Posts tagged Apple

For you web browser fans out there, Apple released a public beta of Safari 4 earlier this week.  I downloaded it earlier this evening, and, so far I’m pretty impressed.  The user interface has been refined, and “Cover Flow” has been added to the browser in several areas.

Opening "Top Sites" page in Safari.

The first noticeable difference in the user interface is that tabs are now located above the location and search bars.  This is different than in past versions where they were located below.

Also new is a “Top Sites” view that is displayed when you first open the browser, and by default, when you open a new tab.  This “Top Sites” view uses your history to keep track of 12 sites you visit the most.  As your web history changes, what you see on the page will change over time.  In addition, you can pin certain pages permanently to “Top Sites” by clicking on the “edit” button on the bottom left.  You can search your history on this page as well.  A “Top Sites” button has been added to the right of the bookmarks button in the toolbar of Safari for easy access to this page.

Speed is dramatically improved in this version of Safari as well.  The Web Kit rendering engine has been optimized, along with the introduction of a new JavaScript engine called Nitro.  I did find Safari 4 very snappy on some difficult to render pages like ESPN.com.  Your mileage may vary depending on how the site your visiting is coded, but Apple’s benchmarks state that Safari renders pages marginally faster than Firefox 3 and dramatically faster than IE7.

Also new is the use of coverflow as you scroll through your history and bookmarks.  Thumbnails of pages are generated as you browse, and then are visually represented as you “scroll” through your bookmarks and history.  This is is the fourth major area Apple has implemented CoverFlow into.  Recently it was added to iLife’ 09, and has been in iTunes and the Mac OS X 10.5 finder for a couple of years.

Windows users will find that Safari now uses native widgets and font rendering engines in Vista and XP.  This was a big complaint for most users on Windows, since Safari 3 used its own widgets and font rendering engines, which sometimes caused visual glitches when using the browser.

Overall I think this is a solid release.  If Safari is your primary browser, I wouldn’t recommend installing it yet.  There’s still some bugs to iron out- I was not even able to use it to post to WordPress due to a glitch in creating links in WordPress edit post tool.  In addition, some plug-ins will most likely stop working with Safari 4. Issues with the third party programs 1Password and Growl notifications have already been reported. However, for general browsing it works fine, and as I said above, is very fast.  Safari 4 comes with an uninstaller in case you do need to revert back to version 3.2.1.

Finally, if you don’t like the layout of the tabs located over the location bar, there is a simple fix for this on Mac OS X.  Quit Safari, and then open the Terminal application and type in the following:

defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugSafari4TabBarIsOnTop -bool FALSE (courtesy of MacOSXHints.com)

If you would like to revert back to the new tabs layout, type the above in again with Safari closed, but change the FALSE to TRUE.

Overall I think this is a very polished initial preview, and many of the new features caught users by surprise.  Safari is based on the open source Web Kit web rendering engine, and nightly builds of it are available at webkit.org for use.  Even though these bleeding edge builds were available, the new layout and Cover Flow features were not available until the release of the Safari 4 Public Beta.  I’m pretty sure we won’t see any new features in the final version of Safari 4, but there’s definitely room for improvement in page rendering.  Who knows, we may see even more speed and optimization improvements by the time this thing is final!