakdown-cover/european-breakdown-cover.jsp
With all the hype out there, it seems impossible that Safari is as good as Apple says. However, I must admit that it is a much better release than Safari 3, which I thought was a downgrade from v2. Safari 4 beta starts up and loads pages much faster than v3. Also, it does appear to consume less memory while running. Apple has also integrated the "lazy susan" thumbnails for bookmarked pages and also includes the new "top sites" page. I'd say it is faster than Firefox for some things, but overall, Firefox includes more features. However, Safari 4 is still better than v3 and of course IE - any version.
> In fact, webkit is licensed under BSD + GPL
This is not correct. Some parts of webkit are licenced BSD + LGPL. Some are LGPL-only. The latter is a more restrictive license than the MPL/GPL/LGPL trilicense Mozilla uses, so only code that falls under the former could be used in Mozilla internally. LGPL-only code could, of course, be used as a separate library.
That said, Gecko developers _do_ look at Webkit code, and vice versa, as far as I know.