- Saturday, 21 November 2009
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Potatoes are more intelligent than grass because people can eat them - Gurdjieff
Apple releases Safari 4 Public Beta
APPLE HAS ANNOUNCED THE PUBLIC BETA OF SAFARI 4 which it says is "the fastest and most innovative browser available for Mac and Windows PCs," claims which remain to be proven as yet.
What is apparent from the get go, however, is that Apple has pulled out all of the stops to make Safari look gorgeous. Many lessons have been learned from the way in which Itunes and OSX display files and folder, and you can now display your Top Sites in a faux-3D amphitheatre of webby wondrousness.
In this mode you can permanently pin all of your most visited sites to your startup page and quickly search your history using the text input field in the bottom right of the window.
It takes a few moments to populate each of the windows but, once they have been cached, everything moves along lickety split.
Searching your browser history quickly flicks into the now familiar cover flow mode but, as far as we can tell, only pages which have been visited using the new version of the browser are properly displayed in their full visual glory.
But once you've built up a new set of history markers, flicking through them is intuitive and impressively fast.
Apple reckons that Safari 4 loads Web pages three times faster than IE7 or Firefox and that the brand new Nitro Engine runs Javascript more than four times faster than previous versions and 30 times (yes 30!) faster than Microsoft's offering.
We've only had a brief play with Apple's latest browser, and on the surface everything seems to run quickly and without problems. Demanding sites like the BBC's Iplayer work flawlessly, and additional interface tweaks like tabs which pop out of the top of the main window rather than stealing little bits of your viewable screen seem so obvious once someone else thinks of them. But with built-in support for CSS 3 and HTML 5, Safari looks like it may well have stepped ahead of the game.
And if looks are anything to go by, Internet Exploder, Firefox and the rest of the browser crowd had better shape up sharpish. µ
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The reall question is not how it looks but how secure is it from outside intrusion/ expoits.
My guess is not very.
I will wait to see if the same old exploits that have been used against Safari in the past get through this version.
I am betting they will.
Looks like they finally did the same as mozilla and m$ did some time ago, they simply implement all features of Opera, and call them something new.
Innovative, hmmmm, honestly OSS groups and Opera should look into this innovation. Two words explain this simply, Compiz and Speed Dial... ok ok I know that is three words but in reality it is two technologies. Opera came out with speed dial a long time ago, and compiz has been around for years.
Me thinks Apple should be taken to court on this since they seem to have the audacity to go around saying that they own IP on multi-touch tech. Give'em a taste or their own grubby little tactics.
Cheers
Compiz? You mean the Linux/XOrg desktop 3D wobbly windows version of Apple's Quartz Extreme that they introduced years and years ago, adding things like Expose in 2003, etc?
Next you'll say that Linux did CoverFlow before the guy that Apple bought out that did CoverFlow did!
What's the betting it'll work flawlessly on ancient versions of Win XP, but will only work on the latest release of OS X? (What we in the trade call a bloody stupid decision.)
Its still grey or gray which ever you prefer.
Welcome late to the party. Operas has speed dial for 2 years, Chrome had it for a year..
Apple masters of stealing everyones ideas....
If you look at the entire Safari 4 feature list, it reads like a list of existing Opera features, or at worst, already in Opera 10 alpha.
When will people wake up, and see who is REALLY innovating, and who is just copying...
Why can not one of these new browsers sort bookmarks by name?
Also if you have more than one browser and more than one machine you are going to want to synch them. Why not add useful features like that instead of cover view and flashy home pages.
The whole point of a tabbed page is that is appears like a tabbed page. The page and tab should be visually connected, thats the visual analogy which you are breaking by separating them. Its doesn;t save any screen space by moving it to the top, it just means we now have to move the mouse further to click on it.
Safari 4 like the earlier version, tends to freeze often when I've a lot of tabs. I still like it because its fast on many pages especially Gmail.
So it will never be my main browser.
Opera does that already, has done for about a year. It also syncs lots of other settings and documents between all your instances of browsers, regardless of platform. It also syncs bookmarks and notes to Opera Mini and Opera Mobile.
Add a bookmark on your phone, and it it appears on your desktop(s) and vice-versa.
I think Firefix has a addon to do this too, but it comes as standard with Opera, and works VERY well.
this thing eats up 150MB of ram idle.
another bloated software package by apple. good job!
This browser rocks. First thing in over 2 years that got me to ditch Firefox. A bunch of Euro-Opera-Lovers here. Opera is slow, and sucks with Flash. I really tried to like Opera, but it is my 5th favorite browser behind Safari, Firefox, Camino & Chrome.
I am very impressed with Safari 4 Beta...
http://dougitdesign.com/blog.html