Initial reactions to Safari
Today Apple released Safari, the new OS X browser based on the KHTML library (though with many speed improvements, apparently). Currently we use Chimera, which we're very happy with. Safari looks neat, but is it neat enough for us to switch (at least while it is still in beta)?
After some initial testing, our thoughts on how Safari stacks up against Chimera.
Advantages of Safari over Chimera
- Spell checking while you type in text fields
- Google bar
- The weird pop-up window resizing issue in Chimera doesn't occur in Safari
- Somewhat faster, though part of this perceived speed increase may be due to pages being displayed before they are completely rendered
- Bookmark management: faster and more intuitive
- Address book integration in bookmark bar
- History is global, rather than on a per-window basis
- Download manager
- Ability to turn off/on pop-up blocking with keystroke
Disadvantages of Safari
- No tabbed browsing
- Because it's based on "KHTML" -- the engine inside Konqueror -- CSS positioning and spacing is different than in the Gecko engine
- No apparent way to turn off anti-aliasing of text
- Handling of CSS elements (for example, the dotted line) seems to mimic that of Windows IE
- No undo in text fields (Chimera even has multiple undo)
- No tool tips on link titles
72dpi (versus 96dpi) rendering of typePerhaps not...but something does seem off
Shared Cons between Chimera and Safari
- The handling of pop-up windows launched from bookmarklets: they don't open if pop-up blocking is on. In fact, it looks like bookmarklets
don't work at all in Safari. Jason D. points out in this post's comments that some bookmarklets (Blogrolling's, for one) work and that the problem seems to be Safari's DOM handling. Read the comments below to see a semi-fix.
My initial response is this: Safari's bookmark and history management, the Google bar and spell checking are the three biggest gains for my own use. The inability to turn off anti-aliasing text really puts me off, however (like previous versions of Chimera, we may be able to fix this by editing the preferences file -- wherever that may be).
I'm worried about variations in CSS positioning, but it's obviously still in beta and the addition of the bug report feature indicates that a lot of fixes are probably going to be made.
More to come.
Update: So people will be asking why Apple went with Konqueror rather than Gecko. From the Safari page, here's part of their reasoning: "For its Web page rendering engine, Safari draws on software from the Konqueror open source project. Weighing in at less than one tenth the size of another open source renderer, Konqueror helps Safari stay lean and responsive. And of course, being a good open source citizen, Apple shares its enhancements with the Konqueror open source community." See this email from the Apple Safari team for more about the choice.
More Safari Reviews, Observations and Resources
Mark Pilgrim's Safari information for web designers is a collection of Safari rendering bugs and successes. His Safari Review
Greetings from the Safari team at Apple Computer
There are some pitfalls in Safari from Matt Haughey
31 Comments
> In fact, it looks like bookmarklets don't work at all in Safari.
Do you think that MovableType can make available a bug fix for this. Or is it Apple's Job?
This is basically a browser quirk that they need to rectify. If, however, someone knows a fix, we'd implement it.
With Chimera, you only need to turn off pop-up blocking for the MT bookmarklet to work. I tried turning off pop-up blocking on Safari but was still unable to get bookmarklets to work. A nice thing I discovered is that there is a quick keystroke (command + k) method to turn off/on pop-ups.
The email from the Apple Safari team to the KDE team: Greetings from the Safari team at Apple Computer [via /.]
JM -- Thanks for posting that link.
I was tweaking with the MT & Blogger bookmarklets and the problem seems to be the variable being set at from the document selection. I tried several variations on using the document.selection object and document.GetSelection() function with zero results. If you remove that the pop works fine but the variable is set to undefined in the new window. Basically it seems to be a flaw in the DOM handling in Safari so to answer your question Michael it would be an Apple problem.
Jason: Thanks for your answer. I've sent a bugreport to Apple. As you noted on your Website the "BlogrollThis"-Bookmarklet from Blogrolling.com does work in Safari for me too.
Heh. Jason gets there a split second ahead of me... I've gotten mine working as well, using the same method. Since I never select text when I'm blogging anyhow, I'm happy enough.
The CSS file for Safari is located at: /Applications/Safari.app/Contents/Frameworks/WebCore.framework/Versions/A/Resources/html4.css
In order to get the MT-Bookmarklet work without the text selection function you have to delete the following piece of code in your bookmarklet:
?d.selection.createRange().text:d.getSelection()
I can't even post to my MT blog in Safari. After I hit "Save" nothing happens. Then after a couple of seconds I get a Safari error message saying: " Could not open the page "http://....../mt.pl" after trying for 30 seconds.
I've noticed that when I try to post/edit my blog - or use the pop-up, for that matter - that the form fields for entry/excerpt/extended entry are about 1 pixel wide - meaning I can't see what I'm typing. I had similar problems when using Mozilla a while back. Other than that, I'm liking Safari so far, and hope that everyone who has a problem uses the bug reporting....
It's cool that the FTP-handling is done entirely by the Finder. Hope that will make Apple finally fix the strange read/write-access bugs that exist in the Finder/FTP-browser today...I would love to start using it...
ps. check out my new blog - opened today - at http://forss.to/feed/
Actually somthing i dont like about safari is how slow it is for playing flash files, just open www.yugop.com on safari and then on chimera and see the diference
I should point out that 72dpi is the Mac norn for screen resoulution and more closely mirrors that of print.
This is why publishing has used Macs for so many years (other than the softwre originated on the platform).
I should also point out that not using Geckoi is not a disadvantage, just different.
72dpi is a web resolution while 96 is what a typical screen can display. Print res is 300dpi or higher.
Has anyone tried printing post safari install? I haven't been able to print a doc since I loaded it up. There is discussion on Apple's Safari Forum about this problem, it also mentions CD burning and booting in OS9. There aren't any fixes mentioned though.
I need to print!
Interesting how Apple is infalible. Every single comment I have read goes like "It sucks because it is based on Konqueror, it breaks standards, DOM and CSS support are a joke... but it's from Apple, so it rules, because they are very bold and brave to release a web browser to go up against the evil empire of Microsoft".
Interestingly, nobody said that when Oracle released PowerBrowser. Apple is a marketing case study that will be discussed for ages. That emperor has the abillity to be naked for ages.
This looks like the first browser to incorporate Rendezvous. Under bookmarks there is a specific Rendezvous collection. I imagine any Rendezvous and HTTP enabled device like network storage, a printer or even a new Tivo would be discovered by Safari.
love Safari! used Omniweb until Chimera .6 came out - liked Chimera but Safari, for betaware, is beautiful - many, many times faster than Chimera and Omniweb. glad apple is doing it - cool that they are using opensource
|The weird pop-up window resizing issue in Chimera doesn't occur in Safari|
I haven't seen that bug in ages, since it was fixed.
Read http://www.them.ws/?fid=585 for the low down on the 72dpi font "issue"
It seems that Apple's Safari team doesn't want the things that some of us want in Safari...(Gecko, Tabs, etc.) See:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=50189&cid=5047468
:p
Actaully, since Dec. 20, Chimera does have a download manager.
Ugh... Lucida Grande as the default font. Now the whole Web looks like Aqua. Does Apple *want* to further marginalize Mac users?
You should read the blog of David Hyatt. He's the developer of Chimera, and now on the Safari team at Apple. http://www.mozillazine.org/weblogs/hyatt/
If you need information about using Safari with Hebrew then ..... :
http://mac.plonter.co.il/plonwiki/Safari
(The page is in Hebrew)
As for the 72dpi issue, I saw a letter from a developer at Apple where he talked about the reasons why Safari uses 72 dpi.
"At the moment we are using 72 DPI, although much of that decision has to do with problems we're wrestling with over Cocoa NSFonts handling DPI for you (internally), which meant that at 96 DPI, we had larger errors between "px" and "pt" sizes. In order to simulate 96 DPI correctly, we will have to apply a correction ourselves."
Later he posted " that we have Safari working at 96dpi now"
The site has all kinds of info from one of the actual developers, the link is "http://www.mozillazine.org/weblogs/hyatt/2003_01_05_mozillian_archive.html#90155409"
Hope this answers some questions.
You noted that Chimera does not have a download manager. Well, the builds since Dec. 20th have one, and so will Chimera 0.7 due out real-soon-now :-)
When I open a new browser window, it always starts out shifted to the right so the slider to move the page up and down is off the screen! WTF???
perdon tienes que traducirlo lo hubiera hecho pero me dio mucho sueño
I have had a number of nasty problems with Safari with respect to JavaScript/ECMAScript behavior.
An example of this can be seen at http://www.wordwiggle.com when playing the game.
To demonstrate this problem in a simple form, I have made http://www.wordwiggle.com/bug.html available that really shows the problem. So far, Safari seems to be the only browser that has shown this problem. (And the only one with IFrame support that shows a problem)