10 replies to this topic

[phoenixinno]

Recently Apple released a new beta of their successful Safari Browser. I tried Safari 3 and i loved untill it seemed to randomly become slt rif of it. However this new beta look amazing, especially now that Apple has loaded it with several eye-candy features such as cover flow and top sites. There are also other new features and performance improvements.

Cover flow:

I think the new Coverflow feature in history is great. As well as being able to search through history you can see the web pages. This gets rid of clicking each item to see if it is the right page. Now you can scroll through and take a look. The great thing about the history search is not only can you search for past pages but also the text in those pages. But wont this take up a lot of space in temp files or something?

Top Sites.

The top sites feature is great. It displays all of your favourite sites in a cool 3D wall. Pointless but it can provide you with quick access to sites you visit very often.

Tab bar on top:

The tab bar has also moved, instead of being with all the other toolbars it is now in the title bar. Who knows if this is useful? IT is a matter of personal preference, you will have to check it out to see.

There are also new tools for developers

Safari is the only browser that provides tools for managing the offline databases that can be part of you websites. The Databases pane in Safari allows you to view databases, tables and records from right inside it. You can even run SQL queries on your offline databases. Nice for those with offline or test CMS sites!

Resources is another great feature to check each element of your page and check sizes and loading times. Great for when you are optimising

One thing i hated about the old safari was how it your site.stood out and didn’t look like a windows program at all. The new safari features a native windows look including a native title bar, borders, and toolbars.



Plus all the great features from the previous version of safari are still there, for example Snap back. I have the beta and love it. I don’t intend to return to firebox for quite some while now.

Anyone else tried the beta?

[random truth]

I am using it right now. However their is a bug that when you have over 1,000 websites cached (sad, I know) using it becomes slow as safari searches the large cache. Oh well its a beta for a reason.

[zywxn]

I use it and I prefer Safari 3 because Safari 4 lacks a big feature: moving tabs.
The intergreted Window bar and Tab bar like Google Chrome is quite nice, however.

[andreip]

Looks awesome ! Im taking a look at it right now !
Thank you for sharing this with us.

[random truth]

zywxn, on Apr 2 2009, 01:21 PM, said:

I use it and I prefer Safari 3 because Safari 4 lacks a big feature: moving tabs.
The intergreted Window bar and Tab bar like Google Chrome is quite nice, however.

Huh? You can move tabs in it. You just hover over the tab, and move your mouse to the "grab area" with the diagonal lines on the right side of the tab. And then you can move tabs between windows, into separate windows or in different place on that window.

[frozen.fish]

for webkit engine I'd stick with chrome..
after trying out safari for testing sites.. i cannot take the bloat and resource usage so removed it..

[Saint_Michael]

As much as I like the eye candy, the windows version looks horrible, especially the way the tabs look and if you modify your desktop visually then it looks even worse. Of course, I am not a safari user but I think they need to redesign the look of the Safari browser, at least for the window users.

[random truth]

Saint_Michael, on May 3 2009, 12:56 AM, said:

As much as I like the eye candy, the windows version looks horrible, especially the way the tabs look and if you modify your desktop visually then it looks even worse. Of course, I am not a safari user but I think they need to redesign the look of the Safari browser, at least for the window users.

Im using a mac and it works great. Apple cant program worth anything on Windows though. Also the design was redone saddly. It used to have the gray coloring of itunes but then they made it copy the system theme.

[k_nitin_r]

random truth, on Apr 2 2009, 04:14 PM, said:

I am using it right now. However their is a bug that when you have over 1,000 websites cached (sad, I know) using it becomes slow as safari searches the large cache. Oh well its a beta for a reason.

If you don't want Safari to go over all of your data, you might want to reduce your cache size. A smaller cache is better suited for older hardware - less disk space usage, and less CPU usage in searches. You can't complain about getting a feature you never had unless you actually have to use it - that's when you begin to appreciate it.

[random truth]

k_nitin_r, on May 13 2009, 04:10 PM, said:

If you don't want Safari to go over all of your data, you might want to reduce your cache size. A smaller cache is better suited for older hardware - less disk space usage, and less CPU usage in searches. You can't complain about getting a feature you never had unless you actually have to use it - that's when you begin to appreciate it.

The problem is I am not using old or slow hardware. And yes, It is a bug. It has been fixed in the new beta. I can only assume that my cache was in the 300mb or higher area. Ill explain what happens in the bug in simple.wikipedia.com terms.
1. You visit a website.
2. It gets saved to the cache (about 500KB)
3. You continue browsing.
4. The cache just gets bigger.
5. Every-time you look for a website the computer searches the cache.
6. The bigger the cache the longer this takes
7. Until you can get coffee in the lagtime

So when the cache is limited this does not happen.. It was a small mistake that was probably fixed in two minutes or so by the coders.