Posts Tagged ‘safari’

Safari 4 Arrives

Today was Apple’s big World Wide Developer Conference which brought out several big news storied for Apple nerds like me. Among the new software and hardware announcements, Apple has brought Safari 4 out of beta and into full release. The browser is available for Mac OS X and Windows and offers a far superior native look and feel to the previous releases of Safari on Windows. I mentioned the new features of Safari 4 very briefly when the beta was released.

One of the biggest changes to the browser is that it brings the tabs above the navigation menus, much like Chrome. Unlike Chrome, however, the browser tabs act as the title bar (to move the window around) as well as allows you to do tab manipulation such as close tabs or move tabs around. Whether this change is good or bad has been debated around the web, but it does allow the browser window to not take up as much valuable screen real estate as it combines the space that would be used for showing tabs as well as the space for showing the title bar into one. Personally, I like it as my 13″ MacBook sometimes gets a little starved for screen space if I’m flipping between multiple windows.

UPDATE: Well.. I finally got around to actually installing Safari 4. Turns out they ditched the whole tabs above navigation idea as my tabs are all below the navigation buttons again. How disappointing..

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Filed under News : Comments (0) : Jun 8th, 2009

Cleaning Up After Safari 4

There’s been a few reports in the blogosphere of an issue with the Safari 4 beta not cleaning up after itself on OS X Leopard. Apparently this version of Safari leaves some data in the ~/Library/Caches/Metadata/Safari directory when clearing history as well as preview images of websites in /private/var/folders//com.apple.Safari/Webpage Previews directory as well. This indeed is a bug in Safari 4 on Leopard and can fill up some hard drive space if left unattended. The Webpage Previews directory can get quite large (500MB on my system, but lots of people have reported numbers in excess of 2GB) and can fill up a partition a little more than necessary and has also raised some privacy concerns. You can get around this bug, however by doing the following:

In the menu bar, go to Safari -> Reset Safari and select the webpage previews option. On my system this dumped the entirety of my webpages preview directory (as expected).
reset-safari-webpage-previews

You can find out exactly which directory Safari is showing these previews in via the following command: ‘getconf DARWIN_USER_CACHE_DIR’

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Filed under How-Tos / Tips : Comments (0) : May 27th, 2009

Safari 4 vs IE Benchmarks Are In

Yesterday Apple released a the first beta version of Safari 4 boasting Javascript rendering “30x faster” than Internet Explorer 7. Today, ZDNet released the results of a benchmark that proves exactly that. In fact, the tests show roughly 42 times faster rendering. The browser was very close to Mozilla Minefield as well as Google Chrome, but still better than the other two. Firefox 3, Opera 9.6 and IE8 were all much slower than the other three with IE8 by far the slowest. Then it came to IE7.. It’s not even worth comparing the two as, of course, IE7 was 42x slower at rendering the page. In a world where desktop applications are migrating from the desktop to the browser, Javascript rendering is going to be very important for application performance. Safari has been rated as the fastest browser at rendering Javascript in the past and it appears it has just raised the bar again.

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Filed under News : Comments (1) : Feb 25th, 2009

Apple Releases Safari 4 Beta, Claims 30X Faster Than IE7

Apple has released a beta version of the next version of its browser, Safari. Among some usability features, Apple is boasting some significant performance gains. It is saying that its new Nitro Engine, it can execute Javascript code 30x faster than Internet Explorer 7 and 3 times faster than Firefox 3. They are also bragging 3x faster html rendering than IE7 and Firefox as well. They stated the browser was faster than Google Chrome, but no numbers were given to compare the two.
Safari Top Pages
They made two big changes as far as usability goes. Probablythe biggest changes as far as usability is that Apple moved the tabs to the top of the browser window similar to the way Chrome displays tabs. Also added was cover flow for browsing history. It’s the same coverflow just like you find in Finder (I couldn’t resist) and iTunes only with webpages that you’ve visited.

A new feature that’s been added is something they call “Top Sites”. By default when you open a new tab or window, it displays the top 12 sites you’ve visited in the past and gives you a nice one-click access to your favorite spots on the web.

They finally made the Windows version look more like a Windows application and not painfully obvious that it was an application built for Apple and ported to Windows. That’s one of my biggest pet peeves with applications that get ported to the Mac is some developers don’t adhere to the “look and feel” of the platform they are porting to. I was disappointed to see Safari 3 on Windows, but am relieved to see they’ve finally adopted the Windows “look and feel” on Windows.

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Filed under News : Comments (1) : Feb 24th, 2009