Posts Tagged ‘Safari 4’
I know I’m cruisin’ for some abusin’ at the hands of the Mac fanatics today, because twice in one morning I’ve felt compelled to bring a little skepticism to the exuberant reporting surrounding the latest developments from Apple. This time, all the major tech outlets are credulously reporting on this morning’s press release from Apple, which heralds the runaway success of Safari 4 on the basis of 11 million downloads in three days.
Now, I’m not doubting Apple’s numbers. Why would I? But as someone with three Macs at home, I couldn’t help but notice that Apple pushed Safari 4 out as an automatic update to all of its users this week. Yesterday, all three of the Macs in my household received the update, and we don’t even use Safari. (We prefer Firefox.)
An informal poll of my friends and colleagues reveals a whole lot of the same. Got the update dialog, downloaded and installed it, don’t intend to use it.
It may well be that Safari 4 is a fantastic browser, and that’s not what’s at issue here. What is at issue is the ridiculously thin claim that the latest Safari is a wild success on the basis that Apple basically pushed it out to everyone it possibly could, whether they wanted it or not. This very clearly echoes the last big Safari update, which Apple also pushed to unsuspecting usersthrough its update tool.
If Apple knows how to do anything, it’s take tech you’ve already seen and make it flashier and more fun to use. The new Safari 4 public beta is no exception.
Apple says Safari 4′s 150 features are “leading the way with innovation,” but in reality they’re all things we’ve used before in other browsers—with Cupertino’s magic aesthetic touch thrown in. Let’s take a look at Safari‘s headliner features, what other browsers already have them, and how Safari’s offering differentiates itself. (To follow along, download the public Safari 4 beta for Mac or Windows. Since most publications are testing the Mac version, I used the Windows version to do my review and take screenshots.)
Top Sites
Fans of Opera’s Speed Dial and Google Chrome will say that Safari 4′s “Top Sites” page looks awfully familiar. Like Chrome, Top Sites shows a thumbnail grid of web sites you’ve visited based on frequency, which changes as your browser history does over time.
Safari’s implementation of this been-there-done-that feature brings some flash and additional customization options to the table. First, when you click on a thumbnail, it zooms forward and fills the screen with a cool animated effect. Second, pages which have new content since the last time you visited them contain a blue star in the corner. (See the top right thumbnail in the screenshot above as an example. The concept is a neat, the implementation, for me, was a bit buggy.) Visuals aside, you can customize Top Sites in a few ways. To do so, click on the Edit button on the lower left hand side.
When you’re in edit mode, use the X’s to remove a site and the pins to fix a site to a permanent position. On the lower right hand side, use the Small, Medium, and Large buttons to set how many thumbnails you see at once (and their size).
You can also drag and drop thumbnails in the Top Sites view to appear where you want; watch all the others in the grid move aside to make room for the new positioning all smooth and musical-chair-like.
Cover Flow View
The one thing Safari 4 has that no other browser does (by default at least) is something Mac users are used to: Cover Flow view, which now displays web page previews instead of just album art (iTunes) or file previews (like in Finder). Go into bookmark view (hit the bookmarks button next to the Top Sites grid button on your toolbar) to flip through your history, bookmarks, or search results Cover Flow style. Still, Firefox users can get a very similar interface with the previously mentioned FoxTab extension.
Tabs on Top
Another page stolen from Chrome’s playbook is Safari’s new tabs style, which puts tabs at the very top of the window. If you aren’t used to Chrome, you’ll probably find this change pretty disconcerting at first, but the similarity between the two browsers is striking from tabs to toolbar.
With Chrome in the background and Safari up front on the left, check out how the buttons on the right side of the address bar look almost exactly the same. Safari changes things up slightly in two ways: the close tab button is on the left side of the tab, and that grippy handle on the right is a visual indicator that you can grab a tab and drag it to a new window, into another, or just into another position (also like Chrome).
Here’s what dragging a tab out of a window in Safari looks like; this is the one visual effect where Chrome (which offers a larger page preview during the drag action) actually does a nicer job.
Get Mac Fonts on Windows with Safari 4 (SQUEEE!)
Windows users who miss the Mac’s gorgeous typography when they’re surfing on the PC will want Safari 4, which now offers Mac fonts in its Windows version. As someone who just launched a site on which the fonts look like hell on Windows XP and beautiful on the Mac, this is the Safari feature that got me positively giggly. Sadly it’s not turned on by default in the Safari 4 beta. But take a look at the difference—it’s subtle, but powerful.
The top version is Safari’s default font rendering, which looks just like Firefox or Chrome (a bit pixelly around the edges). On the bottom I’ve turned on Safari’s font smoothing and the results are like butter.
To turn on font-smoothing, in Safari 4′s preferences dialog (Ctrl+, to get there), go to the Appearance tab and choose the appropriate option from the drop-down, as shown.
Safari 4 Is Not Ready for Everyday Usage
All the good-lookin’ features aside, in my one day of testing, Safari 4 reminded me several times that it’s not kidding about that “beta” label. Safari 4 is still super-crashy, so while it’s certainly worth a test drive, it’s got a long way to go in the stability department.
But Is It Faster?
The big question about Safari 4 is whether or not it’s truly leads the pack in terms of speed and performance with its new JavaScript engine Nitro and HTML rendering. I’m going to leave the definitive answer to that question to our resident speed-testing guru Kevin, who will regale you with charts and graphs later. One set of tests from the trusty Webware site do indicate Safari 4 is fast, but not the fastest kid on the block. My subjective experience is that it does feel snappy, but not necessarily speedier than Chrome.
Tweaks and Keyboard Shortcuts to Know
Finally, if you’re diving into Safari 4, a couple of non-obvious things to know.
Keyboard shortcuts: In general Safari feels light on keyboard shortcuts, but there are a couple to try. First, hit the Alt key to toggle the menu bar. Second, use Firefox’s Ctrl+Tab (Cmd+Tab for Mac users) to switch tabs. The Cover Flow view is pretty navigable using your keyboard, too—use Tab to move between elements and your arrow keys to move up and down your site list.
Customize your toolbar: To get rid of that “Report bug” button or add the handy Zoom or AutoFill buttons, you can customize your Safari toolbar in the same fashion you do Firefox. From the settings menu (that “Cog” button on the right), choose “Customize toolbar.” From there, drag and drop the buttons you want onto and off the toolbar.
All in all, it’s nice to see Safari 4 raising the bar a mite higher in the visuals department and give Chrome a little competition in the light-mean-and-lean browser market. Have you given Safari 4 a test drive? Think it’s all flash and no substance? Any happy (or sad) discoveries? Let us know what you think in the comments.
Google’s latest version of Chrome has claimed the lead in my JavaScript speed tests, but Apple’s new Safari 4 beta is the first browser to challenge it on Google’s own performance benchmark.
JavaScript is a programming language that powers not just innumerable ordinary Web sites, but also many Web-based applications such as Google Docs. With the computing industry’s major push to cloud computing, Web application performance is increasingly important, and there’s a race on to see who’s got the best JavaScript engine. JavaScript engines even have become a named feature, with Chrome’s V8, Firefox’s TraceMonkey, Opera’s Futhark and upcoming Carakan, and now the Safari’s newly branded Nitro, which is Apple’s version of WebKit’s Squirrelfish.
On the SunSpider test, the new Safari 4 beta scored third place.
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News)
I use two tests: The SunSpider benchmark from the WebKit project, and the V8 benchmark suite from Google, both of which run a variety of computing tasks rather than real-world applications. Such synthetic benchmarks are always tricky business, often not aging well as technology improves, but these two are widely used.
The upshot: Chrome wins both tests handily, with Firefox in second place on Sunspider and Safari in second place on the V8 benchmark.
I’m using raw versions of these browsers, though. Chrome is available in three versions, stable, beta, and developer preview, and I’m using the latter, which is the least stable. The latest Chrome developer preview, 2.0.164.0, includes a significant new component to the V8 engine.
On Google’s V8 suite of JavaScript tests, the Safari 4 beta was the only browser to get close to Chrome.
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News)
Also in my tests are Safari version 3.2.2 and the beta of 4.0, Mozilla Firefox 3.1 beta 2, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8 release candidate, and Opera’s version 10 alpha.
The results are an average of three runs on a dual-core Lenovo T61 running Windows XP with 3GB of memory. Results may differ on Apple Macs, of course, and of course bear in mind that there’s a lot more to browsing than just JavaScript speed.
The Safari 4 beta had a respectable showing on version 3 of Google’s tests, for which a larger number is better. Its score of 1,396 meant it’s the first browser to come anywhere near Chrome, which this time around achieved a score of 2,240. Opera scored 202, Firefox 181, Safari 3.2.2 173, and IE a pathetic 63.
On SunSpider 0.9, the results were a more even distribution. Chrome scored 1,775–and bear in mind that here smaller numbers are better–to Firefox’s 2,671, Safari 4′s 4,257, Opera’s 5,513, Safari 3.2.2′s 6,345, and IE’s comparatively feeble 7,168.
Apple on Tuesday announced the release of a public beta Safari 4, promising a much faster browser with improved navigation and searching.
The company said the newest edition of Apple’s browser for both Mac OS X and Windows will run JavaScript commands 4.2 times faster than Safari 3, and also claims to deliver better JavaScript and HTML page loading than Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 7 or Mozilla’s FireFox 3.
Apple also added the Cover Flow interface now found in almost every piece of its software to let users scroll backwards through browsing history as if they were flipping through album covers, and what appears to be Apple’s own implementation of FireFox’s Smart Location “awesome bar” called Smart Address Field.
The new beta version is available for download at Apple’s Safari Web page with both Windows and Mac OS versions ready for testing. Mac users need to be running Mac OS X Leopard 10.5.6 and Apple’s latest security update or Mac OS X Tiger 10.4.11 on an Intel Mac or a G3 or better Mac. Windows users need Windows XP SP 2 or Vista.
Safari is used by about 8 percent of Internet surfers, according to Net Applications, trailing Internet Explorer and FireFox.
Apple senior director of system software Brian Croll said the performance improvements are the result of a new JavaScript engine called Nitro. Apple used the SunSpider benchmark to post the JavaScript results, and the iBench benchmark for the HTML numbers, he said.
Croll emphasized Safari 4′s support for Web standards like HTML 5, which allows Web applications to work while offline, and CSS 3 for adding graphical effects. Safari 4 has passed the Acid3 test developed by the Web Standards Project, while FireFox 3 and Internet Explorer 7 have yet to do so, he said.
As far as changes that will be more visible to average users, Safari 4 moves the tabs from below the address bar to the very top of the window, and allows you to add a new tab by clicking a “+” sign in the uppermost right-hand corner of the window.
Apple added some new history browsing options, such as the aforementioned Cover Flow interface in the basic history view as well as a new feature called Top Sites, which checks the various Web sites you visit most frequently and arranges them in a grid pattern. If one of your Top Sites has published new content since the last time you visited, a white star on a blue background appears in the upper right-hand corner of the view for that site.
Windows users will notice a new “Windows-native look,” according to Croll, that uses the standard Windows font rendering. Safari has been available as a Windows browser since June 2007.