Forum Moderators: travelin cat
Apple® today announced the public beta of Safari® 4, the world’s fastest and most innovative web browser for Mac® and Windows PCs. The Nitro engine in Safari 4 runs JavaScript 4.2 times faster than Safari 3.* Innovative new features that make browsing more intuitive and enjoyable include Top Sites, for a stunning visual preview of frequently visited pages; Full History Search, to search through titles, web addresses and the complete text of recently viewed pages; Cover Flow®, to easily flip through web history or bookmarks; and Tabs on Top, to make tabbed browsing easier and more intuitive.
But, it's the nifty "top sites" feature that gives you an iTunes view of your favorites that has me smiling. It's not a big deal, but it's fun.
That said, it does seem fast.
[edited by: Chico_Loco at 7:52 pm (utc) on Feb. 24, 2009]
The other bizarre thing, and maybe this is a MACism, but the Preferences dialog appears to have no way to CANCEL inadvertent changes you may make. The only button is to close the window so settings are saved no matter what. FAIL.
I kind of like it. I think.
Bill, I'm on a mac and there is no problem for me to change the Preferences in the dialog box. Maybe the Windows flavor is different.
Mack.
1) Go to history at the top and say "show all history." Whoa!
2) Now, go to "top sites" under history. Click on the little search box in the lower right corner....Hey! (This is on a state-of-the-art Mac, BTW. Your mileage may vary.)
Also, I like the way one can move the tabs around on the top.
It refused to play an embedded-via-javascript WMV file on one of my sites with the message:
"Safari can't find the Internet plug-in... content of MIME type video/x-ms-wmv"
Previous versions of Safari (and all other desktop browsers) play it fine.
Fortunately I only use WMV files to show that it is possible (on a test page).
No other plugins were affected.
...
I am disappointed that they haven't added an "exceptions" feature for cookies.
I'm on a mac and there is no problem for me to change the Preferences in the dialog box.
I didn't say I had a problem setting Preferences, but the dialog box doesn't conform to traditional norms with buttons like CANCEL in the event you didn't want to change anything and escape without change.
Mac users don't make mistakes, so there is no reason to have a cancel button.;)
FWIW on the Mac, FireFox doesn't have one either, but Opera does.
maybe this is a MACism
Current Mac browsers:
Safari, Firefox, iCab, OmniWeb - no Cancel button
Opera, SeaMonkey - Cancel button
traditional norms
Windows traditional norms perhaps, but then so are talking paperclips and animated yellow puppies.
A better point might have been that a Cancel button is more user-friendly interface design.
And yes, I use them in my own web applications.
--
Another observation: no Reload/Refresh button in the new Beta, but a Home button instead.
Fortunately I "think different" and use the keyboard shortcut anyway.
...
Windows traditional norms perhaps, but then so are talking paperclips and animated yellow puppies.
One application using these does not make it a norm. But hundreds of thousands of softwares using the cancel button to undo inadvertent changes is usually a good hint that it should be a requirement for modern, user friendly applications.
It's okay to borrow from the Windows world. Windows does it all the time.
Windows traditional norms perhaps, but then so are talking paperclips and animated yellow puppies.
I used a CANCEL button on a Mac long before I ever used on one Windows, it's a common GUI thing, something even my Mom uses to make sure she didn't mess something up when she's unsure.
This is a fun, cool, zippy little thing. Better? Who is to say. Different and colorful? Oh yeah.
Has anyone every noticed that a lot of the people here are...geeks? Who would have thought...
Thank you for your understanding.
...
But, sheee, it's only like, maybe, seven item per dialog box.
Doesn't matter, as a GUI designer and someone that takes calls from elderly relatives that have no clue how they just screwed up their browser (or anything else on the computer), that CANCEL button can save lives, mostly mine from being wasted on the phone trying to figure out what happened.
it is not a tradition for browsers on that operating system in any meaningful sense of the term.
Has nothing to do with browser tradition, it has to do with standards.
No big deal either way, just totally caught me off guard.
;)
First impressions, quick and a love the cover flow feature in the history.
Strangely since I restarted after the update, my mac mail has been crashing a lot and blaming it on growl. I've had to disable it for the time being. Has anyone else had any similar problems?
There have been a lot of reported problems in this Safari beta if you have any plug-ins for Apple Mail.
You will probably have to ditch the beta if those plug-ins are important to you.
If you want to check out some of the features, without downloading it, Apple has posted 150 of them here [apple.com].
Of special note are the Developer Tools about half way down the page.
It is so so quick and its been benchmarked at 6 x faster than internet explorer (do an internet search)
One annoyance is that in forums (such as this one) its very easy to accidently highlight all the text in the reply box and the next thing its gone and never to be retrieved again-be warned - if the text highlights blue click in the box again to cancel.
Also no google page rank either.
