Safari 4 Quick Take

2009-02-24_0954 Safari Top Sites

I just downloaded and installed Safari 4 on two machines – my work laptop (XP) and my netbook (Win7) which are both PC’s. It’s immediately noticeable how quickly pages render and that’s courtesy of Safari’s new javascript engine. Safari also brings HTML 5 and CSS 3 support which is great news for web app developers and Web 2 enthusiasts.

  • There are definitely some bugs though as you should expect in a beta. In Gmail, if you click a link within a message you get a new window instead of a tab which is how my preference is set. This is the same BS that exists in the current release of Safari.
  • Clicking the title on a Digg post opens the page in the current view rather than opening a tab as you see in Firefox and Chrome.  Interesting that this is the exact opposite of the way links are handled in the first point.
  • On both my systems (XP and 7) even with the preference set from within Safari, I am unable to get it to be the default browser.
  • I tried to install Gears which appeared to install, but on restart of Safari, I found the browser had reset – no saved bookmarks, passwords etc.  I’d only been using it for about 30 minutes so the loss was not severe, though annoying to have to re-enter things.
  • I can’t add a new bookmark (only a folder) in the bookmark manager.
  • It’s impossible to add a link to a post  using WordPress’ graphical editor as seen here:

link Fail in Safari 4 I’ve also noticed some striking similarities between Chrome and Safari … The Top Sites view (first image of the post) is very similar to the Most Visted view in Chrome though it seems to load a live view of sites when possible which is a nice touch. Safari has also moved the tabs to the top of the window panel and added two icons over on the right side of the upper chrome which are very similar to Chrome’s … On the left is Safari 4 and on the right is Chrome:

safari is like chrome 2009-02-24_0956 Chrome Corner

Sure the changed the wrench to the gear, but the options in both menus are very similar.

There’s a cover view option in bookmarks which will also look to show you a live view.  I don’t tend to use local bookmarks much aside from bookmarklets so this is not of much interest to me though I suppose would appeal to a more mainstream consumer.

I’ll probably play around some more but until I can get around the tab issues and the default browser setting, using Safari is annoying – even though it is seriously fast!

Where are the updates to the S60 Browser?

Every day I read about new services and ways to use the Android and iPhone webkit browsers, yet there’s been no change to make some of these tools work well with the s60 software.  I can’t even open a new tab without a silly bookmark hack, and it seems there’s been little to no change in the S60 browser for a very long time.

By now, I would expect (and I don’t even think it’s that big a deal really) to be able to launch a new tab from within the browser yet there is NO way to do this.  It should be a menu item!  Once you have a few tabs open there is also NO tab management system – they can only be displayed in the order in which they’ve been opened.

I originally blogged about this in the fall of 2007.  Since that time, we’ve seen a number of new devices, a revised OS and yet the browser is still the exact same thing.  I’m sure someone will correct me that the actual version number (undetectable to users) has changed, but there is nothing new here.  I asked about this feature at Nokia World and did not see it in the N97 prototype shared with us over dinner either unfortunately.

My initial hack involves using a start page that forces new windows to spawn (like m.twitter.com) though today I use a homescreen shortcut to a bookmark of about:blank.  If you drop to either your multimedia menu or the homescreen and use that, it will force a new windows to open.

If you are going to talk about the full internet in a pocketable mobile computer, we should also recognize that it’s quite likely you’ll be multitasking across several web sites at once and need a simple (and standard!) way to open a new tab.  Why is the Nokia Internet Tablet the only device that does this?