At its Worldwide Developers Conference today in San Fransisco, Apple discussed its upcoming operating system, Mac OS X Leopard. As always, Steve held his keynote speech wearing his well-known ensemble. The keynote dealt mostly with Leopard, while keeping the most interesting part for last. Read on for the details. Update: Read more for a screenshot of Safari running on Windows… Barely.Games
The first series of announcements were all related to gaming. After Electronic Arts’ chief Creative Officer Bing Gordon announced EA’s commitments to the Mac platform, ID’s John Carmack came on stage to disclose details on ID’s projects for the Mac; more will follow during E3.
Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard
Jobs then moved on to discussing 10 of the 300 new features coming in Mac Os X 10.5, Leopard. Firstly, Leopard will sport a unified look; gone will be the days of having 10 different looks on your Mac OS X desktop. Secondly, he introduced new features for the dock and the desktop.
The dock sports a new 3D look (anyone familiar with Sun’s Looking Glass will know what it looks like), and will now feature something called ‘stacks’. From the the live text feed, it was quite difficult to get an idea of what stacks are, but I understood that one stack can contain all items related to something; i.e. you can throw all things related to “Vacation 2007” into one stack, which will expand its contents upon click. The menubar atop the screen is now transparent.
The Finder has also seen an overhaul. Cover Flow has been integrated into Finder, so you can browse directory contents in Cover Flow fashion; this includes the slides of a Keynote presentation or running videos. The Finder’s sidebar has search built-in, and users can store custom searches in it as well.
.Mac now allows you to browse your Macs even over the internet; for instance, you can browse the contents of your Mac Pro at work, using your MacBook at home. Another new feature is Quick Look, which allows you to preview any type of file; a plug-in architecture is in place to allow for expendability. Quick Look can run in full screen too.
As was already known, Leopard will be completely 64bit, from top to bottom. The operating system will come in one version for both 32bit and 64bit applications. Jobs also demoed other known features, such as Boot Camp, Core Animation, virtual desktops Spaces (interestingly, audio from one virtual desktop is muted when not selected), and new features in Dashboard and iChat. Time Machine was also demoed, but no new information about it was given (i.e. if looking up older versions of individual files requires a different harddisk/partition).
After the expected (and deserved) pun at Vista’s 235748 different versions, Apple set the final release date in October.
Safari
As the final bombshell, Jobs announced Safari for Windows. Safari 3, which will come with Leopard, will also be available for Windows XP and Vista. Jobs showed some benchmarks which showed that Safari on windows was faster than Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox. Safari on Windows will be available as a public beta from Apple’s Safari website.
Update: As this screenshot shows, the Safari on Windows Beta still requires some major work. Memory usage spiked after only a few seconds of browsing on both my Vista laptop, as well as Eugenia’s XP machine.
Adam wrote about Safari on Windows making sense almost six months ago.
iPhone
Jobs re-iterated June 29th as the release date for Apple’s iPhone. Developers will be able to write web-based applications for the iPhone using AJAX, which can sport the same look and feel as the other iPhone applications.
As always, I would like to thank MacRumors.com for providing us with their excellent live text and photo feed.
Two thumbs up. I can’t wait until October. Definitely not just a service pack like some other OS.
And no doubt they won’t let you download it for free unlike service packs for some other OS.
Vista wasn’t a free download for XP users, so why should this be?
And Vista wasn’t a service pack. The OP said that this upgrade contained more new things than an XP service pack. I simply pointed out that given what Apple is charging it bloody well better.
Screenshot of Mac & PC versions side by side:
http://img522.imageshack.us/my.php?image=picture1ip3.png
That’s really interesting. Safari/Windows uses whatever OS X uses for font rendering, not XP’s cleartype. I thought the text looked different. Time to dig around in CoreGraphics.dll!
Challenging both IE7 and FF2. And Safari will win. Common poeple will love it.
Safari will have a lot of the same market share problems as Netscape did when IE became bundled with the OS. People will not actively seek out Safari and install it without good reason. The major reason Firefox made large inroads into the desktop was because of the MASSIVE community around it and the security problems that users were facing with IE. I think it is a bit early to say “And Safari will win. Common poeple will love it.”
Bundle it with iTunes. That’ll get it onto people’s desktops.
Now, will they USE it?
not as long as it looks and feels out of place on windows
iTunes is a big hit on Windows. Safari bundled with iTunes will be used, especially if iTunes is extended with more WebServices.
I doubt that the iTunes software would have much success in Windows on its own, if it weren’t for the success of the iPod and the iTunes music store.
Yeah. Because everyone, Microsoft included, takes the Windows UI guidelines seriously. I mean, Office has always blended in perfectly with Windows, right? Surely IE7 on XP fits in like it was part of the original package? And Nero… well no one uses Nero anyway *shrugs*
At least those apps use the native font rendering so it doesn’t stick out horribly.
And they still stick out like sore thumbs. The point remains that claiming users won’t use a piece of software because it clashes with the rest of the OS is silly, especially on Windows.
Not true. All OSes have apps that don’t use native widgets. Users are used to that. Apps that use something so simple like different font rendering stick out much different. It might make a user think something is wrong with it.
It looks ugly on Windows. It still may not beat IE & FF, but it will absolutely pressurise Microsoft to stop kicking their heels and start supporting 10 year old standards.
People say Safari has problems rendering some types of Ajaxified/Javascript intensive pages because of its use of KHTML.
I dunno. Anyway, I have no use for Safari. FF2 and Opera are fine. If I want a an KHTML browser, I’d use Konqueror.
It’s nice to know the mighty Steve cares for the common folk as well as his elite mac aristocracy.
Common people? I guess Mac users really do think they are better people because of the electronics they purchase.
Where is the Linux version of Quicktime, iTunes and Safari?
-Not that there aren’t any alternatives, on the contrary, but rather since it would be a nice way for Apple think differently and for it to broaden the scope of its media offerings considerably…
Where is the Linux version of Quicktime, iTunes and Safari?
I agree. In fact I think there would be more interest in version of Safari for Linux than Windows.
Dudes, I really like Apple, but WTF is this.
Where are the top secret features ?
It’s just like the WWDC 2006, nothing new out of some minor improvement of the finder and the dock.
This just suck !!!
hey Duffman, have you heard the POP, yet?
People have been calling for the finder to be replaced for /years/. A small feature, a new finder is not.
Because you are calling it a ‘new’ finder.
The only thing I see here is a new iTunes able to open more type of files.
“Where are the top secret features ? ”
Games!
Fastest browser on Windows? Ballsy claim. Guess he’s never used Opera.
BTW, you never used Safari on windows neither, so …
I am using it right now. It’s most definitely not faster than Opera nor FF2.
What are you measuring?
My definition of fast means that the UI is responsive (don’t care much about the time to render HTML pages) and here FF2 sucks, I hope that Safari is better in this respect.
Neither did I but hey, I will also port a completely new application from another platform that will be a lot faster than the current fastest application from the same category on this platform. Do you wanna bet?
It is easy to make bold claims; back them up is a lot harder. Let see what SJ pulls from his sleeves but please spare us from your fanboyism in the meantime…
Guess you’ve never been to Apple’s Safari page at http://www.apple.com/safari
It includes Opera in its measurements. Of course, statistics never lie! ;}
The interesting number here to me is the Javascript number, more so than everything else.
A lot of the browser experience is dictated by the network connection. But with the push for more and more Javascript in the browser, Javascript times are becoming more relevant, and potentially less dicated by the network connection.
This is all interesting because the feature sets are closing in, so now we can worry about performance. I think S3 will be a good addition to Windows.
Those stats claim that Opera has the slowest HTML renderer, which goes against conventional wisdom.
But the fact is, connection speed is the real bottleneck. Quibbling over user-unnoticable differences in Javascript speed, HTML rendering speed, etc, is a waste of time; all of the modern browsers are fast enough in those areas.
The only thing I would diagree with you on is Javascript. Being an interpreted language, and with the increase in the amount of Ajax sites with piles of javascript code, performance in this area could be relevant.
opera is so crashable on both Fedora/RHEL/CentOS and Ubuntu. Especially when plugins and video is involved.
I simply cannot relay on it for business.
Seriously, other than Windows web developers who now can test compatability with Safari without buying a Mac – who are going to download/use Safari? It’s not like iTunes in any respect as iTunes is a MUST HAVE due to the iPod and the iTunes store. Safari however has no hardware to give it extra appeal for Joe User on Windows.
I guess that as long as it doesn’t siphon too much resources from proper OS X software, it doesn’t hurt to have another app that _might_ lure 2 or 3 extra Windows users into switching, but I very much doubt it’s potential. At best, in a year or two I’d give it around 1-2% of the total browser market share beyond the >5% that Safari on Mac already got today.
True, that would mean a 20-40% increase, but it’s nothing ground shattering in the grand scheme of things.
“At best, in a year or two I’d give it around 1-2% of the total browser market share”
Guess we’ll talk in a year!
I’d love to be proven wrong. If Safari would steal a bunch of IE users from Microsoft I’ll be a happy camper.
As a few others have pointed out, I doubt Apple gives a damn about browser market share. Here’s the deal:
1. Choose AJAX, as rendered by WebKit, as the 3rd party development platform for the iPhone (http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2007/06/11iphone.html)
2. Provide a WebKit environment that every developer with a Mac or a Windows box will have easy access to (http://www.apple.com/safari/)
3. ???*
4. Profit
* I suspect the “???” in this plan is going to be “sell iPhones as fast as you can make them, and with a healthy profit margin to boot.” But I am one of the faithful–your opinion may vary.
I tried it the moment I saw it, and I kinda like it, but e.g. osnews.com looks kinda funky in it, missing texts and disappeared links, but the ads look good
) Other ~20 sites I quickly browsed to looked ok.
At least when designing websites I can test for Safari compatibility now. I’m happy.
“Seriously, other than Windows web developers who now can test compatability with Safari without buying a Mac – who are going to download/use Safari?”
Well, web sites will look the same on your PC and your iPhone……
And it IS a good browser. On Mac, I use Firefox about 75% of the time; Safari 25%. I don’t bother with anything else. On Windows: Firefox 90%; IE6 10% (for screwy internal web sites written for IE).
If people eventually picked up an iPhone, this will be the default web browser in it. Assuming 3rd party apps will really take off with the iPhone, guess what everyone will create an application that will be compatible in Safari. Competition is good and it’s much good if they use open standards.
with all these Mac apps being ported to windows it makes me wonder if I should shell out the money for a mac or just theme XP and get all the apple apps.
Buy a Mac. Windows with a new paint job will still have a crumbling foundation. 🙂
Buy a Mac… You can run windows, OS X, Linux and BSD on the Mac… one the PC you can’t run OS X (easily or efficiently or effectively)
One reason not to buy a Mac: If Apple cripples its OS and prevents it from running outside the Mac, why should anyone support that? On PPC it was obvious, since it was a different processor for which OS X was optimized. The same reason cannot seriously be given for x86 hardware.
Apple claimed they’re a software company. This most certainly is not the case. They want to sell their proprietary and overprized systems. Otherwise they’d be selling “Systhem Builder” versions of OS X with no support to anyone who’d be interested in their OS.
I don’t have any interest in buying it, but its going to be interesting to see how they do the release. If they sell retail copies, as they do now for the PPC versions, it will be hacked within a week to boot and install on anything at all. Now, whether people actually want to do that in any numbers is another matter. But the exploit will be irresistable and impossible to prevent.
On the other hand its hard to see how they avoid releasing a retail version. Do they only sell upgrades, and make them in some way hardware specific, and reuse bits of the previously installed system, to stop people doing a clean install? It would be a little weird, I would have to go and buy multiple copies, each one hardware specific, in order to update my mini and my imac. That would be very strange and not very customer friendly. Maybe the mac customers will accept it though.
Its going to be interesting.
@alcibiades
There will be a retail version of Leopard, the same as every other version of OS X previously.
It’s really not as complicated as you think it is. When I bought my iBook G4, Panth was installed on it. A couple months ago I decided to try Tiger. So I ordered it (from Amazon, plus a stick of RAM because they’re cheaper than Apple’s store) and did a clean install.
The installer presents you with several options:
– erase everything then install (clean install)
– upgrade
– one other option I forget. Target mode or something?
Obviously my iBook has a PPC CPU. So the install DVD has files in both PPC and x86 flavors. So no, you do not need to buy multiple copies if you have a different CPU type. One install DVD takes care of it all. The core OS components are in separate folders, and I believe all the bundled apps are universal binaries anyways.
You will, however, need separate licenses for each of your Macs
Where are you getting the idea that the retail box for Tiger has x86 binaries? All the Intel Macs already come with Tiger.
None of Apple’s iLife apps, Front Row and numerous other apps will run. If you want Apple, buy a Mac and then use Windows software on it.
Safari on Windows? But why? If ever there was a pointless move by Apple…
Safari on Windows?
iPhone development possibly??
“Safari on Windows? iPhone development possibly??”
No. It’s all about media.
Apple wouldn’t release Safari for Windows without some compelling reason… I imagine it might have to do with iPhone development, but there could be something else in the pipline.
It’s a feeler. Testing the water.
One day you’ll be able to go into a store and buy OS-X for x86
Look for Apple/Intel to release “OS-X compatible” mobos (well “Tivo-ized”).
Look for the stickers on the HDDs, video cards etc. saying “OS-X compatible”
MS is dying of premature senility and bloat.
Linux is endemic with squabbling factions.
The FSF are indifferent to success or business.
The GPL will strangle itself as it continuously
changes to block loopholes around Stallman’s vision
D’ye get it now?
The point is that KDE4 will be available for windows. So why not also khtml or apple webkit. Easy to port.
If Safari would not be made available another khtml browser would. We have four www engines these days that matter, opera, IE, gecko and khtml.
WOW
The irony is that Windows users will be able to get up to date versions of Safari without needing to pay for OS upgrades. Mac users, on the other hand, need to pay for OSX upgrades to get the latest Safari versions.
For example, I’m still running Panther on my Mac, and therefore haven’t been able to get Safari 2.x, since that requires paying to upgrade to Tiger. And it doubly-sucks since Apple has stopped releasing general bug fixes for Safari 1.x, and will stop releasing even security fixes once Leopard ships (assuming that Apple continues its policy of only supporting the two most recent versions of OSX).
Edited 2007-06-11 19:04
Just download WebKit (http://webkit.org/) – it’s what Safari is based on anyway.
Did you visit the safari download page? There’s a download for Mac, too.
Did you visit it? You need 10.4.9+.
There’s no Windows 98 version, oops.
At least according to wikipedia 10.4.9 is the most recent version of Mac OS X.
10.4 was released 2005, so it is around two years old. Not that much if you ask me.
Imo your comment is off.
Sorry, you didn’t get my joke! My point was to show that on the windows side they are supporting the latest as they are doing for the OS X.
This isn’t to spite you, you know. It’s cos they’re constantly adding developer features under the hood which makes it easier to write better software. Safari uses some of that, I’m quite sure… so they could port it to 10.3 without taking large chunks of Tiger with it…
Probably. But the point is that they make it completely free for Windows users that are using an OS that is almost 6 years old, but not free for their own users using an OS that’s less than 2 years old.
Already have it installed 😉
I have never been the biggest fan of Safari, but am very glad to be able to test webpages against it now without having to switch platforms.
Graphically it is pretty nice. The fonts that it uses are different then firefox/ie, and it seems to be using its own anti-aliasing. One UI issue I noticed right out is that they are not using the Vista widgets for close/minimize/maximize. On vista, if something is maximized you can throw your mouse into the upper right hand corner, and clicking will close the window. iTunes comes close, it uses the larger, easier to hit buttons. However, safari uses the oldschool tiny iTunes buttons. Not only that, but since the upper corners have that oh-so-attractive curve, clicking in the corner will close any window you have maximized behind it, which is disconcerting to say the least.
One thing is nice is that gmail works, which means safari finally has an ajax implementation. Overall it is pretty much what you would expect. IMHO on vista, if you need a lighterweight browser then FF, IE is the way to go, however this is definately a nice alternative for previous versions. Also, since now it is that much easier to test sites against it, It is some great news for us web developers.
Yep I would have to agree most sites render around 1 to 2 seconds slower on Safari compaired to IE7. I have also noticed that it both Safari processes start out at around 10mb (when added together)and adds 2 mb for every page you visit after 30 min browsing I was over 100 mb while IE would cap out at around 73 mb as to this I am not sure if they are caching the pages into ram like ff
as this is a beta it prob will be worked out and as the ram goes now with new computers having over 2 gb I don’t really think it will make a differance (otherwise if ram mattered I would still be running 98se instead of Vista)
Edited 2007-06-11 22:52
A.f.a.i.k. Safari has a default setting that prevents it from displaying content before everything can be rendered in one go. This delay is a ‘feature’ to prevent the infamous fouc (flash of un-formatted content).
So you’ll rarely ever see a page actually being built, as – in my experience – is often visible in IE.
I’m not saying Safari’s method is necessarily better, but it’s a valid choice.
Ummm, I’ve been using Gmail on Tiger with Safari 2.0 for well over a year. What it did not have is Rich Text Editing (which is FINALLY available in 3.0 beta), but it definitely had/has AJAX…
all the new info has been released to the new apple website.
you can download the beta for safari and see cool videos for finder and new dock etc.
http://www.apple.com
I think I may have to agree with the folks saying “pointless” – I use safari on my Mac 75% of the time, and FF the other 25%. I use FF 90% of the time on my windows boxen and use IE the 10% of the time some jackass codes something IE specific on their page/app. I can’t see a need for Safari on my windows installs, but then that’s just my own take on the situation. On the other hand, considering I primarily use Konqueror on my linux boxen, and primarily use linux as my desktop, wtf do I know?
Now that Apple is making Safari for Windows, maybe they will give it some more attention. I can’t stand Safari and have switched to Firefox on my Mac. But maybe the new version of Safari will be better.
I like it, using it right now to type this comment.
I like the page snap back function, nice.
(Under history)
Mac OS X is a UNIX system now.
Mac OS X Server is now an “Open Brand UNIX 03 Registered Product,” conforming to the SUSv3 and POSIX 1003.1 specifications for the C API, Shell Utilities, and Threads. Since Leopard Server can compile and run all your existing UNIX 03-compliant code, it can be deployed in environments that demand full conformance.
http://www.apple.com/server/macosx/leopard/more.html
this is goan have a nice impact on apple’s server market share I would hope.
Sweet – nice find.
Does anyone care about those paper UNIX standards any more?
just bundle it with iTunes downloads. That might get it on a helluva lot of Windows machines.
I think the best part of what was announced is the overhaul to Finder (at long last :p ). I don’t know if it’ll mean all that much for developers, though (and this is ostensibly a developers conference). But it looks like there may be some api allowing devs to hook their apps into Finder to allow browsing an app’s particular documents via coverflow (since they talk about browsing KeyNote presentations vis coverflow), but that’s pure speculation on my part.
I just installed Safari. It’s slower than Firefox, it takes over twice as long to load pages.
Also, there’s no spell-check, like in Firefox. For a terrible speller like me, that’s kind of a must.
I just installed Safari. It’s slower than Firefox, it takes over twice as long to load pages.
Oh, quit Firefox fanboying!!!! The Apple website says that Safari on Windows is 925,000x faster than Firefox!!!!!!!! ::eyeroll::
I don’t know what kind of HTML rendering they were doing on those benchmarks. It had to have been some well-planned code that the devs knew Safari could render exceptionally quickly, and they had to have exploited rendering-speed bugs in Opera. That is, if they didn’t pull those benchmarks out of thin air.
Either way, there is absolutely no way those benchmarks could hold any semblence of truth in the real world, as opposed to Apple’s cherry-picked speed test scenarios.
And Safari on Windows eats RAM like crazy, but it’s a beta and I’m somewhat cofident they will at least partially fix that issue. Frankly, I think this “beta” is more of alpha quality with its rendering issues and minor UI ugliness.
I think the reality is people expect a beta to be a release candidate these days.
‘Beta’ means bugs, pain and instability. It shouldn’t be assumed that a beta version of anything should be useable. Things not working is sort of the point of the word ‘beta’.
Maybe they were comparing the Mac rendering times with the PC rendering times.
I am running Safari 3.0 on my mini right now and it is pretty zippy and I am not seeing the memory usage climb.
If you had only read the page completely it states that they used “VeriTest’s iBench Version 5.0 using default settings” and also states the exact system configuration, so it’s not like it’s pulled of thin air.
It may not be objective because they could have optimized the rendering for these test, but my limited experience tends to confirm the results with one exception – the Safari. In the past I have tried to use the WebKit engine on Windows and while very buggy (the Windows UI parts, that is) it was really fast. On the other hand the public beta of Safari seemed to be a bit slower.
(btw, the bottleneck of Safari seems to be more of a network access problem than the page renderer slowness)
Edited 2007-06-13 20:04
There is a spell-checker which can be enabled under Edit -> Spelling menu, but on the 522.11.3 build it simply crashes the application the first time you try to type. Hopefully this will be fixed with the next release.
I think the main reason they released Safari for Windows is because they expect many people will be using Safari on the iPhone, and they can then use the same browser on any machine at home, Windows or Mac.
Then factor in, sooner or later, that iPods themselves will be running Wifi and Safari. People will think: Safari on my iPod and on my Windows box – and they’ll have the common Apple experience on all their most used machines. Between all these combinations, Safari can become one of the most used browsers in the world, eventually challenging IE.
Just found the option, it does check spelling. Still substantially slower though.
uhh… did you miss the big fat BETA tacked on there?
Yeah but… where did they get their results (timing) from? The Beta version. So it follows that Beta or not, it should still be faster if that’s what they posted on their site.
I’m not trying to smack Apple, I’m a mac fanboy, been using them forever.
But…
Releasing Safari on Wndows makes all the sense in the world.
IPhone third party apps are going to be safari based. You don’t want to reduce your developper base to Mac owners. Therefore, windows based developper need safari to test heir app against.
Simple, really. This has not much to do with swotching or getting more market share, Apple could not care less about the browser market. But they WANT people to use the IPhone, and they definitely have an eye on businesses with this one.
I do not know the internals of Safari, except that Safari shares the same HTML engine with KDE’s Konqueror (KHTML).
Will Safari for Windows be available because the same technical improvements made on Qt4 and KDE4 about code portability?
KHTML and WebCore diverged a long time ago. I don’t think any portability improvements in KDE4 have made it into Safari.
Although there is a webkit port available for KDE4/Qt, Apple doesn’t use Qt for Safari.
“Just choose the new Apple menu item “Restart in Windows.” Your Mac goes into “safe sleep” so that when you return, you’ll be right where you were. It’s much faster than restarting the computer each time. “
This news actually got me to reboot into Windows to try it out. It’s left me with some nice first impressions, although I can’t tell accurately how well it really runs yet, since my drives need defragged. :/ Still, it feels pretty responsive. Its fonts look extremely good… some of the best font rendering I’ve seen.
The only things I can think of that I truly miss are Adblock and maybe NoScript, and maybe a feature here or there from Opera/Firefox. The UI looks kind of funny (yet sleek), but that’s to be expected, considering it’s an app ported from Mac. Too bad this didn’t come out sooner, before I switched to Linux–it would’ve been a great alternative to Opera, SeaMonkey and Firefox. Honestly, using this is pushing me to getting a Mac. If only I had the money…
First of all, the screen shot included in this ‘article’ is not accurate. I’m writing this using Safari for Windows and everything has rendered fine. Speed has been good, haven’t seen any major slowness or hog issues others have been mentioning.
I have to say that the FIND feature within the page is VERY nice. I know other browsers do the same thing, but Apple has once again made the common NICE. The way words are highlighted really stand out as the whole page dims, and having a count of matched items is quite handy.
All in all it’s nice for us who use Apple at home and are stuck on Windows at work!!
The screenshot is accurate on my PC, running Windows Vista.
Other problems: It crashes left and right at any attempt to add a bookmark or import bookmarks, even the standard bookmarks coming with Safari aren’t shown on the bookmarks bar. To me this looks like an Alpha build, and I wouldn’t be very surprised if Apple posted an updated build within the next days.
Firefox does this too, on the find toolbar, choose “highlight”
Thank you. As I mentioned in my comment I’m aware that others do this, but like I said… this one is NICE. The words really stand out as the whole page dims, and the words are outlined and shadowed compared to just placing a colour highlight over them. Also, firefox is lacking the count of found matches.
Please read more thoroughly next time before replying.
“The Finder and other applications needn’t wait for one mount to complete before requesting another.”
🙂
Welcome to 2001, Finder! Seriously, this was one thing that bugged me to death. I’d almost pay $129 just to get it fixed.
http://www.apple.com/macosx/leopard/technology/
New multi threaded and self tuning TCP/IP Stack
New scheduler
New multi threaded optimised Apple Apps and others (almost everything)
New Sandbox to protect from attacker
New ACL for sharing according to your address book
New OpenMPI 2.0 support for cluster
Oh sweetness!
I can’t wait to get a feel for the snap of the new Finder and networking performance.
I can’t seem to delete the URL history in the autocomplete section. This seems like a very major bug to me personally and I wouldn’t use it for this reason alone. I’ve reported it to Apple as well.
I have tried the Safari on windows, and i am not impressed.
The GUI looks very old school, boring and ugly.
The rendering really suck, normal CSS it can’t render correctly, even on sites that IE6/7, FF1.5/2 and Opera renders correctly. The Javascript engine has bugs.
To use that browser would be a huge stepback.
No thanks, i’ll stick with Firefox 2.0 and all the lowly add-ons i have for that great browser.
Yeah even IE6/7 is a better browser. I sure hope for all your Mac fans, that Apple’s other software is better quality than this, and no i don’t think iTunes is any good.
Extra, Extra:
Even the uninstaller is screwed up, it just hangs and hangs and hangs all the time 🙁
Edited 2007-06-11 19:44
And just what are these sites that work for FF and IE but not for Safari? I use Safari as my main browser every day and I don’t see these CSS screwups that you are talking about.
I won’t believe you until I see some links to the sites that don’t work properly.
I can’t see my Bangla sites I visit most. I think Safari does not render glyphs from windows, rather by itself, which is not a good idea. Do I have to use ATSUI for safari to render unicode glyphs properly? If so, that is insane.
However, the claim is true. It is a fast browser. OSNews loaded really fast and gmail works too!
I tried safari on windows. Sadly it uses OS X-decors and widgets, which makes it very inconsistent with the windows GUI. I would prefer native widgets. But I bet the windows-OS-X-wannabes will go wild over this.
Second, it was really unstable, I know it’s beta and all, but a crashreporter or something would probably be helpfull for catching the bugs. For me, it crashed by just typing in the searchbox at apple.com.
Edit: I’ll try it again when it’s out of beta. Hopefully it’ll be a bit more stable then. 🙂
Edited 2007-06-11 19:44
Click the “Bug” icon in the main menu – that’s your crash reporter.
i think people are forgetting that safari for windows is only a beta. they seem to be drawing huge conclusions about how well it will actually run once its done.
why I use firefox most of the time on osx…
fast though on windows for sure…
wow thats amazing!
Tiger, and even Vista are looking that old compared to Leopard in my opinion! I can’t wait to get my copy! =)
There is a private browsing function that doesn’t keep track of where you’ve been and what you’ve typed in.
As well, I noticed that when dealing with forms… you can readjust the size of TEXTAREAs by dragging the bottom right hand corner to suit your size. Interesting
Does this mean that it won’t support G4s? I thought only G3s would have been dropped from support.
Oh well, I have Debian on my iBook anyway
They’ll hardly make Leopard 64 bit ONLY when they’re still selling 32 bit Mac Minis.
“Fildirutes” (I think I got the spelling correct) as discussed on the Haiku Glass Elevator list. Well, this confirms that the person that’s argued vigorously isn’t alone, but the question remains: will this be something Apple will stomp down on if it does get implemented under a different name, or is there enough prior art (including the discussion on the GE list itself) to keep it from being a problem?
Actually, Stacks sound very much like Piles:
Which was patented by Apple back in 1994.
There have been many rumors since Panther that “Piles” would find it’s way into OS X. Looks like Piles turned into Stacks and are now part of Leopard. I think this is a great addition to the Finder/iTunes conglomeration that it has become.
I welcome the new Finder.
Writing this in Safari 3 on Windows XP. Speaking of which, it seems that it takes Vista a lot longer to install Safari than XP. But overall, I have been having a good time with speeds and stability with Safari, though I guess time will tell.
nice for web developers if for nobody else. Now I can test my sites against Safari as well (well when it is finalized).
As for speed. Because it’s in beta I won’t pass judgment, but the beta isn’t any faster at rendering html pages than Firefox or Opera. It is pretty cool all the same.
Maybe I’m missing something, but does Safari have a built in inline spell checker? Or a spell checker at all?
Found the spell checking section. Doesn’t seem to work yet though.
Any talk of if ZFS will be default? (beyond the rumors from the Sun guy last week) ?
-m
Frankly I think there is a 50% chance that Steve Jobs removed all mention of ZFS from the news just to spite Jonathan Schwartz.
They mention DTrace, another technology taken from OpenSolaris. So it’s not like they’re afraid of mentioning OpenSolaris tech they’re using.
Leopard is looking like a Windows Vista. A mostly under the hood update.
I seriously doubt those claimed “300+ innovations” are truly mind-shattering.
You forget that Leopard IS just that, an update. A revolutionary new operating system completely different would be Mac OS 11… but seeing that this is just a .1 higher then Tiger why would you expect anything else. A lot of work has gone into this update to make things unified, and I’m not one to complain about that.
I wouldn’t make an assumption on the 300+ features. I have no doubt that there are that many, but based on how we use the OS we probably won’t be aware of them all. Developers will obviously be more in tune with new features behind the scenes, as system admins compared to the average user.
EDITED: typo
Edited 2007-06-11 20:43
…my favourite online game looks pretty messed up:
http://img102.imageshack.us/img102/6655/safariwindowsogamebg6.jpg
I’m glad they have decided that the 18 month old MacBook Pro I gave them $2000 for, is now considered obsolete and not worthy of Leopard. Im sure glad I spent my money!
Pardon? What are you smoking?
Leopard is 32 & 64-bit. It runs on both. There’s only one DVD for all versions (unlike Vista)
Nowhere does it say Leopard will run on 32 bit machines. All they said was that it will run 32 bit apps. Apple claimed at the last WWDC that Leopard would run on every machine since the g4’s. Plain and simple they lied out their ass to get everyone who isnt 64 bit to buy a 64 bit machine. The prices of 32 bit Macs on Ebay and Craiglist are already lower.
For goodness sake, screw your head on. It would be commercial suicide to make Leopard 64-bit only. There are still a majority of 32 bit Macs out there by a long shot. Leopard _adds_ 64-bit compatibility to the whole stack, 64-bit support is present in Tiger already, but only at the Unix level. Gettit? gottit? good.
edit:
Photo proving that Leopard runs 32-bit apps:
http://www.engadget.com/gallery/wwdc-keynote-photo-gallery/272162/
Edited 2007-06-11 21:35
Man how dumb are you really, Tiger already has some 64bit functionality. Really I suggest you spend more time research instead of flying off the handle Leopard will run on all the macbook’s don’t be stupid for the sake of being stupid.
For the record yes I have confirmed this with a source at apple. No I didn’t get signoff but since he is my brother and worked on the development I kind of too it for what it is.
Just for the record the feature complete version the handed out runs beautifully on a MBP core duo
leopard will run 64bit apps and 32bit apps but it will be a 64bit OS only so it will not run on the core duo intel machines before core 2 came out.
Who said your MBP is obsolete?
Installer layout broken on large font machines, Check.
Stupid ‘value added’ (Bonjour???) crapware? Check.
Annoying auto-updater as a standalone crapplet/service? Check.
Ignores the native UI to use it’s own? Check.
Ignores the system metric and font settings so all the menus are too small and %/EM and PT sized fonts don’t scale up? Check.
On a positive note, you can choose NOT to install the “Bonjour” crapware and auto-updater. I’m all for auto-updating, but I think Opera and Firefox got it right – do it when I run the ****ing program, don’t install another crap service to sit there chewing CPU and memory for something that shouldn’t even happen but every few months.
Is it just me, or is this running Apple’s font smoothing technology atop windows? What did they do, port half of OSX over as windows runtimes? On the same hardware it seems like the UI is more responsive (even with the goof assed animated bullshit) under windows than OSX…
Still, I have to say this is more than welcome and for a Beta, it’s not bad at all if for no other reason than it means a couple hundred less watts power use for me – It means I can (assuming they keep the OSX and Windows versions rendering engines on the same *****ing codebase) retire my DellMac (Dimension 8200 running 10.4.8 – it’s on a KVM) and NEVER have to touch OSX just to test one browser ever again. This is a huge boon to web developers.
Not to argue with your main points (I have no real faith in Apple’s ability to write decent Windows apps), but I’d stop short of calling Bonjour “crapware”. You may not want it, but it’s a boon to anyone who wants to have network services without having to pick up any network admin skills in the process.
For anyone who doesn’t actually know what Bonjour is: http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/bonjour/ Basically, the marketing-speak boils down to “self-configuring, auto-discoverable services”. iChat uses it to automatically discover all other iChat clients on the subnet, iTunes uses it to automatically share playlists, AirPort uses it for automatic file and printer sharing, etc.
So no, not useful to everyone, but certainly not “crapware”. Though I do think the name is stupid.
I’ve had a Mac for a couple of years now, and the same reason I use Firefox on my mac is why I won’t be using Safari on Windows (or v3 when it’s gone final for mac)
Until such time as Safari adds keycombo address completion I have no interest in using it.
Ctl+Enter for .com completion is so ingrained on my usage habits that it drives me nuts to not have it available.
I was hoping that Apple would catch up on that feature with this update.
Try to learn Enter only!
iTunes essentially already contained a port of Safari to Windows for the user interface, so this port couldn’t have been too difficult. After playing with it for a bit, it feels fairly fast, and the memory footprint has not yet reached firefox like levels.
It looks out of place, though, and it seems the rendering could use some work.
It will be very beneficial for people who want to develop iPhone apps on Windows.
The thing I’m excited about is the gaming. I think it’s great that EA is putting more games on the Mac (though I don’t buy EA products). More exciting is what was the stuff from id Software.
I hope they put a strong focus on the Mac. Hopefully I will be able to buy one box and be able to put it on either a Mac or PC from the get go.
Also, I hope the next id engine steals a little bit of DX10s thunder.
Dtrace will be available in leopard (http://www.apple.com/macosx/leopard/technology/unix.html)
So I guess ZFS too.
Never has there been anything wrong with a little competition. So for that reason alone it’s a nice thing to have an extra browser available on the Windows platform.
The reasons for releasing a Windows port seem obvious. As I see it more and more people on the Mac side make the switch (from Safari) to Firefox. Apple needs more Safari users to make sure that web developers remain incented to deliver decent Safari support.
Now that Safari has been ported to run on Windows, it seems obvious that parts of Cocoa have also. This is a good thing for Mac users because this might mean that iTunes will be ported over to Cocoa as well. In it’s present state iTunes is one of the least mac-like programs presently available from Apple for the Mac and I would surely welcome this change.
How you can point the finger at Safari, a Beta might I add, on Windows, having problems with OSNews.
Your code isn’t even valid according to WC3.
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=www.osnews.com
116 Errors.
Some of the CSS apparently has errors too.
http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/validator?uri=www.osnews.com&war…
Don’t get me wrong, it’s a new browser in beta, with a site that isn’t valid.
I’m not sure what kind of miracle cure you want.
Did you actually look at those WC3 errors? They where basically all pedantic niggles which should have no effect on a browser (even a beta browser) to render the site.
Yes, I agree, those errors do not usually cause problems.
But on a BETA browser, who’s to say what errors aren’t going to cause problems?
Besides, I don’t know what the guys at OSNews are doing, but it works fine here.
Everything I seem to read on OS X lately is hugely biased and completely false at times.
I suggest you check your machines, my Safari on Vista works like a treat on OSNews, with the old version and the new version.
http://img443.imageshack.us/my.php?image=osnews1yw0.png
http://img227.imageshack.us/my.php?image=osnews2yj4.png
I’m pretty sure that code of almost every site will not be 100% valid if you try to validate it:
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=www.google.com
Result: Failed validation, 51 errors
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=www.yahoo.com
Result: Failed validation, 34 errors
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=www.myspace.com
Result: Failed validation, 214 errors
Do you really think that browser should screw layout of 99% pages just because they are not absolutely valid?
And this is how Safari renders on my Samsung X11 (I’ve already uninstalled Safari, but will install it now to make some screenshots for those screaming “It works just fine for me”):
http://amak.gomen.org/safariforwindows/
By trying to make screenshots of google.com Safari crashed every time I’ve tried to enter “Safari” into the search field. Pathetic.
>> Do you really think that browser should screw
>> layout of 99% pages just because they are not
>> absolutely valid?
On legacy websites maybe, maybe not – Two of your three examples (Google and Yahoo) Should] get a ‘by’ because their sites are riddled with legacy code. Yahoo does not however because they just redesigned lately ‘for real’ – problem is their coders couldn’t find their way out a piss soaked paper bag with a hole in the bottom.
Google though is STILL mostly legacy code… Note, google works FINE in Safari.
But there is ZERO EXCUSE for making a NEW web page filled with errors and outmoded code – NOT because of browser capabilities but because it is INVALID CODE. People rely on browser error correction like a crutch – and worse HACK AROUND the behaviors of certain error corrections instead of just fixing the actual problem. The end result is big, bloated pages that are broken cross browser, and worse make finding errors the proverbial needle in a haystack.
There is this attitude towards validation as ‘worthless’ and ‘a waste of time’ – in my opinion people who cannot move their coding habits INTO THIS DECADE are the ones who are worthless and a waste of time. These are the people who have to run around like chickens with their heads cut off costing their companies money and business every time a new ‘flavor of the month’ browser comes along. See the release of IE7 and FF 2.0
Seriously, if you cannot be bothered to write valid code on any NEW website in this day and age, back away from the keyboard and take up macrame weaving – quit dragging the rest of us back to 1997. SO MANY web developers have let their skills stagnate at that level, and worse are preaching all sorts of nonsense that no longer applies to the young…
Remember, the day you think you have nothing new to learn or are unable to embrace the new, is the day the rest of the world leaves you behind.
Of course, if you are a business it is IN YOUR INTEREST to have validating code, semantic markup, separation of presentation from content, and a host of other ‘new ways’ of coding sites because it increases accessability almost ‘by default’, decreases bandwidth and maintennance time, and therin reduces operating costs…
But nobody wants to hear that how they’ve been doing something for the past decade is wrong. Just because it works in IE, or works in FF doesn’t make it RIGHT. You get these dimwits who chant ‘code for FF, hack for IE’ like a tantric mantra – as big a recipe for disaster as just saying ‘but it works in IE’. One should code to all browsers at once, and a first step for that is validating your code.
Any variation from that is usually, eventually, a /FAIL/ – it’s just a matter of time.
Edited 2007-06-12 00:36
Hmmm. I have installed Safari on Parallels with XPSP2 running and all but one page (that contained embedded streaming video) worked perfectly. I compared the layout of the pages rendered in Safari on Mac and Windows as well as Firefox on both and IE 6 on Windows. The only one that had the occasional glitch was IE6 – but I don’t have IE7 and IE6 is old so I won’t judge it too harshly there. So it has me completely beat where you get your 99% of pages from?
You people need to get a life honestly. This is a BETA for crying out loud, and the FIRST beta at that! I don’t recall ANYONE having this few issues with the first beta of anything that MS have released in recent times (if ever).
So the only thing I find pathetic is the obvious bias of your comment…
Beta browser, it’s still being worked on, and with it’s first release on Windows, it’s even more of a beta test.
And here’s the screenshots back.
http://img207.imageshack.us/my.php?image=wikigq8.png
http://img69.imageshack.us/my.php?image=yahoomc1.png
It’s starting to look like what kind of config you have.
Edited 2007-06-11 23:47
So, nobody has mentioned it yet… Who’s going to be the first one with Safari installed on Linux using Wine?
didn’t work, just tried it
see
http://www.linux-noob.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=3050
cheers
anyweb
I think it’s cool that safari is now on windows, but I’m annoyed by one little thing: it’s a mac app in that the only way to resize windows is by dragging the lower-right corner.
The first thing I wanted to test was its handling of resizeable webpages, but it was disconcertingly inconvenient to resize the damn thing.
I hope someone at apple tries to integrate a little better.
Negatives:
Safari has scrambled menus on my machine. Maybe safari is expecting a font I dont have? In fact, as I type this, random characters are corrupting (weird artifacted glyhps)
ctrl+f searches are slow (i.e. perceptible lag) because of the whole screen dimming while searching. It’s a nice effect to let you focus, but IMHO not worth the efficiency of a simple highlight like Firefox.
Some lag while the page is loading in the background until its ready to be fully displayed. I much perfer firefox’s 0 delay option.
My back and forward buttons on my logitech mouse don’t work! I didn’t think this had to be built in since Opera, Firefox and IE do this fine (without any special drivers).
Apple has used its own font engine. Personally, Cleartype is superior to every other font engine I have seen (with linux and skyos sharing a close second). I can’t stand Apples “smoothed” fonts. They arent sub-pixel hinted AFAIK.
I can’t really customize the UI like I can with firefox. See the picture for an example.
http://ordorica.org/misc/safari.vs.firefox.png
Positives:
Safari is very quick. It doesn’t lag while scrolling, and it resizes with ease. The UI is very good for cross platform. I wonder what they are using?
Better than IE7. The UI is clean.
Lower memory usage than Firefox. 60MB vs 15MB for Osnews.com
Conclusion:
Sticking with firefox for now, but kudos to Apple for bringing some competition. I hope they fix some of these bugs and allow the native font engine to work.
Edited 2007-06-12 00:47
>> Apple has used its own font engine. Personally,
>> Cleartype is superior to every other font engine I
>> have seen (with linux and skyos sharing a close
>> second). I can’t stand Apples “smoothed” fonts.
>> They arent sub-pixel hinted AFAIK
Well, as a developer I like that they use their own engine – that way I can SEE what pages I’m working on would look like under OSX – which is the only fathomable reason I can see a windows user starting up Safari in the first place – though as someone else already mentioned here, this could be a first step in making standalone crapplets based on the webkit API, just as many windows programs are built atop Trident (IE)
On the Mac, they do offer subpixel hinting as an option – I am somewhat surprised to see it not listed as a choice under windows…
I’m seeing across the web a lot of conflicting reports about speed – I’m suspecting it could be hardware related. Trying to run OSX on a standard PC you have the issue that not all PC CPU’s have SSE2 or SSE3 – I’m wondering if they are calling those functions and emulating them if missing, which would explain why CPU consumption is way up and speed is way down for some people. (Which I’m not encountering at all on my A64 4000+ San Diego, which DOES support SSE3). I know iTunes under OSX requires both SSE2 and SSE3 unless you hack the tar out of it, and even then it never quite runs right – and Rosetta likewise requires it… if we are looking at some form of API wrapper and port of significant portions of OSX, that could be the cause of people seeing slowdowns.
It could also be a 2d video acceleration issue. I’m on a 640 meg 8800GTS – there is no such thing as video slowdown on my card… Older video cards, or worse integrated chipsets may be seeing major slowdowns and/or video corruption. I know SIS video chipsets for example have rendering problems on bold and italic fonts if their 2d acceleration is turned up all the way. (In XP/2K – display properties > settings > advanced > troubleshoot, turn down the slider one notch, corruption goes away)
Edited 2007-06-12 01:05
My system isn’t slow for web-browsing requirements. I will just attribue my random bugs in Safari to beta code.
Apple isn’t used to supporting so many varried configurations of PC’s (excluding that bloated piece of software that is Quicktime + iTunes).
Athlon 64 @ 2.6GHz
2GB RAM
6800Ultra AGP
I agree 100%. Recently I did a site where I was using a small font size for copyright text (dont remember offhand the font/size). Looked fine on IE/FF, but my illustrator said they looked like a mess. I told him they really looked fine at my end, so I got him to send me a screenie. Turns out he was on safari, and they were an unreadable aliased mess. Played with the font a bit and got it working nice on safari, but it got me wondering, how often do I make sites that look like garbage to the average mac user?
I went quickly through a few of the sites Im currently working on, turns out this one asp ecommerce site Im doing has its tables rendored COMPLETELY wrong.
As a rule of thumb, I figured since FF is so standards compliant if it works there, then all I need to do is check for IE bugs. From recent experience, I am finding that there are FAR more safari bugs, and I am really glad that I can test for them now.
>> As a rule of thumb, I figured since FF is so
>> standards compliant if it works there, then all
>> I need to do is check for IE bugs
As I said above, repeatedly you will hear many so called ‘experts’ chanting ‘Code for FF, hack for IE’ like some tantric mantra. They hold up Firefox as a shining example of standards compliance…
So… How’s support for Colgroups coming? What that you say? It’s a whole section of the decade old HTML 4 specification they STILL haven’t implemented? What about display:inline-block? Oh, you can do it with the -moz specific flags but only if you don’t put any elements inside the one you are assigning it to… How’s acid2 coming along? Oh, works in internal builds for over a year and a half but still not seeded into the mainstream releases, INCLUDING the 3.0 alpha.
ALL of the browsers have major shortcomings on the ‘standards’, MAJOR differences when it comes to error handling… and worst of all some things in the specifications for HTML and CSS are so open to interpretation (default line-height and appearance of form inputs come to mind) that it is a simple fact that coding to any one browser then ‘hoping’ it will work in another is utter nonsense… There are FOUR major browser engines, not TWO, targeting those two is akin to saying you play both kinds of music – Country AND Western.
The BIGGEST problem a lot of developers have is not testing AS THEY GO. They’ll write the whole page for Firefox or IE, loaded with unneccessary DHTML (usually to do things CSS can do BETTER these days), none of it validating, then load up on hack after hack of browser specific nonsense to support the ‘other’ browser, bloating the page out to twice it’s needed size, then wonder why they had to run around to fix their pages when IE7 or FF 2.0 came along, and why their pages don’t work in alternative browsers like Opera or Safari.
It is ENTIRELY POSSIBLE to code relatively hack free semantic code for most any layout that works in every browser post IE6 – Mostly it involves not using the coding techniques 90%+ of web developers have built their pages around since before the dawn of CSS. One or two * HTML hacks for IE6, fine… feeding each and every browser different stylesheets? /FAIL/
Of course, that hits the other problem – people still bending over backwards to support IE 5.x and Netscape 4 (though the latter is increasingly ignored). You know what, It’s 2008 – how long are we going to bend over backwards to support pre-standards browsers? We’re at a decade, how long? We still going to try and support IE 5.2 Mac in 2030? To hell with that. (Sorry G3 and Power Mac users who can’t run OSX – them’s the breaks)
In any case, the method I’ve found that works best is to code in sections, testing each section as you go. First thing I do is lay down all the content as minimalist as possible on HTML tags. No tables, DIV’s only to group items that are part of the same section together. Then I start styling from the top trying to avoid adding HTML as MUCH as possible… style the header, TEST IN FOUR ENGINES, style a column, TEST IN FOUR ENGINES, style each section group in that column, TEST IN FOUR ENGINES
Because at the end of the day there are FOUR major browser engines you need to worry about – Gecko, Presto, Trident and KHTML/Webkit. Anyone who thinks that firefox is standards compliant enough to test only for it, then bloat the crap out of your code to support IE… well, do us all a favor, go back to coding MySpace pages and leave real websites to the professionals.
First of all, in my experience FF has by FAR the least browser bugs out of anything else out there. I am not talking about full implementations of specifications, I am talking about standard stuff. It has been my experience that if you write against FF, you get far less problems with the others. I also think you got the wrong impression from what I was saying, I only write browser specific code *extremely* rarely, typically if there is a problem, I will do things a different way rather then doing browser hacks. (JS being an exception)
What I was talking about is that everyone is used to IE having lots of rendoring bugs, and everyone knows how to work around them. Nowadays, I am finding that IE really isnt doing that bad, and that out of the bunch I am getting more wierd problems from Safari then anything else.
As for not supporting archaic browsers, I agree with you 100%. If you have problems with IE5 on mac, then it is your own damn fault at this point. For most websites, I wont bother with that kind of thing.
>> I also think you got the wrong impression from
>> what I was saying,
I wasn’t singling you out – I was generalizing the majority of people I see asking for coding help on places like Sitepoint, Digital Point, Opera’s Cross-browser section of their forums, etc. etc.
>> First of all, in my experience FF has by FAR the
>> least browser bugs out of anything else out there.
>> I am not talking about full implementations of
>> specifications, I am talking about standard stuff.
Which is the opposite of my own experience with it compared to other browsers. When Opera, Safari and IE ALL do something one way, and Firefox is the odd man out, targeting Firefox only is… well… Special. as in some Olympics are… Claims of standards compliance doubly so.
I’ve generally found that if you work against Opera, FF and IE simultaneously, and as you said “Do things a different way rather than doing browser hacks” (Which IMHO is the key to good HTML – Bravo) Safari on the whole just kind of ‘works’. I can’t think of anything I’ve written lately that was problematic on Safari.
Though you did in a previous post mention you used really small fonts – remember from a usability standpoint anything smaller than 12px is a total /fail/ and in general page content should either be 14px or larger, or even better 10pt or larger or 100% default or larger. Why? So you don’t **** ‘large font users’ (like myself) by making them unable to even see your text without zooming in 20-50%. It’s one of the reasons phpBB is such a total /FAIL/ (apart from security holes big enough to cruise the USS IOWA through), 99% of their skins assume everyone is going to be browsing at the same system metric.
Well thats good at any rate 😉 I’ve been doing this professionally for about five years now, while I don’t think I’m the best, I think I’m a bit beyond MySpace at this point.
I guess I could accept that, as long as we are talking about IE7. Three out of the five years experience I mentioned was writing an intranet webapp specifically for IE. I made sure my pages worked on FF (cause the dev tools pwnd at the time), but never really tested against opera until recently, and only against safari very recently. Since my few run-ins with safari have been quite frustrating, I may have gotten the wrong impression about it.
After actually fixing the code, I’m kinda embarassed to say it was my own damn fault. I had just redone a few layout issues on my local machine, but hadnt finished. Usually I make sure to use both align=”center” and the margin way of centering, cause its not much of an effort to support old browsers, and it really doesnt uglify the code that much. Turns out I had forgotten to use the css, and both safari and FF aligned to the left. Opera and IE both centered it, even though I was in standards mode for the page. So, ignore my earlier comment about layout bugs, it was really just my own stupidity.
>> Usually I make sure to use both align=”center”
>> and the margin way of centering
inlining ANY presentation these days is just asking to fail somewhere. If you are going to attempt centering, use auto margins – If you are concerned about supporting IE 5.x, add text-align:center to the parent element… I kid you not. text-align:center will center a fixed width block level element set to margin:0px auto; in IE 5.x.
Remember – semantic markup. Anything in the html should say what it is, not how it looks. How it looks is what CSS is for.
Since I took that attitude of separating presentation from content to heart for my largest client, I cut their bandwidth per hit by 50% but quadrupled their traffic… Why? Because there’s no presentational markup to confuse search engines – SEO and all that guff… and by moving so much out of the HTML, it means across multiple pages on the same site we can take advantage of the client’s cache to not resend that stuff over and over and over.
Edited 2007-06-13 09:37
Nah. The UI is old and overused. IE7 has a much better UI than FF2 and Safari. FF2’s UI hasn’t budged an inch. And Safari needs a makeover. The idea of putting buttons next to tabs in IE7 was brilliant. App UI space well used. Plus they actually made the sidebar in browsers worth using. I toggle off the MenuBar. It’s just wasting precious screen space. There’s a few things I find annoying like having RSS feeds directly on my Links Bar like in FF. But on the whole, IE7’s UI is much better designed than it’s competitors.
>> Lower memory usage than Firefox. 60MB vs 15MB for
>> Osnews.com
Which is odd, and leads me to believe different modules are being loaded/unloaded for different hardware.
On my machine, the OSNews main page as only tab open, set to be only page to load on startup:
Results from XP SP2, A64 4000+, 2 gigs RAM, multiple SATA hard drives totalling over 1tb.
Safari 3 beta: 55,132K
Firefox 2.0.4: 28,336K
IE 7.0: 29,236K
Opera 9.21: 29,566K (Damned impressive condsidering that’s not just a browser, but a e-mail client, widget engine, and 80%+ of the stuff people apply to Firefox as plugins BUILT IN)
Though on my desktop machine, everything in Safari is fast, fast and faster than everyone else – and having rebooted into OSX on this same hardware for an even comparison, Safari IS INDEED faster under XP than it is under OSX – which is wierd since I have Natit giving me QE/OpenGL/etc… I’d be interested to hear some speed results from people running boot camp, so we have a true even comparison.
But, I installed it on my old 1ghz P3 laptop, and it’s AGONIZING compared to Opera, IE or FF. Memory use for ‘the rest’ is roughly equal to on the uber desktop, but Safari opening up OSNews there is chewing 83,168K, and 50% CPU ALL THE TIME
So… Yeah, hardware. Anything lower in specs than a Mac Mini probably isn’t going to run it very well… and there are a LOT of PC’s out there with less CPU than the mini. Not everyone has sunk money into D class Pentiums, Athlon X2’s or Core processors yet.
Edited 2007-06-12 02:00
Well, it turns out my 15MB figure for Safari on Osnews.com is AFTER you minimize Safari. Then restore it, and memory usage holds at ~16MB here.
When browsing its using ~35MB-55MB.
Wow, the text really sucks on a crt. “Text smoothing” is just ugly and no way to turn it off. You can only change the strength . Also ctrl + doesn’t work to change font sizes,a t least not like firefox does.You have to hit the control key and the plus or minus under the function keys. The numeric pad doesn’t work.
Edited 2007-06-12 01:04
I’m glad that mac has ported it to Windows and would hope they port it to linux as well. I tried it out and installed it and definitely like it. It’s definitely faster then firefox, that I noticed. It way better then IE7, totally better. But when I played around with it, i kept on saying to myself “It’s just Firefox”, it’s firefox without the extensions or themes.
Is it me or does safari have nothing better to offer over firefox?
Firefox is still my default browser, but safari def. has potential…it definitely edges out ie7 by a mile in my book.
Safari is a dog on my mac i cant imagine how slow and buggy it will be in windows.
I am using it here, it is very fast indeed.
I don’t know what that update was about, but no memory hog, no slowdowm, and all the sites I have looked at are fine.
From a friend of mine …
ell … let me start off with “initial impressions”.
First, the UI is ass-ugly. Once again, people – if you’re writing an app for Windows, please use Windows established standards for UI. The frilly OS Glass crap may be fine for the mac-heads, but if you want to win over the Windows crowd, don’t give us non-standard interfaces and expect us to cheer (see GIMP for more information).
Second, there is no proxy support yet, so I cannot test it on anything other than our internal sites – which doesn’t allow me to properly bench the browser in the wild. I’ll have to install it at home.
Third, this browser is so barren of features, it makes Firefox look kickass out of the box. I mean – I should have known by the “touted features” list that this browser had very little extra to offer – but DAMN. Almost ANYTHING worthwhile was lifted by other browsers YEARS ago.
Fourth – misc observations …
– Spellchecking isn’t working. Beta?
– I simply cannot use a browser that doesn’t support real time screen scaling anymore (Opera, IE7) – I can’t stand browsing low res pages in high resolution. Honestly, I don’t see how anyone can.
– Font smoothing looks good, but has it’s share of mangling things that used to fit in an area without smoothing.
– Draggable sizing text area boxes. Alright, that kicks major ass. This is the ONLY thing about Safari that impressed the crap out of me.
– View Source uses it’s own crappy internal editor … trying to find out how to replace that. REQUIRED for any good web developer.
– Snapback; hit and miss. I’ll use linked windows in Opera and be LOTS happier. BTW, what’s the point of making the user SET the snapback page?
– The iTunes manager stuff bugs me. I’ve never been a fan of it.
– Buggy … but it’s beta. I’ll let that slide.
– I’ll say it once and for all; if you’re going to steal … steal right. I’ve only found ONE WAY to properly pull off a sidebar – and that’s Opera’s implementation. Clicking the left margin to expand and collapse, and allowing near instant access to Transfers, Bookmarks, history, etc. Try doing it in Safari or firefox or – then try it in Opera.
… more to come …
On one hand, I like that they implemented their font rendering – It’s so close to OSX that it’ll be great for testing your websites to see how they look in OSX.
On the downside, there is no way in hell I would use it because it is so damn inferior to ClearType its not even funny.
Gonna use it today just for giggles but then i’ll be back to Opera
Edited 2007-06-12 02:35
Cleartype better than OSX font rendering? You must be joking, because at least on XP, Cleartype was a joke compared to OSX.
In my opinion, OSX strikes a very nice balance between font contrast and shapes. Also it supports font smoothing without LCD sub-pixel rendering. When I had windows I used it on a CRT, so the only way that cleartype was bearable was if you set it for maximum contrast.
Though I admit that when I tried it on LCDs Cleartype worked fine, I still prefer OSX’s font rendering compared to it.
You’re only supposed to use ClearType on LCDs. It looks terrible on anything else, but on an LCD it completely destroys OSX font rendering for readability IMO.
Looks like im not the only one:
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000884.html
Edited 2007-06-12 06:47
>> You’re only supposed to use ClearType on LCDs.
Well, that’s not ENTIRELY true. You see, if you run windows on one notch higher resolution than you normally would on a CRT, and that CRT uses RGB striping, it actually does work – in fact, IMHO it looks better than an LCD does. (of course if you are on one of the goofball color masks like Mitsubishi diamondscan, it’s going to look like crap)
Which is why I run a 17″ display at 1280×960 and two 21″ displays at 1600×1200 on my primary workstation with ‘large fonts/120dpi’ on. (No, NOT 1280×1024 – unlike some people I don’t like having my aspect ratio ****ed up)
Of course being I’ve been running ‘one setting higher @ large fonts’ since Windows 3.0, and multiple displays on one computer since Windows 3.1 via a targa board – you could say I’m obsessive about having enough workspace on the screen and at a decent resolution… Which is funny since Macs are actually what got me into multiple displays in the first place – something you cannot even think about doing on a new Mac anymore without dropping two and a half grand.
Besides, 4480×1200 kicks ass.
Edited 2007-06-12 07:06
My bad – I was comparing Safari 2 on OSX to Safari 3 Windows. Safari 3 beta for OSX is just as fast as it’s windows counterpart, meaning there have been MAJOR speed improvements to the codebase for 3.
Which is MORE than welcome – speedwise, especially from javascript manipulating elements via the DOM was a joke, holding back a lot of AJAX programs from being viable on that platform… and this is REALLY good news for people already using Safari.
When one dumps the Adobe bundles sans flash and drops the DRM.bundle you’ll notice performance increases for both Safari 2 and 3.
Note: Just move the bundles/plugins into the /Library/Internet Plug-Ins/Disabled Plug-Ins/ folder.
Edited 2007-06-12 04:38
Has there been any word on how well the new eye-candy and other features will work on older, non-Intel Macs?
I don’t want to part ways with my old PowerBook G4 just yet 😉
…I like that they are also focusing on Java, Ruby, Perl and Python a bit, making them more useful out of the box. I have all customized versions of each of them…
I have my /Users mapped to a separate drive, so I can do a clean install of the OS, and it sounds like my RoR sites won’t even be affected.
I hope. Gotta make sure I export my MySQL tables tho’…
I use Omniweb on my mac.
Days ago we saw this: “This week, you’ll see that Apple is announcing at their Worldwide Developers Conference that ZFS has become the file system in Mac OS X,” said Schwartz.
That didn’t happen, although they did announce another OpenSolaris feature called DTrace.
Word now is that the Leopard beta does in fact have ZFS bits in it, but that they are incomplete (? “Readonly implementation”) and that the installer doesn’t support ZFS (HFS+ only). Source: http://www.opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?messageID=128542#128542
Just take a look at this:
http://img160.imageshack.us/img160/8826/safariosnewsfv0.jpg
Looks like bold fonts sometimes aren’t rendered at all.
Checked on two machines running XP SP2.
I’ve got the same problem. Freshly installed WinXP SP2.
Safari for Windows Not So Secure.
http://news.com.com/8301-10784_3-9728500-7.html
One security researcher Avi Raff called out Safari’s statement “Apple’s engineers designed Safari to be secure from day one.” Raff was able to find a vulnerability within three minutes using publicly available fuzzing tools. Raff found a memory corruption error that could allow an attacker to insert malicious code on a Windows machine.
Another researcher, David Maynor, found a total of 6 vulnerabilities, two of which allowed code execution.
Yes, yes, it’s beta. But even as a beta, if the program is broken by publicly available testing tools I can’t help wondering how much security they’ve actually designed into it. This is the stuff that should have been identified and locked down before it was pushed out the door, or was it rushed in order ride the marketing buzz from the conference? I guess time will tell.
Not trying to single out Apple here, but if Mozilla, Opera or particularly MS released a browser that was broken that quickly, even as a beta, people would be screaming bloody murder.