The Hickensian

11.06.07 Safari 3 thoughts

96 comments
Tagged with: braindump, browsers, osx, safari

Apple has announced Safari 3 beta for OS X and Windows. To make room for more important thoughts in my head, here’s the associated Brain Dump™.

Updated version of WebKit. Nothing new to Omniweb 5.5 users, but my un-scientific perception is that it’s speedier. I think there will be some users complaining of ‘ugly form buttons’ though…
Draggable Tabs. Yay!
Inline Find, and very nicely implemented it is too. Yay!
Resizable textareas, extra yay. Is this the only browser to do this by default?
The Web Inspector is in there too. Not a patch on Firebug, but a welcome addition.
Its wonderful looking at a website on XP, and seeing gorgeous text smoothing. Even the apps menu’s are smooth – presumably it’s using webkit to display the interface too?
WebClips are conspicuous by their absence, but I’m assuming that this is a Leopard only feature.
No session saving. I wasn’t really expecting it, but this does make Safari the only browser that doesn’t reopen your tabs inbetween launches. As some commenters have pointed out, you can ‘Reopen previous windows’ from the History menu, but sorry, there really needs to be a preference for this, so that the process is automatic.
Looking at the preferences window in Windows is slightly scary. Like those PC-esque interfaces in early version of Firebird/Firefox for the Mac. I did feel that the interface should’ve been a better Windows Citizen.
I wondered if installing this on Windows would make Lucide Grande available to the OS. It seems that like iTunes, it doesn’t and keeps it to itself. Shame, I really hoped it would available to IE, Firefox and Opera as well, although as Ben Darlow points out, it does look ropey when aliased!
Also wondering if Apple will give a copy of the updated webkit to 10.4 users, in the same way they did for Panther users?
The sizable textareas thing and smooth text rendering seem to be only new browser features to Windows users. Is that right? If you’re a Windows user, and have tried the Safari 3 beta, I’d love to know what you think: Does it make you want to switch over?
Developing Javascript to work in Safari in the past has been a pain in the arse, so I would love to know from any Javascript developers whether the situation is improved in v3.
I wonder if/when developers of Saft, SafariStand and Inquisitor will update their plugins for SF3? My money is on Hetima getting a SafariStand b18 out first. (Update: Inquisitor actually works fine! Also, SafariStand will work if you turn off ‘Enable Site Alteration’).
I find the new interface too dark, but I use the Uno shade which for me is just right. To clarify: I’m referring to the screenshots of the Leopard version, which I find darker than the brushed metal. The UNO shade I find just right.

Comments | RSS

No.1

∞ Brutal said 974 days ago:

I’m loving 3.0 so far. The new inline find is gold! To bad they didn’t include the webclip function.

btw: Is it just me, or does Safari store its favicons differently now?

No.2

∞ Tom Poole said 974 days ago:

Installed it on the MacBook, browsed around and it seemed okay. Until I tried to load up to the new (and pretty) Apple homepage and I got a kernel panic. Gave me quite a shock! One more incident like that and I’m going back to me WebKit nightlys…

No.3

∞ Jon Hicks said 974 days ago:

Gah, Is it me, or is the default text size on Hicksdesign just too small now?

No.4

∞ Pablo said 974 days ago:

In regards to getting Lucida Grande available in all your apps … it was the first thing I did after instaling Safari for windows =)

http://irgeek.net/archives/2007/06/11/lucida-grande-on-windows/

No.5

∞ Chris Parker said 974 days ago:

Jon:

JS support is vastly improved over 2.0 and I mean vastly. The early beta I tried on a version of Leopard months ago handled everything I threw at it, including lots and lots of pages that failed to work in 2.0.

So far the latest beta has too (which makes sense, they would hardly make it worse since last time I tried it would they?)

No.6

∞ Mik said 974 days ago:

On Windows when I try to use bookmark it crash, also when i try to press + button…
Very beta i Think

No.7

∞ Scott O'Raw said 974 days ago:

Thanks for the brain dump Jon. I absolutely love the inline Find and think it borders on genius!

I’ve just moved to Camino as my default browser after the release of 1.5 and at the moment still think that Camino just “feels” better – hardly scientific, I know.

I’m looking forward to seeing what happens to Safari between now and the finished version.

No.8

∞ Chris said 974 days ago:

Inquisitor seems to be working fine as is in Safari 3, at least on my Powerbook.

Other than Saft (which diabled itself), I had to disable Stand, SafariSource, SafariTidy – they may not all have been contributing to the slooooooow performance but I dumped them anyway along with SIMBL. Now it’s quite snappy (well as snappy as an app can be on a Powerbook).

No.9

∞ Pablo said 974 days ago:

Hmm, I posted a comment but it never showed up =/

The first thing I did when I installed Safari was figure out how to get the pretty fonts in firefox/explorer. I posted how to do it here

No.10

∞ Mark Rowe said 974 days ago:

No session saving. I wasn’t really expecting it, but this does make Safari the only browser that doesn’t save your tabs inbetween launches.

Check out History, Reopen All Windows From Last Session.

No.11

∞ Matt Eason said 974 days ago:

It’s nice to finally be able to test Safari compatibility on Windows, but I won’t be switching from Firefox any time soon. I’m too reliant on my Firefox extensions.

Font smoothing in Safari has nothing on ClearType, IMO

No.12

∞ Daniel J. Wilson said 974 days ago:

It isn’t automatic (perhaps a command line switch is available), but state restoration is available:

History > Reopen All Windows from Last Session

No.13

∞ Bill H said 974 days ago:

I am having the same problems as Mik. Also I can’t set proxy information because the option is grayed out? Anybody know why that is?

No.14

∞ Rob McM said 974 days ago:

... webkit even ;)

No.15

∞ Tim said 974 days ago:

Too bad Helvetica wasn’t also shipped with Safari for Windows

No.16

∞ Dušan Smolnikar said 974 days ago:

Another switcher here. Firefox wins by functionality, but Safari 3 isn’t far behind and is just so much speedier (on a mac). It did take me almost an hour to figure how to manage my 2 certificates (each linked to a certain website), though.

As Chris already noted, Inquisitor works fine.
What do you mean by the interface being too dark? It looks exactly the same as safari 2 on my machine, or am I missing something?
The font size on your page seems the same as in other browsers.

I had a friend complaining about safari 3 crashing on him – After removing SafariStand it was fine though, so to anyone experiencing crashes, try removing addons.

The only thing bothering me right now is that safari 3 had overwritten safari 2, which is kinda bad for testing browser compatibilities.

No.17

∞ mike said 974 days ago:

well, i for one aint gonna switch from ffox for this

No.18

∞ Jon Kantro said 974 days ago:

I don’t know if anyone else has noticed, but there is still no support for cairo. Hopefully they’ll include this come Leopard’s release. or with a simple update.

No.19

∞ Michael said 974 days ago:

“What do you mean by the interface being too dark? It looks exactly the same as safari 2 on my machine, or am I missing something?”

I think Jon meant on Windows. On Windows, Safari has a dark polished-metal finish rather like what’s used for iTunes. as you say, it’s still using brushed metal on the Mac.

Jon – have you got Cleartype enabled? It isn’t on XP by default, but there’s an applet you can download from MS to switch it on:

http://www.microsoft.com/typography/ClearTypePowerToy.mspx

I found Safari’s font-smoothing looked too smoothed to my eyes unless I set it to “light”.

FWIW, I’ve tried Safari 3 on the Mac and on Windows, and I like it very much. I haven’t run into any real problems on either platform either. I’m more a Mac user, but I occasionally use XP and was using Firefox on that. I guess I’ll switch to Safari for Windows now. I’m not a big user of extensions, anyway—although I do use NoScript. Actually, since scripting is enjoying something of a renaissance on the web, I’d like an easy way to toggle it on and off in Safari, since surfing with it turned off in the Preferences is a little inconvenient, but at the same time I don’t want to go everywhere with it on—certainly not on Windows.

No.20

∞ tozé said 974 days ago:

damn, that font rendering does make me want to switch.

No.21

∞ Alexander Atallah said 974 days ago:

Jon, how did you get Web Inspector? I can’t find it when I right-click on anything. It just says “reload, view source,” etc.

No.22

∞ Mouis said 974 days ago:

My immediate impression of Safari was that there must be a major conflict with MSN Messenger for Mac! I’ve lost count of the number of crashes from simple actions today; moving windows from monitor to monitor, various keyboard shortcuts, even just closing windows.

I guess I’ll let them off as it’s still beta ;)

I also really want to open new windows as tabs using inbuilt functionality, rather than an addon. Very useful.

No.23

∞ Richard said 974 days ago:

Nice and fast on Windows XP, but I really don’t like the font smoothing – too much anti-aliasing at small font sizes for me, even when set to ‘Light’. I find ClearType rendering much easier on the eye.
Out of intrigue, does OS X use the the same font smoothing technology found in Safari throughout the OS ?

No.24

∞ Dale Cruse said 974 days ago:

I downloaded the Windows version and have had a pretty good experience so far. Unfortunately none of my bookmarklets work.

No.25

∞ Tim said 974 days ago:

> Resizable textareas, extra yay. Is this the only browser to do this by default?

Actually, netscape 9 does this too…

No.26

∞ Doug said 974 days ago:

Anyone else having issues installing the OS X version. Won’t let me install it on the drive I selected (internal hard drive)?

No.27

∞ dinis correia said 974 days ago:

John, what do you mean with the interface looking darker? I’m still stuck with the same old brushed metal.

AcidSearch – and a buch of other SIMBL plugins – stop working. I ended up disabling SIMBL all together.

Oh, Flash feels waaay snappier – is it just me?

No.28

∞ Scott Nellé said 974 days ago:

I’m running windows, and to me the font smoothing is too much. Smaller text becomes almost too chunky to read.

It seems to render pretty quickly, but I was testing at work and it seemed to lag on the initial request, like the Microsoft network protocol was stopping it and saying “What are you doing here?” : ) All told, I don’t think I’ll be switching away from firefox. Safari currently lacks the plugins I’ve come to depend on, and I just don’t see anything that really makes it worth switching.

I’m pretty excited to be able to test in Safari without VNCing to a remote machine at work. Browser testing was going to be my excuse for buying a Mac, but unfortunately now I don’t have that. I guess I’ll have to wait a little longer if I’m just buying one to play around with.

No.29

∞ Sunny said 974 days ago:

I think what Jon means is that in the final release the window will be the new ‘sunken unified theme’. In the beta its still brushed metal.

No.30

∞ doublejack said 974 days ago:

Doug: Are you sure you’re using OS X 10.4.9? I had the same problem when I tried to install on a machine running 10.4.8.

No.31

∞ Kit said 974 days ago:

They include the fancy new Web Inspector from the webkit nightlies, so already it’s more useful to develop AJAXy apps in. The Javascript console is the same, but I’m hoping that Drosera will become more widely available.

The debug menu has some nice goodies in it now (and it’s been rearranged a little, too).

No.32

∞ Ncus said 974 days ago:

I am typing on Safari 3 in Windows. Safari is kinda slow on launch, it because i only had RAM less than a GIG :p

Font rendering looks stunning. Love the expandable textarea :-) woohoo!

No.33

∞ Anthony Baker said 974 days ago:

Well… digging this so far. THANK GOD Inquisitor works on Safari. One of the biggest complaints folks have on Digg is the lack of multiple search engine support. This takes care of that in the best way out there.

Still bummed about some of the keyboard shortcut failures on Gmail. In particular, not having TAB+ENTER work for sending mail sucks. Hitting tab from the text entry field highlights the button to the RIGHT of the Send button. Oy.

Rich text editing works, though… but this was enabled in Webkit a while back. Still, the sucker is damn fast and inline find is a WELCOME addition.

Missing Firebug. Anyone know of Input Managers were all disabled? Word was that was going to happen in 3.0 — a major issue for add-on creators.

All-in-all, however, I think I’m switching to Safari 3 from Camino. Firefox will be there for development, but not for regular use. Too damn slow on the Mac. Zippy on Vista, however.

No.34

∞ ryan said 974 days ago:

On windows it crashes as soon as you try to type in your proxy password and you can’t edit the proxy settings (the button is greyed out in preferences.)

Haven’t tried it on Mac yet, as I’m at work.

However, unless the del.icio.us bookmarks add-on for Firefox makes it to Safari, I just wont change, no matter how much faster the browser is.

No.35

∞ Bob Jones said 974 days ago:

I can’t find the specific page that it was mentioned on, but the final version of Safari 3 will be released for XP/Vista and 10.4/10.5. So yes it will be available to Tiger users.

No.36

∞ Chris said 974 days ago:

PicLens is the only plugin that I care about that does not seem to work.

Its a shame they did not throw out the metal interface for the beta.

No.37

∞ Daniel said 974 days ago:

Hah, I guess I’m the first, but I may as well: I don’t like the Ugly Form Buttons!

Draggable tabs are delicious; I could also eat the inline find, and it’s fantastic not having to go to the nightly builds to use the Inspect Element tool-o-greatness.

Inquisitor is working smoothly, SafariStand is also – for some reason, though, Shapeshifter “switched off” for Safari when I upgraded. Hoping it gets fixed, so I can get back to my Lanham-y skinned goodness again.

Overall, though, is a very fantastible upgrade. It really feels great to use, and I feel happy for all those Windows users who can now have some more of the Kool-Aid.

No.38

∞ Glenn said 973 days ago:

Based on the text alone I don’t see myself switching over to Safari as my default browser. I know it’s still in beta but I see myself sticking by firefox. However, I’m very excited to see Apple opening up it’s browser to windows users. One more browser I can test my sites on now.

No.39

∞ Brendan said 973 days ago:

Well, unfortunately it just crashes at startup for me (Vista Ultimate in a domain network, web access via corporate proxy). Seems to render the app ok – as soon as it tries to load the initial page it crashes. Is there a safe mode at all?

No.40

∞ Ludwig Wendzich said 973 days ago:

I find Safari on Windows to be painfully slow. Every page load takes forever which is really disconcerting.

I feel like Safari also looks ostracized from the Windows environment and ends up looking quite ugly (kind of like ITunes) but this is just my opinion.

I love the Genie effects the font smoothing is nice but I feel like I’m constantly looking at a picture instead of text!

I won’t be switching but it’s nice to be able to add it to my list on available browsers.

No.41

∞ sedated said 973 days ago:

Overall I really like it. I am missing URL shortcuts because Saft isn’t compatible. That is kinda the only thing I really miss because I was faster but oh well. The form elements are a little weird and hopefully will get better before the final release.

Totally lovin’ the dragging tabs, although they were available with Saft, the implementation here is a lot nicer. Inline find…sick. Javascript is definitely a lot better..THANK GOD!

dinis – Flash is WAAAAY the snappier! It doesn’t bog down now if the browser window is in the background!!

Overall, I am stoked. Can’t wait for a couple things to show up, but great start!

On a completely different note…the new search on the new Apple site is AMAZING! If you haven’t checked it out…GO NOW!

No.42

∞ Robert Biggs said 973 days ago:

Safari 3 does have a kind of session state. When you open the browser, look under the History menu and you’ll find “Reopen all windows from last session.”

No.43

∞ Bruce McL said 973 days ago:

Every once in a while, somebody releases software, calls it beta, and it actually IS beta, instead of 1.0 software that the developer doesn’t want to support yet.
Has anyone tried Sogudi on the Mac version? It’s great for searching and shortcuts in general.
http://www.kitzkikz.com/Sogudi
Has anybody checked for color profile support on the Windows version? That would be awesome.
http://www.color.org/version4html.html

No.44

∞ John Lascurettes said 973 days ago:

I’ve noticed that the default font-size for v3 on Windows is 12pt. Anyone know why it’s that and not 16pt as it is on just about every other browser, including Safari on Mac?

No.45

∞ Ben Darlow said 973 days ago:

In regards being able to use Lucida Grande in all browsers on Windows, I have to say I’m very glad Apple has done it this way. Have you seen how it renders in browsers without anti-aliasing? It isn’t a pretty sight. Given the choice between aliased Lucida Grande and aliased Verdana, I’d choose Verdana every time, which is why I’m happy Apple have preserved what has for a long while been my default browser stack: Lucida Grande, Verdana, sans-serif;

No.46

∞ henri yim said 973 days ago:

Seems like the new webkit from the safari beta is messing up a few widgets and crashing my newsfire. Also, no more piclens, so I’m all teary eyed. The inline search though is so full of sexy it’s sick ^_

No.47

∞ Remy Sharp said 973 days ago:

The main problem that I’ve found with Safari 3 is that some of my widgets are broken. The text input element in particular on some of the widgets don’t work properly and even the stickies don’t render properly.

Have a look at the IMDB widget or my html entity codes widget on OS X with Safari 3 installed to see what I mean.

No.48

∞ Brutal said 973 days ago:

Am I the only one having trouble with disappearing text in the XP version? Makes Safari pretty much unusable.

Example

No.49

∞ Remy Sharp said 973 days ago:

It’s also mentioning that WYSIWYG editors work in Safari.

The common problem with Safari was that the focus was be lost when selecting text and formatting it. Safari 3 – on the Mac – doesn’t have this problem (finally!).

No.50

∞ Sulis said 973 days ago:

If you’re having problems installing on OS X, make sure that your existing Safari is in the top level of the Applications folder (ie. not in a sub-folder). The installer is very picky about this.

No.51

∞ Doc said 973 days ago:

Tried the Windows beta at home and thus far I quite like it – draggable tabs is a welcome addition and IMHO Safari has the best native support for RSS feeds of any browser. The biggest problem I had with it was on my Windows machine at work, it keeps asking for proxy server details and then crashing when I enter them.

No.52

∞ Matt Hamm said 973 days ago:

Safari on Windows and PC is brilliant! I think safari is a good solid quick browser. I think porting to windows is the the best thing they could have done. Does safari 3 render the same as it does in version 2 but with the added CSS 3 support?

Finally on the Lucidia Grande font front, There is a PC alternative which displays pretty much the same on the web, ‘Lucida Sans Unicode’ which is preinstalled on windows.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucida_Sans_Unicode

No.53

∞ dmc said 973 days ago:

First off, the theme looks horribly gloomy and dour on Windows. Perhaps this is due to different gamma conventions exacerbating the natural darkness of the theme on Windows?

I think it’s a mis-step to force so many Apple UI conventions on to Windows, where they just don’t fit. They’re also applied inconsistently. For instance, you can only resize the browser with the bottom-right corner, as with MacOS, but you can’t drag the window by its edges. And the borderless frames are really ugly under Windows, with odd-looking black edges. Also, the chrome font-rendering really ought to be Windows native. These things just make it feel buggy and weird, like running a Java or X app does on a Mac.

I prefer Firefox or Camino to Safari on the Mac, but appreciate the sleekness and Apple-ness of Safari on its native platform. I’m not knocking the app itself, at all. However, under Windows it feels awkward and clumsy—anyone downloading it on XP for a taste of the Apple experience is likely to be more discouraged than enthused.

The first Windows version of iTunes felt this way too, and has gradually lost that fish-out-of-water feel. Perhaps future versions of WinSafari will be less gawky.

No.54

∞ Charlie said 973 days ago:

I’m amazed Apple have released Safari for windows, how am I supposed to justify buying a mac now. I can’t use testing the company website in Apple browsers as justification anymore. Does anyone know if the html/css rendering is uniform accross mac/pc? I guess it should be, but thats my only ray of hope!

No.55

∞ Matt J said 973 days ago:

If only it had proper single window mode, I’d drop Camino for Safari. Of course, that is unless the Camino developers give us that amazing inline search from Safari.

No.56

∞ Phil Bowell said 973 days ago:

I’m not seeing any of the “web developer” tools you all seem to have. I can’t see any option to let me inspect an element at all. Do you guys have something still installed form using the Webkit nightlies?

No.57

∞ Mark said 973 days ago:

Installed Safari Beta III as soon as I could get my hands on it – about an hour after it was announced. Put it on my G4 powerbook and my 1-Ghz iMac G4. Both are working well. No glitches, no crashes. The browser doesn’t seem very ‘beta like’ to me. Fast, stable, and my windows brothern are downloading it fast and furiously. So far the reports on Wiindows machines are the same – very stable and very much a finished product. Leave it to Jobs to re-ignite the browswer wars! Great – simply great.

No.58

∞ Steve said 973 days ago:

Phil: to turn on the web inspector you have to enable the debug menu:
defaults write com.apple.Safari IncludeDebugMenu 1

No.59

∞ Brutal said 973 days ago:

@Phil: You have to enable the web inspector first. See here

No.60

∞ Will Croft said 973 days ago:

The Windows version also doesn’t have the new history/bookmark search you see when in bookmark view.

Presumably this is due to the history/bookmark search being built on spotlight.

No.61

∞ Ricky Moorhouse said 973 days ago:

I like the speed at which it draws the page, and the way it renders some fonts – on lots of sites it makes the type too heavy for me.
The find is brilliant too – the number of times I’ve searched in firefox for something and not been able to spot the result.

I agree that the UI is too dark. It would be better if it fitted in more.
The most annoying things for me are the UI and that I can’t use control and backspace to delete words, and can’t use ‘autoscroll’ on my mouse.

I’m not likely to switch

No.62

∞ Neil Bradley said 973 days ago:

I have found issues using Safari on an Extended Desktop on Windows.

When I open Safari, drag it to the Extended Desktop monitor and then click on the maximise icon – the browser then disappears back to the Taskbar and cannot be opened again.

I have sent the Bug report to Apple for this. Wondered if anyone else had a similar problem?

No.63

∞ marc nothrop said 973 days ago:

IMHO it’s not aimed at Firefox users; it’s not competition, it’s about raising the tide of ‘standards-compliant browsers’. Even if that’s not core mission, that’s a likely outcome.

If the high count of IE 6 does indicate disaffection, Safari might make in-roads with these less feature-oriented users, esp. if Safari can sustain a reputation for fast rendering and fewer security issues, for the average Joe. : )

IMHO, in the broader context, the presence of WebKit on Mac, Win, iPhone, Nokia, and ‘inside’ AIR (nee Apollo), will contribute to the increasing use of standards (there’s a long way to go), and the pragmatic developer has the interesting choice of using AIR as a ‘web runtime’, outside of the browser.

No.64

∞ MCS said 973 days ago:

Can’t even install this software. I have 2 iMacs I’ve tried to install it on, a G5 model and a 24” Intel Dual Core Duo, both of which are running 10.4.9, and the installer refuses to install stating: “You cannot install Safari 3 Beta on this volume. This volume does not meet the requirements for this update.” Weird for 3 reasons: 1) that it’s happening at all on these machines, 2) it’s happening on both machines, and 3) nobody else is reporting it. I have a G4 Powerbook; I’ll see if I can install it on that… Anyone else notice this issue?

No.65

∞ Doug said 973 days ago:

Figured out what the issue was. I had Safari located in /applications/browsers it needs to be in /applications

No.66

∞ Marcus Taylor said 973 days ago:

Wish I could be so enthusiastic…

Installed and uninstalled within the space of 30 minutes. Refused to work. Thought my DSL connection had gone down, but hold on wasn’t that an e-Mail in my inbox? Hmm… let’s just try logging on to apple.com from Camino. Odd, all my other browsers seem to work but Safari 3 doesn’t. Ho hum… where’s that uninstaller?

No.67

∞ alex.r. said 973 days ago:

As a windows user, Safari doesn’t make me want to switch just yet: currently the stability is atrocious and there’s many rendering bug.

As for the smoothing of the user interface…
Maybe they do use webkit but then again, I would think that webkit doesn’t do its own font rendering but relies on a lower-level layer…

Maybe they’re porting cocoa to windows and are using their own apps to flesh out the major bugs / see potential problems?

No.68

∞ Nathan Rutman said 973 days ago:

Am running it on WinXP. Page rendering is DEFINITELY faster than Firefox or IE. I would use it as my default browser, except I am too attached to my firefox plugins. Also, I liked the functionality in the demo of being able to drag a tab outside of a window and for it to launch in a new window, but I can’t seem to get this to work in the Windows beta.

No.69

∞ Colin said 973 days ago:

“Installed and uninstalled within the space of 30 minutes. Refused to work”

Same here, couldn’t even open local files. Very strange.

No.70

∞ Dan Hiester said 973 days ago:

I’m running the Safari 3 beta on Windows XP at the office. I’m fluent in OS X and Linux, and while it is nice to finally get nice font rendering in Windows, I don’t think I’m excited enough by it to switch.

For one thing, I’m not really a fan of Safari’s minimalist aproach to window framing. It makes web pages blend in to the applications I have running behind it.

And while Safari’s implementation of inline search is indeed quite slick, Firefox has made me a spoiled brat about only needing to press the “/” key in order to initiate a search.

Still a very commendable effort. Anything that diminishes IE’s market share and forces Microsoft to pick up the pace is a good thing.

No.71

∞ J. Dack said 973 days ago:

Tried beta 3 on my XP machine at work, seemed stable enough but on my dual monitor setup (dualhead geforce 6200) maximizing the browser on the right monitor makes it disappear into never-never land.

Also 90% of all pages i went to had SERIOUS font problems. Hard to explain without screenshot but for example, on bold face (google, slashdot, etc) all the capital M’s look like the font used in the Metallica logo. I’m not joking. Most text on cnn.com was unreadable.

On my macbook at home, beta 3 won’t start at all because my Pithhelmet (pithelmet?) ad blocker isn’t compatible and it crashes before I can disable it.

All and all, bad beta experience for me thus far.

No.72

∞ Neil Bradley said 973 days ago:

@ J. Dack, I’m glad someone else experienced the same problem with dual monitor / extended desktop.

No.73

∞ Loz Gray said 973 days ago:

Couldn’t get it to work properly on mac – everytime I tried to load a page, it just produced a blank white page until I refreshed. Then it worked. Dropped back to 2 until it’s final. With last week’s release of Camino 1.5 I am actually considering going back to that as it was fave before Safari.

Also, and this is for someone far more qualified than me to comment on, at @media last week some bloke commented at the end of Molly’s talk that a mooted browser based on KHTML for windows was scrapped because of KTML being unstable. Or did I get that totally wrong?

No.74

∞ Michael Grinstead said 973 days ago:

Seems there are a few security risks for PC users.

It’s certainly faster then Firefox, and I’m loving the resizable textareas.

I still prefer Fx for both PC & Mac.

No.75

∞ victor said 973 days ago:

I have found that Safari for windows crashing upon hitting the bookmark icon, or not showing flash content, may be due to I18N problems. Safari only has localized resources for English (i.e., en.lproj and English.lproj folders). If you use another language, that could be the culprit.
Unfortunately, copying the resource folders with the name of another language does not work, but changing the windows system language to English allows Safari to work without crashing and to display flash content.

Now, I’m gonna post a blog entry about this… :-)

No.76

∞ Anthony Baker said 973 days ago:

Would love to hear from folks about their experience with Safari 3 on Google Apps. I personally use Gmail, Calendar, Google Reader and Google Docs on a regular basis now and am still torn about whether or not I’ll be using Safari to access these.

Have to say, JavaScript support for Safari does seem to beat out even Camino — which, insofar as I can tell — has been the fastest JS handler on OS X. That being said, certain keyboard shortcuts in Gmail still don’t work, there’s some wonkiness in Google Reader, and I’m not entirely clear that Google Docs is rendering Word files as they should.

Wonder if it’s an issue with Webkit or more of an issue of Google having to tweak their apps to handle the new browser.

No.77

∞ Paul said 973 days ago:

For me it’s hugely buggy on windows.

The main problems being missing text on both pages (Many sites, form controls are useless across the board.) and the ui. Makes it less than useless.

It is beta though and I seem to be alone in these issues.

No.78

∞ Sajid Khan said 973 days ago:

(On Windows XP SP2) I’m finding Safari to be extremely buggy, crashing constantly and occasionally seizing up the system. In addition, some CSS styles which otherwise render consistantly on Opera, FireFox and Internet Explorer 6 & 7 are lost on Safari.

Of course, I do like the font smoothing and page render speed, but am unlikely to switch over from Firefox just yet.

PS – Why is it that I can’t resize the window from any other corner but the bottom right? (Maybe I’m missing something).

No.79

∞ Ralph Brandi said 973 days ago:

I loaded Safari 3 on my XP work laptop and it couldn’t get to any sites. This was while I was disconnected from the VPN that connects me to my work network. Later, when I was on the work network, it worked fine. Turns out the reason was that Safari gets the proxy settings from the Internet Settings control panel on Windows, so when I was disconnected from work, it couldn’t find my proxy server. I just confirmed this by turning off the proxy settings in Internet Settings while connected to the work network. With the proxy on, I can see sites. With it off, I get nothing but the intranet.

No.80

∞ Andrew B. said 973 days ago:

Has anyone figured out how to turn on the debug menu under Windows?

No.81

∞ Jay Ramachandran said 973 days ago:

I tried the beta on Windows XP. I was overwhelmed initially, but on subsequent use, I must say that there’s not a whole lot of “new” things here when compared with Firefox. Of course, Apple does a tremendous job at serving things out the box whereas in Firefox (or Flock), I had to install extensions/addons. The font smoothing in Safari is superior … that goes without saying really. And for folks who love design, your websites look so much nicer! But the beta is still buggy and crashed on me a couple of times, especially with secure websites like credit cards and banks. I also had some trouble with Google Finance and Google Docs. Overall, I’d give this beta a B+ and wait for Apple to debug/improve on this. Am I switching to Safari later? Perhaps, but I’m really excited about Firefox 3 … IE never lived up anyway. I apologize for even mentioning IE along with Safari or Firefox …

No.82

∞ Matt Wilcox said 973 days ago:

Colour me not impressed, it completely borks my website by loading the print style sheet on top of the screen style sheet. I think it’s seriously broken on XHTML 1.0 pages served as XML.

I then tried it out on a site I’m developing, and discovered that rather than using Arial for the text, it was using some sort of comic-sans type font. No where in my stylesheets are anything other than Arial and Verdana stated, and in no other browser does this happen.

Safari 3 continues to have the Safari 2 bug with CSS generated content – simply not rendering it until the browser window is resized.

Frankly, Safari on the PC is an added headache I do not want. Webkit is a headache I do not want. And I’d be a happy bunny if all browsers had conditional comments so I could fix their quirks and deficiencies without resorting to hacks and detection scripts. Which i refuse to use, and which is why Opera and Safari both look crap at times.

No.83

∞ Nick said 973 days ago:

I’m happy to report that the JS rendering in Safari 3 fixes a Safari 2 known bug with Douglas Crockford’s json.js making my professional life much (much) better. So far, I’m happily impressed.

No.84

∞ Jon Hicks said 973 days ago:

OK, OK chaps, enough with the bug reports! :D

A lot of the issues people are having aren’t ones I’ve ever come across, especially your Matt.

No.85

∞ Ryan said 973 days ago:

While the new search bar is absolutely stunning, the lack of keyword bookmarks is, unfortunately, a deal breaker for me. I use my Wikipedia search keyword bookmark in Camino about once every 15 minutes…

No.86

∞ Brutal said 972 days ago:

@Ryan: Just wait for the plugin makers to catch up. Both Saft and Safari Keywords add keyword bookmarks to Safari.

No.87

∞ Ash Searle said 972 days ago:

In reply to Bruce McL… yes, it looks like Safari 3 does suppor colour profiles on Windows.

Could this be first browser that does? IE7, FF2 and Opera9 all fail to support either ICC profiles (version 2 or 4)

Once again:
http://www.color.org/version4html.html

No.88

∞ Alex Ciobica said 972 days ago:

Here are my toughts as Windows user:

- I really like its text-rendering system, altough it feels incomplete;

- I love the resizable textareas, the popping search, and the way it highlights the textboxes;

but

- I too find the interface to dark, and I don’t like that it doesn’t integrate with the OS (especially the fact that they kept the tab-closing button on the left);

- (this might be because of my firefox background) I just can’t get used to the fact that I don’t see favicons on the tabs, and on the bookmarks bar;

- i really hate that they didn’t implement any mousewheel functionality into the browser (except for the the scrolling part): I can’t wheelclick on a bookmark to open it into a new tab, and I can’t ctrl-scroll to increase textsize;

But overall … bravo! ... I’ve been waiting for safari on windows since forever.

No.89

∞ Jack the Revelator said 972 days ago:

Wow, blurry text…

Apple: I’m reading a screen, not a book.

No.90

∞ Walker Hamilton said 972 days ago:

Why did only one person mention Drosera?

http://trac.webkit.org/projects/webkit/wiki/Drosera

No.91

∞ Chris Fonnesbeck said 972 days ago:

It would be great if you could enable find-as-you-type with the new find tool. That is, the search starts automagically as you start typing, as in Camino.

No.92

∞ Jason Harris said 972 days ago:

Just to let you guys know that Haoli has put out a new beta of Saft providing compatibility for Safari 3.

“Saft 9.0.0 Beta 1 (Build 1002) for MacOS 10.4.9 and Safari 3.0 (522.11)
Improvement: Safari 3 Public Beta support on MacOS 10.4.9 only (build 1002)”

http://haoli.dnsalias.com/Saft/Download/

No.93

∞ kL said 969 days ago:

JS is much better. All my scripts that were slow or crashed Safari 2 work flawlessly on Safari 3. Slowness of some DHTML effects has been fixed as well. Safari 3 on OS X seems to be even faster than Opera 9 (but not on Windows).

No.94

∞ kabari said 969 days ago:

Looks like some css bugs are fixed too! I don’t see the background-repeat bug on my site anymore in sf3. It also seems like we get more control over the styling of form elements!

No.95

∞ smiles said 969 days ago:

Not to bad only problem i have is that some things are hard to read with that grey and black colour scheme

No.96

∞ kabari said 967 days ago:

let me add to that by saying that the javascript rendering is out of this world. It makes some effects render so smoothly it looks like flash, no joke.