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."

Comments

Notes on New Features

[AKAImBatman]

Nitro JavaScript Engine

Anyone know if this is a new engine or just Squirrelfish renamed?

Acid 3 Compliance

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.

CSS 3 Web Fonts

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.

CSS Canvas

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.

Re:Notes on New Features

[tyrione]

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.

Re:Notes on New Features

[MrHanky]

If it lives up to all the hype Apple is giving it, it will still be lacking Noscript and ABP.

The CSS 3 Web Fonts seem rather neat, though.

Re:Notes on New Features

[AKAImBatman]

I am a fanboi

Right you are! I am a HUGE fan of web standards and the new features that HTML5 is bringing. And because I have experience with browser developers like Apple, Opera, and Mozilla, I trust that they'll do a good job in making the features a reality. Especially since they're the same people writing the standards.

For those who actually care, I've managed to pull up some demos in Safari 4:

http://webkit.org/blog/138/css-animation/
http://webkit.org/blog/176/css-canvas-drawing/
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/cssatten

I must say, I'm impressed! We'll see how well they work in real-world usage going forward.

The browser itself appears to be leaning more toward the UI design of Chrome. Which fits it well, IMHO. The new Coverflow feature is surprisingly slick and doesn't feel tacked on at all. The bonjour integration feels like a new management console for the network. I can surf all the devices and get important information on their location and status. I can even change the settings!

Which makes me wonder if the next version of OS X is going to use Safari-based widgets for network and printer management. Hmm...

At the very least, this is a nice way to surf the network on Windows. ;-)

Re:Notes on New Features

[AKAImBatman]

The whole point of features like Web Fonts is to get away from using images. Thus when you zoom, the renderings look crisp and clean. Try these demos in Safari 4 to see what I mean. Zooming the reference image looks ugly. (What you're complaining about.) Zooming the actual rendering is helpful and actually looks better the closer the examples are zoomed.

Re:Notes on New Features

[onefriedrice]

http://www.apple.com/safari/features.html
Scriptable plug-ins is listed as a feature.

Re:Notes on New Features

[memco]

Two words: user stylesheets. If you don't want fonts, it's easy to force all content to render in whatever font you want (from a user standpoint).

Re:Notes on New Features

[AKAImBatman]

Text reflow fails miserably once you get past a certain size. If your intent is to inspect the page close up, then text reflow is a problem. Why don't you just download Safari and try it out? I think you'll answer your own question fast enough.

Alternatively, go watch this video. You can see how zooming allows you to focus on the areas of interest rather than dealing with a terrible layout. (Given the size of the screen, three column would work out to barely a word or two per line. I don't think there's anyone who finds vertically stacked words pleasant.)

Saying you beat IE isn't much

[kcbanner]

Its like saying you beat the kid with a fake leg at sprinting, or beating the a preschooler at a spelling bee.

Re:Saying you beat IE isn't much

[Karellen]

I find it's much easier to go up against a lot of people. I haven't fought just one person for so long... I've been specializing in groups, fighting gangs for local charities... that kind of thing. You see, you use different moves when you're fighting half a dozen people than when you only have to worry about one. So just one person would give me so much trouble.

AdBlock and extensions

[nkh]

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).

From the horses mouth

[alvinrod]

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.

Re:From the horses mouth

[Halo1]

This is about a completely different iBench. If you look at the the benchmark graphs, you'll note that

• the displayed results are actually for Windows (click on the Mac link at the top to see the Mac results)
• at the bottom: HTML and JavaScript benchmarks based on VeriTestâ(TM)s iBench Version 5.0 using default settings and the SunSpider Performance test.

Re:From the horses mouth

[maztuhblastah]

Good guess. Unfortunately, you're wrong. It's an open source benchmarking app for Mac OS X. [sourceforge.net]

Good guess. Unfortunately, I'm wrong. That's (apparently) the wrong iBench. Mea culpa!

How does firefox maintain competitive advantage?

[HockeyPuck]

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?

Re:No so bold

[wereHamster]

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.

Re:No so bold

[hannson]

On the Apple Safari feature page:
 

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.

As the article sucks, here's some better info.

Re:Top sites

[AMSmith42]

>Chrome beat them to it.

Not on the Mac, they didn't.

http://www.google.com/chrome/intl/en/mac.html

Re:How does firefox maintain competitive advantage

[Tinlad]

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?

Removes existing installations

[JuanCarlosII]

Given that this alleges to be a beta version and according to its own EULA:

THIS IS PRE-RELEASE, TIME-LIMITED SOFTWARE MEANT FOR EVALUATION AND DEVELOPMENT PURPOSES ONLY. THIS SOFTWARE SHOULD NOT BE USED IN A COMMERCIAL OPERATING ENVIRONMENT OR WITH IMPORTANT DATA.

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?

Re:Removes existing installations

[rizzo320]

Link for Safari 3:

http://support.apple.com/downloads/#internet

Clearly labeled as "Looking for Safari 3? Download here" at bottom of the Safari 4 download page.

Re:Removes existing installations

[vasi]

I've put together some docs on creating a standalone Safari 4: http://vasi.dyndns.org:3128/svn/SafariBeta/ . It runs exactly like the beta, only it does not replace the system's WebKit library and does not replace Safari 3. So you can continue to use the old Safari, and your applications will not use the new WebKit (and potentially break because of it).

It also has a tiny patch allowing the use of an auxiliary preferences file. This lets you disable incompatible InputManager hacks for Safari 4 only, while Safari 3 will still use them.

A couple of responses to miscellaneous comments in this thread:

- Following the "Looking for Safari 3" link will just end up overwriting Safari 4 and its WebKit. Congratulations, you've reverted back to where you were before! But you still can't run Safari 3 and Safari 4 side-by-side.

- Seriously, WebKit nightlies include WebKit inside their bundle, and other apps therefore don't see the new WebKit. This works. It is a standard technique on OS X, do not be surprised.

- It is indeed a good thing that the Safari 4 beta upgrades the WebKit library, things really need to be tested before Safari 4 final is released and millions of users have their apps break. However, there's no excuse for Apple not providing a standalone Safari 3 so we can test in both versions. Also, this public beta is quite different from the last semi-private developer release of Safari 4--Apple really should have provided the beta as a dev release first, so folks could fix their WebKit-using apps.

Re:How does firefox maintain competitive advantage

[mystik]

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 ...

Classic Apple performance claim inflation

[Andy Dodd]

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.

Re:Classic Apple performance claim inflation

[ogdenk]

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.

If your going to spout blind FUD, do your homework. Altivec didn't even exist on PowerPC's back when the Pentium II was around. The current PowerPC CPUs were the PowerPC 604 and the newcomer was the G3.

Altivec didn't arrive until the G4 and by then the Pentium III was out and selling.

At the same clock rate, the PowerPC really was quite a bit faster. Not by rediculous "3x" margins but it really was quite a bit faster. The PowerPC is also a much cleaner and well-thought-out architecture. Anybody that still does any ASM can definitely vouch for this.

Just because IBM/Moto/Apple didn't have the R&D dollars to polish a turd until it hit 4GHz doesn't mean the PowerPC sucked. It was and still is an awesome architecture.

For nearly all other applications, the P2 was equal to or faster than the PPC.

No, it wasn't. I ran several real-world benchmarks as I owned an Apple B&W G3 tower and a Pentium II at the time.

Are they as fast as Apple claimed? Hell no. Were they genuinely faster? Yes.

For nearly all users, the network is the bottleneck.

Now that is very accurate. For what most people use a computer for, a single-board 1.6Ghz atom machine with a GMA950 is more than they'll ever need for web browsing, e-mail, playing youtube videos and running Word. A faster machine doesn't make you type faster or make web pages load faster.

Safari's improvements though are very welcome as they free CPU cycles for more useful things. A more efficient app is always a welcome change.

Re:Classic Apple performance claim inflation

[juuri]

Damn; you got served by a 5UID.

Re:Classic Apple performance claim inflation

[PsychicX]

That still doesn't explain why G3 and G4 based machines are so god awful slow. Is it become OSX is so absurdly RAM hungry?

Re:Classic Apple performance claim inflation

[Just Some Guy]

For what most people use a computer for, a single-board 1.6Ghz atom machine with a GMA950 is more than they'll ever need for web browsing, e-mail, playing youtube videos and running Word. A faster machine doesn't make you type faster or make web pages load faster.

I'm typing this on a 1.2GHz G4 Mac. I promise you that any browser improvements that make the new AJAXey Slashdot load faster than frozen molasses will be quite welcome.

Re:Classic Apple performance claim inflation

[Bullet-Dodger]

Up until a few months ago I was running OS X on a 867MHz G4 with a half a gig of ram and it ran just fine.

Kills Growl Mail.app Plugin

[bhima]

So it looks like the Safari 4 beta causes the growl plugin for the mail.app to crash the mail.app

great.

More Fun Demos

[AKAImBatman]

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

Re:More Fun Demos

[AKAImBatman]

Short Answer: Yes

I was on the WHATWG mailing list when this was discussed. Apple was very clear that anything supported by Quicktime would be supported in the browser. They singled out OGG/Theora support as a format they will support, but only through user-installed plugins.

Re:More Fun Demos

[vux984]

That depends upon what you mean by "confused".

I've gotten the state out of sync. Where clicking open closes something, and vice versa, because the data model is out of sync with what's rendered in the browser.

Is that a question? Because no, it's neither a feature nor is it correct. GMail is a multithreaded application.

Cite? Because seriously, I don't do a lot of Javascript programming, but I'm pretty sure all the major browsers only give you a single javascript thread per tab. And there are countless tutorials for 'simulating multiple threads' in browsers (meaning they work more or less like windows 3.1 and meaning they aren't really multi-threaded.)

Chrome separates each tab into its own process. A random site should not crash the GMail tab

And yet it can and does.

Now that you've had your peace, allow me to fire a few salvos in return:

(fyi: piece not peace)

Does your local email client support having messages in multiple folders?

I presume you mean one message in multiple folders at once, not copies of the same message in multiple folders?

Even so, yes. OSX's mail.app does this, Thunderbird's 'Saved Search' is this and even supports message tagging (though not as robust as gmails). I'm pretty sure even the new outlook has this.

Do you still have access to messages in your IMAP folders when you lose connectivity?

Of course. Sync features from server and client are old hat.

Does your client have integrated IM and video chat making it a complete communications platform?

What if I use yahoo for IM? Is ICQ still around? Does gmail let me stay in touch with all the networks trillian supports? My standalone IM client lets me transfer files, and share a whiteboard... does gmail?

But that's all beside the point ... IM and video chat are not a core feature of an email client, and suggesting that you need them to be a 'complete communications platform' is misleading.

After all... we can run around all day about bolt on features that we need in a 'complete communications platform'... If I used twitter (I don't) then does gmail store all my twits like emails? If I used myspace or facebook (I don't and I don't) then does gmail store all the messages I get through that as email? Does gmail store all my incoming/outgoing phone calls and voice mail? What about feedback I leave in web forms on random web pages? My calendar? Shared calenders? Shared calendars with people using Outlook? What about to-do lists? Shared to-do lists? How about a calculator? Does it keep track of the urls I vist? I guess it needs a web browser too? Can it keep track of my passwords? Does it store my bookmarks? Does it reconcile my checking account with my paypal confirmation messages? Index transcriptions of the web based support chats offered by ebay? What about my WoW and EQ2 group chat? Internet faxing?

To me all of those should be extensions or external apps. Maybe to you, IM is a native feature of an email client. Its not to me. And even if it was, none of my friends/family use gtalk; unless it supported ichat/aim, msn, and yahoo it would be useless.

Ditto for video chat...

Does your client automatically thread related messages?

It actually does if I wanted it to. But I usually don't. I like new mail on top, sorted chronologically, not in threads. If I need to see the thread together I can, but most people simply leave the thread in the message body, so its not that common I need to see more.

And I actually find threads quite annoying for email, because they only work within a thread. I prefer to filter to messages to/from/cc the recipient so I can see the entire communications with that person in chrono order regardless of whether it's in a thread or not.

For example: If someone sends me a message, I reply, and then sends my boss a separate message, and my boss replies and cc's me, and then he replies back to me. And then he replies to my boss a

Re:More Fun Demos

[vandel405]

Then apparently you haven't studied it enough. We're not talking about cooperative multi-threading. A true, honest to God thread gets spawned to handled these requests. "Cooperative multithreading" is the practice of scheduling processing and voluntarily using a limited amount of time for each turn. That's feasible without Gears or HTML5, but it's not what the XMLHttpRequest object does.

I think you guys are both missing the point. Asynchronous means asynchronous. That's it. It doesn't imply preemptive threading, and it doesn't imply cooperative threading. It just means asynchronous. Asynrchonousity can be implemented many ways. You could have one thread per asynrchonous call, or one thread for all asynchronous calls, or kernel support, it's really depends on the design and implementation of the library/API. They all have trade offs. You're both right, and you're both wrong. "Multi-threaded" isn't a feature. "Responsive" is a feature and there are many ways to get there, and that they're stable, and perform well is what really matters.

Re:Top sites

[reashlin]

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 worse than that.

[Xest]

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?

Impressions

[Anonymous Coward]

- 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.

Re:Impressions

[Colonel Korn]

- 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.

-No, it's 30x faster than anything you've ever seen.
-That's Windows' fault and yours. Windows should be designed around Safari, not the other way around.
-Again, the Windows UI is just a thin shell meant to blend nicely with Safari. If it doesn't, then it's Windows fault.

Re:How does firefox maintain competitive advantage

[je ne sais quoi]

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).

Tabs on top?

[argent]

Tabs on Top
Manage your tabs elegantly and open a wide window for exploring the web.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

F*** you, Google, now everyone's going to start using this f***ed up idea.

This is now my default Windows browser

[Maury Markowitz]

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

Re:30x faster than IE7, so what...

[pohl]

Maybe you do, but I shave to keep my ballsack silky.

And just because you have to design for the LCD doesn't mean you have to always use the LCD. Life is short. Use a better browser. I don't care which one, but only stoop to the LCD when you absolutely have to.

'Full History Search'

[moria]

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.

In other news...

[stormbringer_comming]

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...

Re:In other news...

[herve_masson]

I gave safari a run on my web app, which uses a lot of clientside scripting and has been designed to "work" on FF, IE7, chrome. I did not optimize anything for any browser, it was just a test to make sure I would make mac users happy. I was amazed by performances, really. The JS runtime is way better than anything else I've tested, and even beats chrome which is also really good. More importantly, it seems almost immune from memory leaks, compared to ff3 which needs a restart when approaching 1GB.

Re:How does firefox maintain competitive advantage

[cmburns69]

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.

Re:Safari 4 actually has SLOWER JavaScript...

[yabos]

That's the most retarded thing I've heard all week.

Safari still a memory pig? Crash protection?

[Theovon]

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.

Re:30x faster than IE7, so what...

[mrdoogee]

I read your acronym as Liquid Crystal Display 3 times until I realized you were saying Lowest Common Denominator.

We so need a "commonly used acronyms on /." refresher course.

Of course this is coming from a guy (me) who still reads IANAL as "I anal"

Firewire?

[robogobo]

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.

Re:Firewire?

[adpowers]

I think you should read that as:

(Mac with an Intel processor) or (a Power PC G5, G4, or G3 processor and built-in FireWireî)

and not

(Mac with an Intel processor or a Power PC G5, G4, or G3 processor) and (built-in FireWireî)

Re:How does firefox maintain competitive advantage

[je ne sais quoi]

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?

In other news...

[kestasjk]

The big problem Safari faces is that Opera users already dominate the snobby-over-nothing niche Apple usually occupies :-(

Re:To read more about safari's legendary stability

[DiLLeMaN]

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.

Re:Safari still a memory pig? Crash protection?

[DiLLeMaN]

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.

Re:Why is Session Restore still not an option, god

[goombah99]

I don't understand why Safari still offers no automatic session restore.

Safari 4 does have a restore session. Also since safari 3 there has been a prefernce for autorestore session.

Re:No Linux Support? Don't take them seriously.

[Super_Z]

Why do I care about your lousy browser? If it only runs on Mac and PC, it is not a serious browser. The Linux browser market is expanding due to netbooks and phones.

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.

Think Differently? I don't see any difference between Apple and MS these days. They both try to tie you into proprietary formats and do a piss poor job of supporting other operating systems. IE runs poorly on Mac and (relatively) well on Windows, Safari barely ran on Windows and was well supported on Mac. I don't see how Apple is any better. They're just Microsoft in a prettier dress.

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.

Tabs on Title Bar still make no sense on Mac.

[argent]

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.

g3 performance

[steak]

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-.....

Re:Safari 4 beta + Gmail = FAIL

[steak]

gmail was down for a little while.

http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/02/24/1337245

Re:Safari still a memory pig? Crash protection?

[666999]

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.

Re:How does firefox maintain competitive advantage

[bdash]

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.

SafariBlock

[theurge14]

Been available here for Safari for a long time.

Not what the summary says

[jensend]

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.

Re:lost in the past

[toddestan]

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.