Safari
Next up : Safari - A new web browser by Apple, based on the same rendering engine as Konqueror. The press release reads "The fastest and easiest to use web browser ever created for the Mac, Safari features integrated Google search capabilities, SnapBack for retracing web paths, improved bookmark management and automatic 'pop-up' ad blocking." It’s in beta just now, but initial reports aren’t good.
Update
I gave Safari a quick test drive at home last night. As with most incomplete software there are (almost) as many minus points as plus. The biggest plus is by far the overall speed of the application. From booting up time to page loading times, it is very responsive. It almost made my super-slow 56k dial-up bearable. Here’s a quick run-down :
Plus points
It included all my IE bookmarks straight away (though not my Chimera ones).
The minimal design is excellent - exemplified by little things like combining the stop and reload buttons and merging the address and progress bars.
The status bar speaks plain english e.g. hovering over a link to www.apple.com where the anchor tag has a target of '_new' or '_blank', it reads 'open "http://www.apple.com" in a new window'.
SnapBack is implemented very well, as is the toolbar Google search (though we have seen this before).
It is very compact - less than 3MB download (no superfluous bloatware such as messengers, email or html - take note Netscape).
It is scriptable! - more details here.
Minus points
No tabs - after using Chimera for the past 6 months, this is big loss.
Somewhat suspect CSS support (I didn’t put it through any rigorous CSS tests of my own but it didn’t render form elements as I expected).
Somewhat suspect HTML support (e.g the 'title' attribute in anchor tags is not supported).
There is no auto-fill for form elements - you start to miss this after the fourth time you fill out your address.
The platinum effect - a bit like marmite - you either love it or hate it, I err towards the latter.
Despite this (and bearing in mind it is still in beta), there are enough signs to indicate that, by the time of 1.0, we’ll have a very good browser on our hands.
Posted 7 years, 6 months ago
As per usual, John Gruber, of Daring Fireball, comes up trumps with an well researched <a href="http://daringfireball.net/2003/01/safari.html">commentary</a> on Safari. Gruber speaks of the historical aspects of choosing the KHTML engine over Gecko and quickly runs through it’s faults and merits.
Phil · www · 7 years, 6 months ago