Steve Jobs just announced in his Macworld Keynote that Apple is releasing its own browser, called Safari. Its claim to fame is extremely fast performance on the Mac. The Mac platform has struggled from sluggish browser performance with IE (the old default browser). Update: According to Jobs, Safari is open source and based on khtml. It only runs on Mac OS X and will be available for download today.
Bout time.
Nuff said.
Well, first off, I had no idea that the macworld keynote and whatnot had started yet… but them I’m always out of the loop.
Anyway, should we assume this is chimera/mozilla based?
Its based on khtml
“extremely fast” – compared to what? What is this, a ‘first post’ for news? There’s no links, no specifics (such as whether this is mozilla based).
I’m really enjoying Phoenix (based on the Mozilla core) on Windows… if my Mac could run OS X, I’d certainly want to see Phoenix there.
How do you define “fast” these days anyway? Renders local pages quickly? Doesn’t hog your system or UI while waiting on remote servers? Tabbed browsing? Opens new windows quickly?
That they are releasing the source code with all of the improvements! They used a program called i-bench to benchmark various browsers.
Pretty bold!
… I stopped using IE on my iMac about a week after buying it. I downloaded Chimera 0.60, and that’s been my main browser ever since. I like its speed and capabilities, and the fact that I haven’t had one browser crash since I started using it (unlike Mozilla 1.2.1 OR IE).
I will download and try Safari, mainly because it sounds neat.
I found some more info on Safari. See: http://www.macintouch.com
http://www.macminute.com
> Its claim to fame is extremely fast performance on the Mac.
Kind of like a lightning-fast supercomputer that whips the P4 on specially contrived benchmarks? I hope that this is not simply more old-school marketing hype.
>Kind of like a lightning-fast supercomputer that whips the P4 on specially contrived benchmarks? I hope that this is not simply more old-school marketing hype.
To use KHTML (or, for that matter, Gecko) and end up with a slower browser that the oh-it’s-dead-slow IE for Mac would be a BIG FAT shame for Apple.
KDE,Konqueror, Linux , GPL havent any of you heard of any of this
thats what khtml is and thats why its open source
I hope credit is given where credit is due
And i hope they dont violate GPL
Anyone remember http://scout.wisc.edu/addserv/NH/95-02/95-02-07/0014.html ?
They are releasing the inmprovements to KHTML today. No violation.
Really cool. Hope KDE incorporates the improvements into Konqueor soon.
metallic window is gonna be hard to get used to, but it is slightly faster then Chimera.
They dont have to release the code until they start distributing the browser, so only today do they have to start doing that.
when a company like apple is not able to do a simple browser from scratch you know that something have turned very wrong with how internet work.
… still wondering why a web browser should take more than 2M.
Its very small btw ;p
ack no tabs though!
Why bother writing the rendering engine from scratch?
I have watched Macs and PC’s on the same network, and neither has a speed advantage browsing-wise. But of existing browsers, I most prefer (under OS X) Mozilla, because it has a killer feature set (pop-up killing; tabbed browsing; VERY solid standards support; etc) and IS a little faster than the rest I have tried (I was holding off on Chimera until verion 0.9 or so).
I would like to see a screenshot.
I saw that there is a button to submit sites to Apple that do not work correctly. Since they use KHTML, this will mean that also more sites will be compatible with Konqueror in the feature!
very fast, and good looking. NO TABS though.
The metallic look is very easy to get used to, the interface just gets out of your way. Also i believe the file size is ~7MB when uncompressed is because for one, all of the buttons are stored as tiffs, they could have used png, but might not have been as fast to display. Also it has rendezvous support so you can share bookmarks and such with no configuration. Plus it has the bug submit feature.
Nice options to configure also, pop up blocker, etc etc.
But no tabs.
but does anyone really use IE5 anymore? It so slow it could only be deliberate; Omniweb is good and Chimera is just fantastic, my 800Mhz iMac is far faster than my 2.1Ghz PC running IE. Lets hope Safari is as good or better.
i love it! i can’t believe it’s THAT good and THAT compatible! how do they do it?
Chimera is pretty stable at .6 on 10.2 for me, should give it a go.
Anyway, even Eugenia would be hard pressed to knock safari, it scrolls fast.
Strange that Apple didn’t go with the Gecko renering engine.
The GPL can be a issue for compaines like Apple (BSD tends to be the prefered)
David Hyatt works for apple now (dude that does phenoix and Chimera)
Chimera kicks ass
Supporting the Mozilla project would piss M$ off even more.
They do it by using code that’s been tested for years now.
Yet they have hired Hyatt to work on Chimera? What’s up with that?
KHTML by the way is an interesting choice. It’s fairly fast and small yes, primarily by being very simple. KHTML simply does not compare with Gecko in terms of power. Luckily it’s LGPLd, although given Apples previous “contributions” to open source I’d be surprised if it’s little more than the patches that integrate it with the Mac.
I’m using it just now. Fast… it’s fast. I don’t know if it’s faster than IE. Interface is pretty, clear, but I think it’s missing some feature I like, as tabbed windows. But this is a 1.0, and it’s ok. I will ask for it. HTML support seems to be better than in konqueror installed in my Mandrake 9. Now i’m going to explore bookmarks feature and OS integration.
Are using saying Gecko is KHTML.
If so, it is not. KHTML is Konqueror which is very fast.
Secondly Gecko is not slow XUL can be slow.
Apples previous “contributions” to open source I’d be surprised if it’s little more than the patches that integrate it with the Mac
Already with the sh|t-throwing? You just can’t see anything positive when it comes to Apple can you? Are they gonna take away your PeeCee membership card if you don’t immediately come out and bash Apple? Geez…
I’ve been using Chimera and iCab, both of these sometimes rendered illegible fonts and I have to hit enlarge font to even read. So far Safari has really improve legibility of small fonts. Even the tiny crap that some sites unforgivingly present.
I don’t know if anyone noticed but Apple also released X11 for MacOS X
http://www.apple.com/macosx/x11/
Pretty cool
official link: http://www.apple.com/safari/
IE from MS, Chimera from Mozilla, and now Safari from KHTML… you know, for a system that prides itself on having a creative user base, it’s kind of funny that they have to port their browsers from other systems… I’m a PeeCee owner though, so you can ignore this
Apple has too much of an ego to contribute too much intellectual property back to the community. I don’t believe they would unless they were required to by law. Its just not profitable for them. All that aside, Apple is a good company.
Linux on the other hand wants to give EVERYTHING away for free, because it knows that it is not perfect. It has no ego. And it doesn’t care about money. All that aside, Linux is a good community.
using safari right now. Works with css, frames and javascripts fine. Blazing speed. They did it right again.
Apple is rocking again, and again, and again. By the way, the keynote:
new imovie, new iphoto, new idvd, browser that has an awesome interface (except no tabs) and speed. New presentation software that used OPEN FILE FORMAT (reportedly) – and it has spreadsheet component built in.
New 12″ powerbook. $1999 with superdrive. That’s right, with superdrive. 4.6 lbs. Also, a 17 incher. Firewire 2 on that one.
new airport faster speed.
ha , ha, ha. When will people just give up and give Apple’s it’s due. WHEN?????? and don’t give me that shit on “the price” Guess what, quality and innovation costs money. It ain’t free pal. bye bye
It has no ego
Ummm. No. The Linux community has all types.
KHTML based? What the hell?
The stage is set for Mozilla based browsers to become the second most used browsers around! I cannot believe they didn’t build off of what the Chimera project started! Didn’t they hire the main Chimera programer a little while ago?
I downloaded Safari BTW. It was a shocking 3mb download! Not bad. Unfortunatly, its not that great. The speed advantage over Chimera is extreamly minor in everything except startup time and there is no tabbed browsing at all. I, frankly, cannot find any way that I would prefer it over Chimera. What are they smoking over there?
KHTML based. You must be kidding Jobs. Let me know when the REAL browser comes out, k?
Its funny how the Chimera browser more closely matchs the OSX UI and its tenents then Apples own browser. Just another sign of the “half-assed” nature of this thing.
You say that there is a noticeable speed difference, minor but you say there is, also you say that loading time is also faster, well that’s what holds me back from using Chimera. I launch it, wait, and wait, Splash Screen, wait, it’s done, wow it’s pretty fast. I’m one of those people with a 1gb of RAM and a Dual G4 that doesn’t like wasting resources by leaving programs open especially when running games. And I don’t really feel the need at all to launch a browser like that everytime I want to view a webpage, it’s painful watching it load like that IE loads faster than Chim.
Good deal. They are not re-inventing the wheel and I believe they will probably contribute code back. Why? It is not like Safari will be making them any money so giving the code to the KHTML people will not cost them a dime and bring a bit of good-will at the same time.
@appleforever — you are as bad as the knee jerk mac-haters. I will give Apple its due when they bring down the price a bit. Yes, I understand quality but I also understand the Apple premium. I was there when quality Apple notebooks use to go up flames. That is not the case now. They make good stuff but it still costs too much for what you are buying IMO. As in don’t take it personal, it is just my opinion.
I will also give Apple its due when the par down the interface a bit and squeeze some reasonable speed out of those gui interface. It feels slow but smooth. The rendering and response is very smooth in window movement, text rendering stuff like that but still too slow. The good news is that they are making progress on this with every release and I know that one day it will be a thing of the past.
When they make enough progress I will be there to give them their due. If they start charging for iapps they will be making a mistake and I will them their due in regard to those apps. Those are some nice little apps very smooth, very nice to use. The airport I am sure is nice to but I have no experience with them so I can’t “give them their due” in that regard.
Also:
@Andrew –
I agree there are all types in the Linux community like pretty much any community. There are huge festering egos and some really nice helpful people. Everyone talks about RTFM and attitude but I subscribed to the suse_en list and the redhat-list and I have not seen the attitude people talk about. Mailing lists are great places to get help. My only gripe with the community is that people who subscribe to the list tend to be old-timers and there advice always leads to the command line when there are gui-alternatives in the distro of their choice right there in the KDE control center of the System Configuration section of the Gnome menu.
Oh I love that feature!
No Apple is not perfect. But for too long too many people have refused to just acknowledge THE TRUTH: Apple makes the best personal computer experience. There were some dark years. But that is history. Apple is on an unbeliveable groove and yet still people debate whether it will be around next year. The response to that should be disbelief – what? why would the company making the BEST, pointing the way for all the copiers — just disappear. Instead there is just a lot of denial and fuzzy thinking. There is simply nothing to be lost — and everything to be gained — by everyone just acknowledging the simple and obvious fact that Apple is AHEAD. Maybe then MS would get off it’s fat monopoly butt.
It reminds me too much of IE. No thanks. I’ll stick with Chimera and Mozilla.
a couple weeks ago i noticed this: http://developer.apple.com/darwin/projects/misc/ — apple had the KDE javascript core on their web site. I thought it was odd at the time….
It is very interesting and refreshing to see how Apple selects less successful Open Source achievements and turns them into commercial spectacles.
IMHO, this is a very welcome thing for the whole community.
Since MS has threatened to take away support for MS Office and IE on the Mac platform, I think Apple is trying to make provisions for later.
Because OS X is already based on an open source project, they are trying to make themselves a more prominent figure in the OSS community, which may or may not be a good thing. In any case, I think it may just be a defense against MS – especially the attention they give themselves about releasing the code and keeping everything “open”.
Good for Apple.
p.s – The news post itself here at OSNews was pathetic. I agree with previous posters that the lack of a link was really disturbing. I actually found the story on LinuxToday first, which had a more substantial article AND a URL.
As Safari is based on KHTML from used by Konqueror, here is a e-mail to the kde-guys from one guy at Apple. (many guys here!;) It contains a changelog of what Apple has done to improve khtml.
http://lists.kde.org/?l=kfm-devel&m=104196912316326&w=2
quality and innovation costs money
This is a load of BS. Are you saying Linux is not quality software? Quality and innovation costs time. It takes knowledgable people working together creatively to innovate, and skilled people working passionately on a product to produce quality. Money has a lot to do with why most products are neither innovative nor high quality.
appleforever: quality and innovation costs money
c: quality and innovation costs time
If A = B and B = C then A = C, therefore
If (quality and innovation) = Money
and (quality and innovation) = Time
then Time = Money.
But didn’t we already know this?
Apple has already used kjs for a while (in Sherlock). It’s part of JavaScriptCore
By the way, this news posting was made as Steve was still talking. No link, because there was no place to link to. I could go back and make a link, but if you can’t find apple.com by yourself, I can’t help you.
why would the company making the BEST, pointing the way for all the copiers — just disappear.
Because they require money to sustain their IP. Apple is what’s “in” today, its popular, its good. But how long can it sustain its cash flow? What will it do when the screws get tightened? Apple has to move products and improve its stuff and make many new sales to stay alive. Its competition doesn’t. Apple could be more like its competition if it wanted, to, but still insists on being proprietary in so many ways.
Releasing OSX for intel or alternative hardware would be a step in the right direction. So would open sourcing their OS. At least the most important parts of the OS are open source, so we know that will be around for a while, but Apple hardware is going to be obsolete in a couple years, like everything else. What happens if the company goes bankrupt or gets bought out? It disappears unless its profitable to continue building systems and software. What happens when it is no longer profitable? It disappears.
That’s IP for ya. Its worthless unless you give it away for free.
The loading time for it was great… a lot faster than Chimera. In terms of browing speed, it seems to be faster than Chimera, but they are pretty close. I wish tabs were there, but snapback is pretty nice itself. I can’t decide which one I like better. Also, Ithink safari’s interface and rendering is a bit cleaner than Chimera, but i guess that’s personal tastes.
You have 5 minutes to live, how much do you want me to pay you for 1 minute of your time.
Time != Money !!!
Time is worth far more than you’ll ever know.
but still insists on being proprietary in so many ways
Can you give us five examples? I can’t think of any really.
>new imovie, new iphoto, new idvd, browser that has an >awesome interface (except no tabs) and speed. New >presentation software that used OPEN FILE FORMAT
>(reportedly) – and it has spreadsheet component built in.
Are we a few years behind MS on this browserthingy and presentation software or what? Apple, IMHO, made a huge mistake in not using Gecko for the browser engine. Gecko just sweeps the floor with IE, Opera and KHTML feature and technology wise.
>New 12″ powerbook. $1999 with superdrive. That’s right, >with superdrive. 4.6 lbs. Also, a 17 incher. Firewire 2
>on that one.
12′ !!! Anything below 14′ is pointless and what kind of a lame sceen is that 17′ one, OMFG, they use the iLamp screen. That screen have I have heard soo many complaints over it’s quality that I thought they’d switched supplier… but OH NO! let’s put in our prime notebook model!
I bought a notebook with a 15′ screen 1450×1050 almost a year ago for less than the 12′ PowerBook and it have far more features and CPU speed than either of the new models. Almost a year ago… heh, time flies
>new airport faster speed.
ever head of 802.11a? that’s what some of us have been using for quite some time. same thing. “fantastic innit?!”
>ha , ha, ha. When will people just give up and give
>Apple’s it’s due. WHEN?????? and don’t give me that shit >on “the price” Guess what, quality and innovation costs >money. It ain’t free pal. bye bye
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Apple is just an MS wannabe and the latest software just reinforce that image. The quality issue is a no-no as Apple use just as cheapo PC components as the rest of the white-box manufacturers does. Innovation? Using a readybuilt htmlrenderer really shows innovation. How about the iFan that the Dual PowerPC really should be named. The new keyboard, on the powerbook, is, despite the overall package being substantially larger, no bigger than before… big miss. No speed upgrade on the
Apple is a nice company. Has nice design. But they are in no way AHEAD och better than others. I really urge you to look at what OpenSource can do for ya in terms of price/features that just leaves the Mac in the dust.
Oh and didn’t you complain about MS charging for upgrades of their MovieMaker software. Guess you feel kindof stupid now that Apple does just the same with their iApps.
Safari is actually much slower than Chimera 0.6.0 with “Pipelining” turned on. Steve used a version of Chimera with “Pipelining” turned off for Apple’s benchmarks. It also has a boatload of HTML element violations, and client-space rendering quirks. It is a beta without question.
Well I’ve been playing with Safari (sorry BAD name) and its not bad at all, but I’m not sure its a great leap forward from Chimera, its faster loading and a little faster, but not so much that I’ll ditch Chimera from my HD just yet. Fonts seem better (mostly) but I’ve noticed some graphics that don’t seem to render as well, but hey its a beta so whadda ya want. Dunno if I would not just have prefered Apple to help Chimera get to a 1.0 release. Suppose this way they have full control.
But as a step away from reliance on MS, its a good one, now all Apple need to do is to fund/assist with a native version of openoffice and they can sleep better at night, I wonder if the X11 they have released is an effort to increase the ease of use of openoffice (among other apps of course).
Gecko is still pretty closely tied to the whole netscape platform. Off the bat, KHTML is easier to use as a rendering engine, as evidenced by the KHTML-based AtheOS browser. It’s also probably a notch faster, because it is simpler. As for why browsers are so complex, just take a look at the latest HTML specs. There are complex layout and formatting standards (CSS) and active scripting (Javascript, among others) and just a whole lot of standards (and IE standards non-conformence) to deal with.
OSX only runs on Mac hardware
Only recently was the iPod able to sync with Windows
For a *nix company one would think they’d support UNIX better, again with products like the iPod, drivers for their hardware, corporate network software and integration. OSX is an excellent system, but its far too expensive for most corporations to afford. I don’t know all the details on their hardware support, but it is my impression that it is OSX or nothing.
I don’t know. They’re not all that proprietary I guess, but it doesn’t change the fact that you must have Apple hardware and software to make use of it. What would people say if Microsoft stopped selling Windows XP unless you bought it on their Xbox PC or whatever. That’s what I mean by proprietary.
Apple basicly uses PC hardware. I see no reason for them to horde the OS or the hardware like they do. Open it up, it’ll stick around.
Guess you feel kindof stupid now that Apple does just the same with their iApps
iApp. That is singular, $iApp = iDVD. The rest are still free.
ever head of 802.11a?
Yeah, that’s the one that is INCOMPATIBLE with 802.11b. Let’s add *another* protocol to the mix, shall we. Nice try.
Umm.. well hahaha.. Buh bye IE, it loads in less than a second and loads webpages faster than IE, Chim, and OmniWeb.
All I have to say is stop bitching it works…. fast.
I could seriously start to argue the innovation thing after all most of the effort software-wise revolves around getting together a core set of apps for MacOSX and making OSX better. Not a lot of big innovations like in the old days — remember when Macs had voice recognition way back in the dark age? Ahead of their time again. Making the most out of OS X is what they need to do mind you. Still leaves little room for the big innovations that we use to see coming out of Apple all the time.
The hardware side is looking good for them except for the processor speed. They need an alternative quick. Good solid products — slower processor than intel. Not good.
People amazed that Apple is still around? I am not. They really know how to please their core audience and retain enough users in even the hardest of times to survive. It would take a huge stumble for Apple to completely go under.
Jobs has done a good job of putting together the types of people and products Apple needs to survive in a MS dominated world.
I doubt that MS would even allow that considering the fact that as long as Apple is around MS has someone to point to as an alternative when the anti-trust lawyers come poking around. Also, they money off of Macs with Office and such. MS is a lot of things but business stupid is rarely one of them.
I will say that using huge sweeping terms about something like OSes is kind of silly. Macs are the best computers for a segment of the population. Wintel boxes are the best computers for another segment of the population. You’ll pry that XP box out of most gamer’s cold dead hands. Still, for Unix geeks and tinkerers linux is the best. Other people still love their BeOS. It all depends on what you want out of a computer.
I understand the anger for folks who bash macs or any other OS besides the one they like. However, look in the mirror. You look a lot like the people that tick you off.
Konqueror rocks! No surprise they choose KHTML over Gecko. Sure, Gecko is currently the most complete open source rendering engine out there (when it comes to standards support), but it is s-l-o-w. KHTML is very fast, and standards support is good:
http://www.xs4all.nl/~ppk/css2tests/intro.html
…and getting better by the minute. It will be fun seeing the Mozilla fanboys cringe over this one, and make up lame excuses. But the truth is that Gecko sucks, and it will always suck, thanks to the morons behind the “Mammothzilla”-project.
Wow! Your right! It WOULD be great if Apple opened all its software to everyone! We could all have OSX and iTunes on our PCs!
Well, except for the whole Apple going OUT OF BUSINESS thing…
Remeber: Apple is a hardware company! They compete with Dell, Gateway, and HP/Compaq, not with Microsoft. If you didn’t have to buy a Mac to get the mac experience, why would you? Sure some still might, but not enough to support the kind of inovation that got them where they are today.
From http://www.barnard.columbia.edu/at/training/netscape/update/detect….
The browser that you are using:
The browser is Netscape
The version is 5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/48 (like Gecko) Safari/48
The codename is Mozilla
Guess this will probably show up as Mozilla most places. I don’t see anything new on http://66.181.171.71/2/42699/400/?password=&sub_page=0&date=0&extra… except the fact that Mozilla is leading so far today (but that seems to usually happen early in the day (PST)).
No, it would not have been wise to write a browser from scratch. Took 3-4 years to Mozilla and Konqueror and even IE to come where they are today, and Apple needed a browser today, not in 4 years. Writing a browser from scratch is a HUGE undertaking even if you are Apple or not.
The decision to use an existing HTML engine is of course wise, however I would favour Gecko and not KHTML today. A year ago I was still favoring KHTML to be honest, but the tables are turned these days.
————-
“Konqueror rocks! No surprise they choose KHTML over Gecko. Sure, Gecko is currently the most complete open source rendering engine out there (when it comes to standards support), but it is s-l-o-w.”
————-
Please… have you even compared Safari to Chimera? Im sorry but Chimera is FAR from slow. Even when Safari DOES manage to beat Chimera, its not by much, except for the cold start time. Chimera is still in development too though, and they can still get the start time down before 1.0, in fact the latest version is already much improved in that respect from the previous. Add to all that the technological and feature superiority of Mozilla… well Im not to interested in Safari. At LEAST they need tabs!!
I am using KDE for many years now. O.K., there are some geeks that think KDE is not cool, but for me it is the best user interface available for Linux. One of the reasons I really like KDE is the fact, that Konqueror integrates very nicely with the rest of KDE. And furthermore, Konqueror is fast and since I am using KDE3.0/3.1 i did not encounter a single web page Konqueror could not display. The essential point is: a lot more people are developping gecko than khtml. Nevertheless, Konqueror is almost as good as Mozilla (maybe as good). Why is this? In my opinion, because the KDE Apis and frameworks are very well designed. I think it is a very good choice that Apple uses khtml. On the one hand khtml is small and fast, on the other hand, is is very nicely designed. And both, Apple, and KDE profit from this. So stop blaming Apple for making the wrong choice. They probably decided absolutely right!
I tried a rather large page(http://www.wcdebate.com/7others/regions.htm) to compare rendering speed and found that on a 1Ghz G4 that the difference in rendering speed once it was cached between IE and safari was insignifigant. I will try something bigger, but I am somewhat skeptical that the rendering is that much faster than IE that it is purported. Also what about opera? I haven’t used the mac version lately, but the windows version renders even huge documents(10mb+) in a seconds.
“when a company like apple is not able to do a simple browser from scratch you know that something have turned very wrong with how internet work.”
To be able and willing to do are two different things.
This is good! Safari will improve Konquerer and vice versa.
There are lot of developpers improving gecko-based browsers and now another khtml browser. More choice, more comptetion , opensource. Good for KDE, good for Apple!
http://lists.kde.org/?l=kfm-devel&m=104197092318639&w=2
What more do we want?
Apple and opensource working together making a better office (koffice or openoffice)?
I’ve been using MacOS X everyday at work… and still a very painfull task sometimes… almost no keyboard navigation though the system and options, time’s precious! specially if you’re typing something and have to swith one hand to the mouse/tablet just to click a button everytime… and things like that…
That’s also why Dock’s very bad to switch between several browser windows (i use lots of then… =] ), you have to click on dock once, and then in the windows of the app… Chimera has a good work around for the problem with tabs (actually I don’t use then in windows, prefer windows taskbar, but in MacOS X…)
Safari looks good, too dummy to me in some areas (no status bar, no tabs, auto-expand and auto-delete downloaded compressed files, SnapBack thing, bookmarks in diferente windows, and so on…), but… after all that’s just MHO…
I’ll probably stick with Chimera, but I’ll give a try to Safari soon as I get at work.
It’s good finally any browser from Apple to MacOS X… probably it’ll make a lot of people happy… Well, let’s take a better look later today…
no status bar ?
The status bar has been married to the place where you type the URL, that is actualy a pretty cool feature.
ssa: the web page you mentioned is large, but it is dead simple: no signinficant tables, stylesheets or graphics. Heavy use of deeply embedded tables, complex stylesheets and graphics are what really slow down pages in IE–not long lists of ASCII text.
Please remember that this is a public beta, and not a 1.0 release. That’s why the feedback button is there on the toolbar, to notify the developers of problems you encounter (whether it’s an application problem such as a crash, or rendering issue, or, heaven forbid what’ll happen most of the time, badly coded websites not showing up properly). This, however, is a good thing — a nice step for the Mac OS X platform.
Also, a couple of notes. Someone mentioned they wanted to see Phoenix (mozilla/browser) for OS X. It’s not going to happen. Chimera is the Phoenix for OS X, and will remain so according to the Mozilla developers.
KHTML vs. Gecko. Does it really matter if it’s rendered with khtml or Gecko? They are both good standards-compliant browsers. Sure, the khtml engine is a bit smaller, but Gecko has a larger developer base? These points don’t matter, at least to me.
Tabs. Everyone’s complaining about tabs. I think the SnapBack feature remedies many of the needs for tabs. I would use tabs to open up each hit I wanted to investigate from a search page. Now, Command + Option + S brings me to the results page, regardless of how deep into the site I was. This is very handy.
Another thing I’ve noticed was mentioned by CodeBitch in her latest article — http://www.macedition.com/cb/cb_20030106.php . Many people are switching from OmniWeb to Chimera because it looks good. No other reason. I tend to agree. If Safari can look good, and provide me support for the web technologies that matter to me, then I’ll use it regularly. Sure, it’s “Appearance” preference pane isn’t as complete as Chimera’s, but that can easily be remedied by using a style sheet of my own creation (an option that isn’t available in Chimera, IIRC). Plus, another thing I’ve noticed just now, typing in text boxes on a web page is not as slow or otherwise horrible in Safari as it is in Chimera. (This is being posted from Safari.)
And if you don’t like the “Textured” brushed metal look of the application, open its nib in IB, uncheck “Textured”, save, and open. Presto, it’s a regular Aqua app. And for whomever it was that stated there’s no status bar, investigate the View menu. (IE6/Win had its status bar off on default for me, too.)
— Rob
…of course there is a status bar, it’s just not displayed by default…
About the keyboard switching. Agree. Some things are missing. About the Dock. Well to switch between applications in the dock. You don’t have te click on them. Just use APPLE-TAB combination to switch between youre open applications.
What Apple should do is provide us with a good users-manual. I have learned more about keyboard navigation via “SAMS Teach Yourself Mac OS X in 24 hours”. then the manual from Apple.
About Safari, have just downloaded it. Like what I see so far, but the real test has just to begin. Let’s see what it can do.
One more thing I forgot to add: Small text is *far* more legible in Safari than in Gecko-based browsers (Mozilla 1.1/1.2, and Chimera 0.6.0, and the latest stable nightly that the Chimera team recommends over 0.6.0). This makes reading pages far easier, as I prefer smaller text sizes.
— Rob
(It’s still quite zippy on my Lombard 333/256MB with X.2.3)
I too am surprised that Apple went with kthml over Gecko. From everything I’ve read, Gecko is more standards compliant. However, I’ve seen some plausible explanations (easier embedability, faster, smaller footprint). Either way, it is a good thing that Apple is creating a non-IE based browser. One problem with IE is that its user base is so large that non-standards compliant IE behavior becomes the only supported behavior by many websites. Neither Gecko (Mozilla/Phoenix, Chimera, Galeon, KMeleon) nor html (Konqueror, Safari) will have huge user bases in the near term. Browser diversity is a good thing because it forces web sites to be more standards compliant. I just hope that this doesn’t kill the Chimera project.
Any details on the plug-in architecture used by Safari?
I have found that with the default settings that netscape’s webmail will give an error message. Once I allowed it to take all cookies it worked fine. The default settings may draw the ire of people using some websites which use cookies that are from a different url which safari blocks by default. Sounds like a good default at first until you find that some sites don’t work properly. The dropdown search currently appears to support a google search. Better than nothing, or only being able to search msn or some other lame search engine, but I would like to see the ability to add other search engines. Having the source one could add the ability, but it would be nice to have a means of doing it easily for the end user. Otherwise it looks pretty good for a beta. No crashes so far.
“Safari delivers the attention to detail you expect from Apple. Take the space-saving progress bar integrated directly in the address field, for instance”
Now THATS innovation.
My browser has had that for what, 4+ years?
Hi Maarten,
I know about APPLE+Tab thing… Actually I’m using macs for some time… But there’s a diference… APPLE+TAB switch between APPs, also when a window of the opened ones… and in Windows, Alt+TAB switch between opened windows of every app… Apple+tab doesn’t help me switching between 10 opened windows of the browser on Mac… It’ll try switch to finder usually… ;]
This behavior could not look so important, but it’s to me! =]
More info here: http://www.apple.com/safari/
Most of the Mac browsers have their own key command to switch between windows. I can only vouch for Opera and IE off the top of my head, but this is doable.
I am NOT an Apple user. FYI, I am running FreeBSD:
bash-2.05b$ uname -a
FreeBSD tchaikovsky.stpetersburg 4.7-RELEASE-p3 FreeBSD 4.7-RELEASE-p3 #0: Tue Jan 7 14:54:13 EST 2003 [email protected]:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/GENERIC i386
bash-2.05b$
Firstly, having look at the change log, there has been a boat load of changes/additions given back to the community. I assume the only part that is proprietary is the interface, which, in the grand scheme of things isn’t really the most sexiest piece of code on the planet.
As for the accusations that Apple is proprietary. Who cares? I think it is about time companies stood back and realised that cheap PC doesn’t mean a reliable PC. Sure, I can get a $200 PC from some bargin basement store, however, will it run as reliably as Dell? hell no, because there has been a tonne of corners cut to reduce the cost of production.
As for the comment regarding Apple being so-called “proprietary”, funny how I never hear any one moan about Compaq’s weird and obscure BIOS or HP’s “Firmware tweaks”. The only people who are throwing the stones are the Johnny and Jane CheapSkates of the world who are a little pissed they can’t build a wizzbang computer for 50cents out of dodgy parts from some dodgy cheapskate local PC store.
As for buying “quality PC’s”, you do a comparison and Apple only comes out $50 more expensive, HOWEVER, that doesn’t take in account all the software and crap you get with the computer. Heck, I’ve just had a look at Dell, and talk about a bundle of sweet bugger all. Great, I am going to get excited about Windows XP + Works Suite? geepers, Bundle something that is atleast remotely tempting to the user.
As for the reason why Apples aren’t in the majority. People are sheep. They follow the few uneducated leaders in society believing that unless they run what everyone else is running they’re some how “different” and there for must be “evil”.
[quote]”Safari delivers the attention to detail you expect from Apple. Take the space-saving progress bar integrated directly in the address field, for instance”
Now THATS innovation.
My browser has had that for what, 4+ years?[/quote]
Christ, you have to be a downer. On the Mac, no brower supported it. So get it through your head and complain somewhere else.
My browser has had that for what, 4+ years?
Share with us what browser that is, my company’s been testing our hosted products on over 15 browsers over the past three years and I’ve never seen a browser with this feature. So pony up, which browser had this before Apple?
I have something else to add, I just saw TechTV’s coverage on TechLive about MacWorld and they had a little poll asking what people thought of MacWorld and the choices were “Proud”, “Dissappointed”, “Who cares, I’m a Windows user” and the results were as follows;
52% Proud
5% Dissappointed
46% Don’t care – windows users.
On another topic entirely:
I really have to ask, if only, what, 3% of the market is Mac users, how did 52% of those responding to the poll say they were ‘Proud’ to be MacHeads. I dunno. Then I got to thinking. All the normal stats on Market share is based on what else, but Sales right? Then I thought about the company I’m employed at, and all the companies that my company deals with. I’ve been through many a server room in the past two years and I’ve noticed that, yes, most computers are non-Apple. Not Windows either (Linux/FreeBSD mostly) but still non-Apple. And it dawned on me that those server rooms really skew the stats because while the server room are chock full of PC’s there is only a few USERS of those computers, mainly the admins. Most of em are servers. I’ve seen many multimedia companies who have over 50 boxen running Linux as their servers yet there production team works on about 10 Macs, the office is MOSTLY Macs save the Linux servers. So what does this all mean? While I don’t know how much the ‘Official’ market share would change but I would venture to guess that there are more than a mere 3-5% of ACTUALLY PEOPLE USING Macs than what the market share dictates. How many of these Gateways and Dell’s are being shoved into server rooms and never touched by a REAL USER (clients to the server are not REAL PEOPLE users, they are dumb-terminals).
I Dunno, maybe Macheads simply like to respond to polls but really, how can over 50% say they were ‘Proud’ ? ? ?
More likely most Windows user did not care to respond to the poll.
Ok, I’m testing it right now…
First of all, there’s status bar… good (I don’t click a link that I don’t know where it will send me… =] ) It’s always saying “Go to http://…”, “Send e-mail to someone@somewhere…”, “Run script…”… a kind of funny, but very usefull for starting users…
I got some problems acessing a https site, but it’s a beta, so ok for now…
Unfortunally there’s no shortcut to change between opened pages/windows…
About the SnapBack thing, I didn’t test it yet, but you can mark a point to snapBack… so may could be actually usefull…
I’ve liked a of the Send bug feature… can send an screenshot of the current page and the url of that one… you can describe the problem very basically and so one…
Looks like could be a very good browser… but as it’s for MacOS X… To me needs tabs… =]
All Mac OS X applications have the ability to switch and cycle between their open windows. Just use Command + ` (that’s the backquote), or Command + ~ (that’s Shift + backquote) to cycle backwards. And, as previously mentioned, Command + Tab cycle through running apps.
— Rob
You can easily switch beetwen windows just as you did in IE using keyboard shortcut apple-`
My suspicion is that they used khtml because its easy to embed (as a component). OTOH, the Mozilla project is just getting started on separating/creating the GRE (Gecko Runtime Engine).
Although by all accounts Gecko *is* way more standards complaint (this is not a knock against the KHTML guys) that’s proabably the major reason why Apple went with KHTML.
> I bought a notebook with a 15′ screen 1450×1050 almost a year ago for less than the 12′ PowerBook and it have far more features and CPU speed than either of the new models. Almost a year ago… heh, time flies
It had a slot-loading DVD burner in it? 802.11g? Bluetooth? An equivalent graphics card? Illuminated keyboard? Firewire 800? No?
Oh, you meant, *roughly*, *kind of* equivalent, as most people do when comparing Yugos to BMWs or PCs to Macs.
> >new airport faster speed.
> ever head of 802.11a? that’s what some of us have been using for quite some time. same thing. “fantastic innit?!”
You really have to read more. 802.11a is NOT compatible with 802.11b, which means that the speed is the same, but the usability — and a laptop will be ported around to places where there are only 802.11b hubs — is not nearly the same as Apple’s move to 802.11g. (Not to mention, you could’ve gotten an 802.11a PC card for a Mac a long time ago, just as you did for your PC.)
I must say I am excited by the 12” tibook. I was actually desiring one before it existed. The Ibook sounded a little underpowered for me, and the 15” tibook was too large (I like travelling light, and monitors and keyboards are not hard to find where I travel). Best of both worlds, you can now grab a powerful (enough for me) tibook in a 12” form factor with an adequately long battery life for the price of a decked up ibook. wee !
Apple continues to put together a great package for Mac buyers. The integration of the iApps is another good step forward.
I think the 12″ PowerBook is going to be red hot.
Safari- I’ve been using all evening and it definitely is beta. I, like many, was surprised they didn’t go with Gecko. But, now Mac users have a nice duo with Chimera and Safari. Both will continue to improve and everyone wins.
Some of the things announced today are stunning. But, it is also stunning what was not announced…upgraded iMacs, the expansion of the iPod or a new digital lifestyle device. I think there are going to be announcements about these types of things, mayber even later this month (I hope). I really think this is going to be a big year for OS X and Apple generally.