Tuesday, June 12, 2007

Now that's fast...

Alright, I promise I'll get back to blogging about Java and Terracotta stuff next time but... I've been reading a lot of negative press about Apple's Safari 3 beta and while some it is fair I haven't seen a lot of talk about the good stuff about it. So before people flame me let me start with:

Yes, I know it has security holes and those need to be fixed
Yes, I know it has some bugs (like it doesn't work with Zimbra for me)

But...

It still has all the features from Safari 2:

  • reset browser so when your surfing on someone else's computer you can clean up everything you've logged into like e-mail.
  • Really good tabbed browsing
  • Private browsing (for when you want to pause the caching and recording of what your browsing)
  • plus RSS, popup blocking and the other usual suspects.

Good new stuff in 3.0:

This thing is blindingly fast? I haven't taken actual timings but just from eyeballing it this thing is super fast. It is much faster than what was already fast Safari 2.0. And much much faster than Firefox. I don't have the time to do real benchmarks on this but I would love to see some.

Much improved inner search. How many times have I hit command F, typed some text, seen the window move but not be able to find where the highlighted word is. Safari does a really nice animated bubble highlight that is impossible to miss. Kudos to the Apple guys for simple subtle improvements.

Plus I think it is supposed to be more standards compliant and it has this resize textbox feature which I haven't tried yet. update: Works great but worth noting that it only works for multi-line test fields not the single line variety.
update2: Someone pointed out that Safari3 also now has WYSIWYG editor support. Should have mentioned it since I used that when writing the blog :-)

Anyway, don't want to sound like a fanboy boy, and I might be alone, but I actually like Safari 3.0 and think windows users should give it a go to.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

hi there,

can you post a link to windows version of safari ?

safari crashed on me twice on XP at work. will try on my laptop -- there might be better luck.

BR,
~A

Steve Harris said...

Sure

http://www.apple.com/safari/download/

It asks for your e-mail address but you don't have to give it. Just select your platform and download.

Taylor said...

I agree it's fast - I never realized how much FriedFox was slowing down my computer.

I do disagree however that it has good tabbed browsing - what's up with no feature to force links that open in new windows to open in new tabs??? What's the point of having tabs if everything pops up in new windows? Argh.

Steve Harris said...

A couple people have asked about how to resize textboxs. The trick here is that the single line enter your email style thing is NOT resizeable. Only the multiline text entry style fields are as far as I can tell.

Anonymous said...

Another great thing are improvements in WYSIWYG editing support. Try Tiny MCE examples with Safari 3 to see what I mean.