Apple released the Safari 4 Beta today. Features: Tabs on top. “Top Sites” ‘Speed Dial’ feature. “Smart” address/search fields. HTML5 Canvas. HTML5 Audio/Video (though no Ogg). Acid 3. CSS Animation/Gradients/Masks/Reflection. CSS Web Fonts. New “Nitro” Javascript engine – “Up to 4 times faster than Firefox 3.1”. ‘Native’ look and native font rendering on Windows Vista/XP. I can think of only one thing: “Now witness the firepower of this fully armed and operational battle station!”
It appears that Apple have leap-frogged Google Chrome’s Mac UIattempts and basically implemented what Google Chrome wanted to be on Mac already, with a lot of extra Apple polish. If there were a case for ripping UI off, this would be it. That said, should we complain when it’s done so well?
Just check out the features. I can only describe it as an immense list of awesome. And this is for a browser that only has a mere fraction of the browser marketshare. Clearly Apple have their hearts set on something to put this much effort into their desktop browser.
The web is the platform, and Apple know that if they can’t define it entirely themselves, then they must do their best to make sure everybody else plays fairly. Safari 4 is meant to be an IE6 killer. IE cannot stand up to anything on the market now.
For me, as a web designer (and particularly one developing in HTML5), Safari 4 adds more amazing capabilities to websites than I can even think what to do with. It will be years before we’ve got our heads out of a spin and really knuckled down to subtle and elegant uses of CSS animation, audio/video and gradients.
All of which has been doable in flash; but when you can rotate a video, apply CSS/SVG filters to it, and have it sit in the page as a natural element along with everything else in the page – that changes everything. Now you can use videos as backgrounds. You can layer videos, manipulate their every design with Javascript, all in a lightweight manner that doesn’t crash your computer daily.
Apple want an open web where proprietary products and plugins don’t hamper their product designs. Flash being omitted from the iPhone was both the best thing Apple did with the iPhone and also a glaring sign of just how inappropriate Flash is for mobile devices. Flash already makes my PC/Mac crawl and crash often and an iPhone is a good 20x slower! Proprietary plugins just blunt interoperability and cripple diversity of Internet-enabled hardware. Much of what people use Flash for (a glorified Javascript replacement) can now be done with HTML5/SVG/CSS in Firefox / Safari / Anything other than IE.
But can we learn it and put it to use?
If you go to college to learn to be a builder you are not taught how to be a cowboy, yet if you want to learn web design, you are.
-Kroc.
without mandatory Ogg?
It seems that (thanks to Nokia) we’ll see the the same old “each browser does it its own way”. Firefox will go with Ogg, IE will pretty surely go with WMV/WMA, and Apple, it seems, will go with MPEG4.
The obvious outcome is that Flash/FLV will continue being used because it’s the common denominator. And that sucks…
You can specify multiple video sources with <video>. Thus, annoyingly, you can encode OGG and H.264 files and the browser will pick the right thing.
Til then, we have to gather as webmasters and block users of versions of IE that don’t comply with web standards, otherwise ten years from now, we’ll still use the same old technologies and hacks
Excellent! (At last)
If you have a custom theme in Windows, Safari does try hard to fit in, but seems to make mistakes with the height of the titlebar http://bayimg.com/HANCmaabM It handled my theme not to shabbily, all things considered. The weirdest thing is having no menu in Windows.
You can hit Alt to bring up the menu bar, and then make it permanent from the View menu.
Ah! How obvious. I had assumed it had copied Chrome so much, I thought the menu was gone for good!
I thought IE7 and 8 also has no menus by default. The weird height of the titlebar is likely a side effect of the tab on the top feature.
“Thank you for your proposal, but our tender requires that our site be viewable in Internet Explorer.”
Is it a smart idea in these current economic climes to exclude potential (big) clients based merely on ideology and artistic-integrity?
No need to exclude IE, just to exclude those versions of IE that do not comply with standards (IE6 and below in particular).
I would make that IE7 and below.
That’s all very good and well, but it’s twice the serve space and extra development work for what should have been standardised.
As much as I hate flash, I can’t blame web developers for using FLV to get around the lack of video embedding standard.
If MPEG4/h264 wasn’t patent riddled to high heaven, we would have had a stadardised video format long ago. Thanks to the infinate wisdom of politicians and their enablers we now have a industry fragmented along political lines and each organisation or company thinking its beneficial to screw other companies in the process.
There are solutions out there, too bad the concern by organisations is short term profit at the expense of long term innovation and new business opportunities.
Agreed. Totally.
Patents, inter-operability and access-for-all are concepts that don’t really mix at all well. Open unencumbered standards are far, far better for everybody.
Vorbis for music, speex for speech, and FLAC when quality is required but compression is not, and Theora for “videolets” and Dirac for higher-quality video would seem to be the best options for avoiding all kinds of patent issues.
What I’d like to see is a more sane model. If you’re not making a buck off it then why should one have to pay a royalty? I mean, why shouldn’t Fedora ship with all the patented codecs given that it (not Red Hat) makes no money off it; same goes for other community based distributions and operating systems. Now, if the companies like Red Hat wish to ship and support it (and thus make money off it through support contracts) – then its a different matter entirely.
Going back to the browser, given that the browser is free, why shouldn’t they be be allowed to include support for MPEG4/h264? they’re making no profit off it, thus, it isn’t as though there is any ‘profit’ that the said organisation needs to ‘share’ with the patent holders for the use of intellectual property to create a product.
Maybe I’m just strange but the whole patent issue doesn’t make any sense to begin with in the first place.
I think you are spot on … I think it is the patent issue that is in the strange place.
In the EU one supposedly cannot get any patent on pure mathematics … an idea needs to be a “machine” in order to have patent protection.
My question is this then … how can a codec possibly be patentable? A codec is about as close to pure mathematics as one can get. It is nothing but a transformation of one set of numbers into another set.
Meanwhile, the push against “proprieatry content delivery software/systems on the internet” has just got a little more interesting, especially in the EU, IMO.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/02/google-joins-the-eu…
Webkit is open source, isn’t it?
Won’t some interested Webkit user (possibly Google Chrome) want to make sure that webkit can compete with this? …
http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2009/02/mozilla-demos-impre…
If Firefox can do all this, and then soon after (or even perhaps in the same timeframe) so too can Opera and Google Chrome, then Safari is going to have to implement it also in order to stay relevant.
We are right now not far away from the tipping point when Firefox + Google Chrome + Safari + Opera represents more than 50% of all web browsers. When we do get to that point, and they can all play rich content (in Vorbis, Theora and Dirac) straight out of box … then we may hopefully finally see the back of browser-based lock-in to web content start to be broken.
FTA:
Wow.
Edited 2009-02-25 05:04 UTC
Just FYI…
Safari 4 supports the new Javascript Worker object that your quote from Ars talks about.
Safari 4 also handles the audio and video tags you talk about, supporting all audio and video file types that QuickTime does. In fact, Safari 3 did too. I’ve got the Ogg QuickTime plugin installed on my Mac and have been happily playing ogg vorbis files through HTML 5 audio tags for many months.
Unfortunately I can’t say the same for Firefox 3.1. I regularly check the Firefox “Minefield” nightly builds, and have never had the audio playback work on my Mac. The same build releases on Linux do play back audio. Windows releases have had poor performance for audio playback.
On these fronts Safari does not really have any catching up to do with Firefox.
It is a shame that Apple are being arses by not supporting the Ogg codecs out of the box though.
I’ll take the superior quality-per-unit-of-data of Apple’s QuickTime/H.267 over Ogg Vorbis any day, thanks.
You must mean H.264. And Ogg Vorbis is an audio codec; you must be thinking of Ogg Theora.
Apple should copy more stuff from others.
So should Google! (Multitouch for Android please.)
MS has a long history in doing just that
Conclusion: Software patents make no sense whatsoever!
“Conclusion: Software patents make no sense whatsoever!”
Tell that to MS and many others who makes a boat load of cash on the patents they hold for software. it makes sence when your a business trying to make as much money as possible, and most businesses are in it for the money.
Edited 2009-02-24 17:41 UTC
I’m not a big Microsoft fan, but to their credit, I don’t recall any cases where they’ve tried to use patents to push people around. They, and other large companies have no choice but to file a patent every time they take a crap in order to fend off patent trolls.
Their deal with Novell is a good counter-example to your claim.
They went to Novell, and made a deal along the lines of … if you promise not to sue our customers over patents, then we won’t sue yours. That probably sounded OK to Novel.
As soon as the deal was signed, Microsoft then blurted “all you users of Linux (other than Novell’s) have an ‘undisclosed liability’ to Microsoft – Ballmer”. They then tried to pressure Red Hat into a similar deal … already having signed one with Novell over the same codebase!
If Microsoft truly want to protect their customers from patent threats from Linux and FOSS, such that they feel the need to sign patent covenants … then what would be wrong with Microsoft just joining in the Patent Commons and the OIN … that way they would get exactly the same protetction from patents for their customers for free!
I know all software giants need a degree of BS to get where they are, but I find the above quote a little offensive given half the features Apple have finally added have been in Opera, Firefox and even IE for years now.
But then I guess the headline: “Playing catch-up with the competition” doesn’t earn as many downloads.
Edited 2009-02-24 16:42 UTC
Who cares as long as it’s in our laps.
Let’s not forget that Safari was the first publicly shipping browser to render Acid 2, and now the first publicly shipping browser to render Acid 3. Apple invented the canvas tag and were key in CSS animation and transforms.
There’s tons of innovation here, don’t doubt it.
Uhm, Opera 10 Alpha 1 beat Safari to the punch. Unless you’re saying the beta release is a general release.
Ah, well said. Safari 4 beta is a for-public-consumption release, offered by default. Opera 10 isn’t.
Opera 10 is publically downloadable so Safari wasn’t the first to the Acid3 proverbial flag – end of.
But does it really matter? At least Safari now supports it – first or not.
Opera 10 isn’t final yet, neither is Safari. But if we’re talking about which browser was the first to pass Acid3+be downloadable, that trophy goes to Safari because the Webkit build that passed was available 10-15 minutes after the commits were made. Opera released a public pre-alpha a few days later.
Having a beta (which have crashed once on me) being the default download *and* replacing the previous version of Safari is downright stupid. Not admirable.
the old ones are still available here http://support.apple.com/downloads/#internet
Check your details.
Opera claimed to pass it first. But there was a bug in the test, which the Safari team found. Once this bug was corrected, Safari was the first one to get 100/100 in Acid 3.
But getting 100/100 is not enough to pass the test. The browser also has to render the animation smoothly with a certain maximum time per test.
Safari with it’s new JS engine manages to do that. Opera’s JS engine isn’t fast enough to do that yet. So Opera only passes a part of the text.
See what the text says: http://acid3.acidtests.org/
If acid3 depends on speed of rendering, then would more powerful hardware rather than a more efficient javascript engine make all the difference?
Would that also make a particular browser non compliant when running on hardware below a certain level…
I think so. I remember when Safari announced that they passed the Acid 3 completely, they also specified a hardware configuration. Let me see if can find the link.
http://webkit.org/blog/280/full-pass-of-acid-3/
They mention that it passed on a 2.4 GHz macbook. Each test is allowed to take a maximum of 33 ms, with a total of 100 tests. They were able to finish it with all 100 tests in 330 ms.
Actually, WebKit (alpha-quality builds of Safari) beat Opera 10 alpha 1 to the punch.
Actually both IE8 and Opera 9.6 / 10 (or whatever the lastest version number will be) betas scored 100% on Acid3.
Given this is no more than a beta and the fact that Opera’s latest beta is publically downloadable (I believe – though unsure – the same is true with IE8) – I really don’t see any truth in your / Safari’s claim.
As for inventing tags – I get nervous when browsers create tags outside of w3c’s control.
IE8 does not pass Acid 3! It doesn’t support SVG for starters.
Secondly, this claim was made by Apple on their features page. I’m with them, in that Safari 4 is a browser for public use, offered by default on the website. Opera 10 is not, you have to specifically go to opera.com/next to get it. Opera may have rendered Acid 3 first in the labs, but it needs to be in people’s laps, and Safari has done that better.
So Safari wins the award of making it’s beta software easier for n00bs to download – big deal.
Fact is Opera is still publicly downloadable, despite whatever semantics Apple’s BS crew spew out on their web site.
Definitely agreed. Not that it matters, but calling Opera 10 not publicly available because it’s on ~/next/ instead of ~/ is retarded.
Sorry, you’re right about IE8. I don’t run windows so couldn’t test it though I was sure I read an article saying it had. Clearly I must have dreamt it :$
I believe that IE8 passes the ACID 2 test under certain conditions. They get a F grade on ACID 3.
Not quite dreamt it perhaps … IE8 passes Acid 2. Perhaps that is what the article you read was about.
AFAIK IE8 scores only about 20% on Acid 3 tests. Since IE does not implement DOM2 nor SVG nor SMIL nor CSS3 nor even CSS2 completely … this is not all that surprising I suppose.
Amusingly … there was a bug submitted to the IE development process about DOM2 way back when. The IE development team closed it with the comment “not implemented by design”. Anyway, the fact that IE does not support DOM2 means that it cannot properly support HTML5, even though there is apparently a sham attempt at doing so in IE8.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dom2
AFAIK IE also lacks any kind of javascript JIT compiler.
Microsoft’s sole “push” to compete in this area of rich web content is apparently Silverlight … which is a totally non-standard (and proprietary) way of doing the type of things that these web standards facilitate (and do quite well). This is probably what Microsoft meant when they said about DOM2 – “not implemented by design”. Typical.
Sorry Kroc, you are just too much biased. Laurence is right, Opera pre-release is publically available just as it is now Safari pre-release, so Safari wasn’t the first Acid3 browser. It doesn’t matter if Safari is better linked in Apple’s homepage than Opera in Opera’s homepage, this is just “an implementation detail”. The fact is that if you wanted, 2 days ago you could have entered opera.com and downloaded an Acid3 browser.
Opera was the first browser to score 100/100 on Acid3, however that was a version of the Acid3 test with a bug in one of the tests – the actual score for Opera was therefore 99/100.
WebKit (Nightly) was the first browser to score 100/100 on Acid3 with a non-buggy test suite. Opera followed a day or two later.
WebKit is the rendering engine for Safari – WebKit browsers are bleeding edge versions of Safari, built using the very latest source code for rendering engine. These are effectively alpha releases of Safari.
A score of 100/100 on Acid3 however is not a “pass”, since smoothness of animation is a deciding factor (as well as the render of the test matching a reference rendering). Judging whether or not a browser passes is thus subjective, but most people consider that WebKit passed some time ago, and that no other browser has truly passed yet.
HTML 5 is a w3c working draft. It is being development in cooperation with Mozilla and Opera.
Edited 2009-02-25 02:38 UTC
My eyes. They are bleeding.
This looks absolutely terrible on Windows 7. Titlebar is too thin, tabs are transparent (WTF?!), tabs are sized according to window width (spatial memory? Anyone…?), but worst of all: dragging is totally awkward because tabs == titlebar, instead of Chrome, where tabs are underneath the titlebar. Oh, and the 3D effect on the tab bar/titlebar/whatever is FAR too overdone. It stands out like an eyesore on my desktop.
No, no, no. If this is called “native”, I rather have Chrome’s idea of “native”.
Edited 2009-02-24 16:59 UTC
You’re right, it isn’t native, calling it that is just ignorant.
And also, it managed to crash with a general protection fault at first run without me doing anything at all to it.
Edited 2009-02-24 17:17 UTC
I like the look on Vista. The tabbed view reminds me of BeOS, where you could slide the titlebar tabs around so you could see the tabs for multiple windows at once. Safari is effectively doing the same thing automatically.
As for them being variable width, I don’t see how else they could be, with Windows’ “the title bar must be the full width of the window” design.
I am not sure if it works for Vista, cause I don’t have either Vista or W7 but XP. It seems to be OK with my XP classic theme. By all means, Safari4 is a beta and W7 is at beta stage as well.
If you’re using Safari on a PC with Windows Vista or Windows XP, you’ll feel right at home. That’s because Safari features a native look — just like other Windows applications — including a native title bar, borders, and toolbars. To provide a consistent Windows experience, Safari now uses Windows standard fonts, but you can choose to use Apple’s crisp anti-aliased fonts if you prefer. Of course, Safari in Windows delivers the same lightning-fast performance provided by the Mac version.
you will note it says vista and xp NOT windows 7
you cant complain when it doesn’t support something it doesn’t claim to.
Just installed Safari 4.0 Beta.
1. It installs over Safari 3.x – without any option not to (if there is an option, they sure hid it). Safari 4 has already crashed once.
2. Tabs on the top is horrible. Sure, it is much more polished than Chrome on Windows, but nonetheless, annoying (I especially seem to confuse the nice red blop and the small red box with an X in the first tab on the left). I don’t see any usability reason why the tabs is more functional on the top. Instead, it continues Apple’s trend of breaking consistency for no good particular reason to a whole new level.
I’m sure apps (including Chrome) will implement tabs on the top. Just that they would do it in their own way. Mac used to be big on consistency, and now only the Windows version is consistent with its environment (a strange reversal there).
3. Multitouch gestures remain at 3.x level. In Firefox 3.2 Beta 2, there are more gestures (I’m particularly a big fan of its method to change tabs) – though I didn’t like how they go to the start or end of a page with the three finger up and down respectively. Apple decided the three finger up/down is not good enough for Safari – a shame. Also, a reason why I’m sticking with Firefox.
4. GMail and Google Reader, the two AJAX-heavy websites I visit daily, nay, hourly – doesn’t seem particularly faster than on Firefox. Safari’s Javascript engine may very well be faster than Firefox (wouldn’t be shocking), but at some point, it doesn’t matter. It instead seem to be a forward looking thing – perhaps five years from now, complex Javascript websites would bring traditional Javascript engines to its knees.
5. Top Sites is cool (nicer animation than Chrome and Opera at least). But like Chrome (and Opera, though the feature is very different there), it’s unlikely I would use it often. I already have the top twelve sites I visit on the bookmark bar, it serves me well.
6. In terms of browsing, having gotten used to Firefox’s URL bar, Safari 4’s seem downright primitive (even IE 8 on Windows 7 do the URL bar much better).
BTW, I just noticed the tabs on the top exists for the Windows version as well.
I guess my biggest grouse against tabs on the top is that it blurs the line between title bar and tab. Previously, you can drag any part of the tab to move it around or to create a new window. Now, you can only drag the left-most corner of the tab – dragging the rest of the tab would have the same result as dragging any other title bar.
If Apple really wanted to save screen real estate (*why* stop at Safari?), honestly, I prefer Microsoft’s idea of merging the toolbar with the title bar.
The zoom is extremely wonky – for the first few milimetres of the pinch, Safari doesn’t react. After that, it drastically zooms in/out – not the gradual zoom I’m accustomed to on Firefox.
… some of the features are de facto irrelevant. The problem with many features is that, the web being what it is, nobody publishes using the new features until the developers conclude that a reasonable majority of the readers have browsers that support them. Many of Safari’s features re wonderful, but will remain largely unused until it’s peers catch up.
The REALLY good stuff are the new JavaScript engine, and the developer features (which you don’t need to be a developer to appreciate). Also, the various history enhancements are nice too. I’m not sure, but doesn’t the beta include a feature to save a site as a stand-alone application too (on the Mac), like Fluid does?
I’m also unconvinced that Safari is a good choice for Windows users. A lot of the native features Safari uses on the Mac don’t exist on Windows, so there’s kludges… Then the UI itself is a giant kludge because of the difference in platform, and then there’s the bloat that comes from having to have the extra libraries and layers of abstraction to port the OS X-native app to Windows.
BTW – I really like Safari. For those with OS X, I suggest it whole-heartedly. For Windows — well, it’s still good, but just not as satisfying.
I had run Safari best optimized benchmark (SunSpider) against the nightly build Firefox and the figures show that Safari is with 15% faster than Firefox. Depends of benchmark Safari 4.0 beta runs from 2.5 to 0.5 of Firefox’s speed.
It sounds strange that: up to 4x times is of course depending of benchmark and the figure. It may be said the same about Firefox as it runs: up-to 2x times in SunSpider benchmark!
The features I mind to get them are: Web Of Trust (WOT) extension in Firefox and AdBlockPlus which makes even OSNews or Phoronix much cleaner (yeah, we all love the adds) and removing them I think is the main jump-stopper to Safari. Is cool but gives no added value to Firefox. Even it’s own theme cannot be changed as is possible in Firefox.
Seen, tested and uninstalled!
One of the major advances Chrome made was the multi-process isolated renderer/plugins architecture. IE8 is also going in that direction, but Chrome managed to be released first. Is Safari doing anything to ensure that their (inevitable) security bugs do not result in a total compromise of the user’s account?
One reason I switched from Safari to Firefox, despite the fact that I miss some of the usability features is that Safari was a huge memory pig. It would use on the order of 3x the memory of Firefox for the same thing, and yes, I am taking into consideration the fact that Firefox will return pages to the OS while Safari will not. I bet they haven’t done a damn thing about memory usage.
Another reason is that Safari has lacked really basic things like session-save and crash protection. To get that, you have to buy Saft, which becomes a bit of a pain every time Safari gets updated. Did they fix that yet?
Have you tried History/Reopen All Windows from Last Session (available since Safari 3)?
Why should I even have to do that?
Also, it opens them in a new window instead of the current, so you end up with a blank window floating around. Not a big problem, but not ideal.
This is a browser in a multi-core Multi-GHz Multi-GB world i.e. 7 in emulation seems fast enough for whatever i need it to do but It is hard to bench it without seeming like a total tool, but for some sites that have been traditionally and increasingly slow (i.e Space.com National Geographic and other internal sites) it seems to work. It works great here at OS.News.com it seems to be a 13 MB app with a 31 MB package so there is likely some heavy lifting in the background, but I am not going to look into what all got installed (at least until the kids are asleep)
For the most part the issues that I could see seemed slow in other browsers today. will they be slow tomorrow or after a restart or if I trash the cache – I do not think that it makes a difference. Safari used to suck real bad for lack of a better term. (it haf teh suk0rz) I still use Omniweb as my primary browser and I will likely continue to but I believe that whatever browser you use – and with a wife who is a LAMP developer and I who am a scientific developer I have just about all of the browsers on my Mac – Whichever browser that you use it is a choice and not a MSIE flavored gun in my back.
This site is all about alternatives – not perfection or trashing the other guy for not having ‘perfect’ GNU support.
Was very doubleplusunstable and crashed all the time. It wasn’t until 3.1 that it became stable enough for daily use.
I believe the new features on Safari 4 are awesome, and some of them are truly new and lifted off Opera, Firefox or Chrome.
Another standard compliance browser is a great addition, with great JS and HTML performance and new CSS features. If this is what it take for others to pay attention, then it is doubleplusgood.
The new tab behavior is poorly implemented, Chrome does it a lot better.
Though they did seem to pay attention to two of the biggest complains I’ve read about Safari on Windows, non-native theme and font-rendering.
Overall a good release but needs a lot of polish. I’ll check it again once 4.1 is released.
Pff. Tried out Safari 4 Beta and it scored only 98/100 on Acid3 (@ Windows 7 Beta 1). Had a Mac-using pal check it out too and he got the same results.
I am getting 100/100 on Acid3. Safari 4 could not render the animation above 30fps on only two tests and I am running this on an iBook G4.
Edited 2009-02-25 03:08 UTC
I don’t know how that could possibly be true…
I have the following systems with Safari 4 now installed:
G4 PowerBook 1.33 GHz – OS X 10.5
G5 iMac 2.0 GHz – OS X 10.5
Intel i7 3GHz Desktop – Windows 7
All of these machines have scored 100/100 on the Acid 3 test.
Never thought I would say it, but safari is now in contention for the browser I use full time on windows.
The one issue is the tabs. They obviously copied chrome, but came up so short it almost hurts. There is no ability to reorder the tabs, middle click does not close them, dragging the only tab out of a window does not destroy the window, and the animation, while nice, is way too slow.
That being said, this is an awesome release. I would use it over firefox any day, but I will keep chrome for my day to day browsing for now
Click the grip and drag
Yeah, I just noticed that like, two seconds ago.
I don’t know why they are going for Titlebar Mode and Tab Mode. I much prefer the chrome way of always tab mode, with the window just being a bucket to group tabs in. If they did that I would drop chrome in a second.
Really? The auto-destruct of a Safari 4 window when the last tab is dragged out works on WinXP.
The animation isn’t all that slow but it could be faster.
We’ll see how it works for the release candidates.
So here is the scenario
You have one window full of tabs, for whatever reason window 2 gets spawned on top of window 1. In chrome, as soon as the last tab detaches, window 2 disappears, leaving window 1 free to accept its new tab. In safari it doesn’t.
Believe it or not, this is a situation that comes up a hell of alot, at least for me.
This is especially annoying because pressing Alt+Tab cancels the drag, at least in Vista.
Oh, and no middle-click tab closing, either…
There is a workaround posted here:
http://support.agilewebsolutions.com/showthread.php?t=14965&highlig…
Some users have reported that the 1password icon disappears after a browser restart, others deny that. So, if you wanna try, it’s a plist edit away
Or download the latest 1Password beta, see:
http://support.agilewebsolutions.com/showthread.php?t=14969
Both Safari and Opera get 100/100.
For Opera:
Failed 0 tests.
Test 26 passed, but took 82ms (less than 30fps)
Test 40 passed, but took 39ms (less than 30fps)
Test 69 passed, but took 11 attempts (less than perfect).
Total elapsed time: 2.85s
For Safari:
Failed 0 tests.
Test 26 passed, but took 52ms (less than 30fps)
Test 69 passed, but took 26 attempts (less than perfect).
Total elapsed time: 2.61s
So at least on my machine (a 2007-model laptop), they’re about the same speed, neither passing Acid 3 perfectly.
And let’s be honest, Opera was first to the Acid 3 in a user-friendly installable package. Installing the webkit nightly isn’t as straightforward as http://www.apple.com/safari or http://www.opera.com/next
Huh?
Installing a WebKit Nightly is easy: go to nightly.webkit.org, download the dmg, open it (if Safari hasn’t already done that for you), then drag WebKit to Applications. How is that difficult?
In fact, that’s much easier than downloading and installing the Safari 4 beta. No installer, and no reboot required.
As a bonus, WebKit has Sparkle built in so it keeps itself up to date too.
IMHO one can’t get a more user-friendly installation package than WebKit.
Actually I was referring to Windows :-). But yes, it’s easy for me and you and everyone who visits this site. The point I was making was, average Joe wouldn’t have the slightest idea what WebKit was so that he’d update to its nightly.
“Safari was the first browser to let you organize tabs by dragging and dropping. Movable tabs give you the power to organize your sites exactly the way you want. Rearrange tabs by dragging their tab handle left or right. Drag a tab out of a window to create a new window. Or drag a tab from one window to another window to merge their tabs.”
based on what i read at:
http://www.appleinsider.com/print.php?id=2111
and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safari_(web_browser)
Safari didn’t have dragable tabs until 2006/2007, whereas Firefox and Opera had the feature long before. Firefox 1.5 had drag and drop rearrangable tabs back in 2003. Opera 7 drag and drop rearrangable, and new to new window, etc back in 2003 also.
About time opera implements these feature … I meant Safari.
Acid 3 is a pissing contest anyway (I don’t care about acid 3 compliance if want to browse with lynx), the article look like safari is the savior ( and a nice troll bait ), I love apple for their advance in usability, but for implementation it is still lagging behind.
Safari is for MacOSX what IE is for windows ( stock browser that is working for 65% of people ), Chrome is almost falling into this category.
But Opera is packing the most feature out of the box ( some of them are either badly usable, like scroll drag ), but looks cluttered ( main Opera critisism ) even if the new stock skin looks cleaner, and website that are performing agent check won’t recognize it as a “modern” browser.
So as for today we won’t have any real contender for firefox when it come to compatibility and feature ( 5 ms faster javascript won’t help that much the page loading ).
I don’t know anything about web development but this browser rocks. I’m not sure if I should anymore, but I’m still lauching webkit nightly. This is the fastest I’ve ever seen pages rendered.
Woo hoo! Rock on Apple!
Where is the ever important option to disable JavaScript window resizing?
Opera, Firefox and even Camino seems to get that right except Apple.
-Ad
Camino is a Gecko browser. Imagine that! It has what Firefox has!
File a feature request.
Well, it’s better than v3, but I don’t like how it tries so hard to look like Chrome. I’d really much like to see custom themes, and [lots of] plugins. Opera, Chrome and Safari are all showstoppers for me because the lack of a lot of addons that make my Firefox shine in comparison. Speed is not everything.
edit:sorry I was blind but now I see
Edited 2009-02-25 07:46 UTC
Its fast when it dose work, but I find it to be unstable it did crash like 5 times under the 10 minutes I used it. And its seems to be heavy on the memory as well Chrome dose sub 40mb while Safari is up in 113-144mb.
But over all its good and the more it fails the better it gets :hihi:
Its page rendering is lightning fast on my favorite sites and it does have many cool features. Also, I have yet to see the instability that others are reporting.
But, I don’t see anything like the 4 process models that Chrome has nor does it have the built-in Task Manager.
So, it’s nice and I’ll be sure to use it from time to time but nothing yet to displace Firefox as my go-to browser or Chrome as the work-in-progress future-browser.
this is far the best browser I’ve used and it is hell fast.
And remember: It’s till a Beta!