Ars Technica: Safari 3 Public Beta for Mac OS X: better, faster, and stable, too

“The look of Safari 3 is the look of Safari 2, which is the look of Safari 1. There are no radical changes to the UI,” Charles Jade reports for Ars Technica.

“Setting aside performance tests as marketing, Safari does ‘feel’ faster to me. Using Safari 3 on a 2.0GHz Core Duo iMac and a 1.25GHz PowerBook, my perception was that pages were rendering faster,” Jade reports.

“Safari 3 is a better browser. It’s not only faster, but I’ve noticed better compatibility from at least one site already, Blockbuster Online. Then there’s stability. I have had no crashes of the beta in a day or so of constant use with with both the Intel and PPC version. So far, Safari 3 has made for a better Internet experience, so much so that I intend to make it my default browser now,” Jade reports.

Much more in the full article here.

56 Comments

  1. You don’t need Saft: just go to

    History: Reopen all windows from last session

    Essentially the same thing. You can even assign a menu shortcut in
    System Preferences: Keyboard & Mouse: Keyboard Shortcuts

  2. SAFT has other features not in this Beta 3 version, including “auto complete always on”, blocking images/plug-ins, save browser window including all tabs for future access, and full screen access.

    Then there is AcidSearch and its much more helpful search function, SafariStand and its tab sidebar, and PithHelmet with its site blocking function. None of these are compatible with Beta 3. The shake-out continues.

  3. The one & only person I know who is running Vista (on an HP laptop) is a guest I’ve had here for the past week. She’s been using my Mac for a week now, and is sick that she has to go back to Vista now that she’s gone back home. But one thing that has soften the blow was when I told her she could have Safari on Vista. She installed it and took it for a test drive through all of her favorite web sites, and others. Did not find one that didn’t work properly, including her bank. She loves it. (I got the same results running Safari on my Macbook under XP and MacOSX.)

    I don’t know where all the criticism is coming from, but there are two people out of two that I know of who have no issues at all, and think it’s great.

  4. Crashes. Right. Forgot.
    Exited Safari (2) after installing Safari (3) and ignoring ‘restart’ request. Later, started Safari again. It munged my .Mac account, then proceeded to crash. Yikes! Remembered I hadn’t done the restart, DID the restart, then tried again. Been cool since – except for eating increasing chunks of my memory.
    I said there was more. I do Web Sudoku. The page looks brighter and crisper than with Safari (2).
    I just loaded S3 on my XP test box and did a little surfing. Looked good, until I clicked a ‘cancel’ button and it just quit on me … no warning, no message at all, just ‘quit’.

    Yeah … this is a little buggy (on my older XP system) and ‘needs work’. Given that Safari 3 for Mac will be introduced in October, that work needs to be done soon. We don’t want to be arguing the value of a crashing secure(?) browser vs a not-crashing INsecure browser … they’ll be (justifiably) calling us Mac Fanboi!

  5. Look all you have to do is simply edit your hosts file.

    1: Do a search for \”hosts\” on google and the first site that pops up go there. There is a link for a 565 kb text file. Copy this data.

    2: Log in to admin user, open terminal and paste: sudo pico /etc/hosts Press return and authorize.

    3: now your in the pico editor, (don\’t delete anything you see or suffer dearly) arrow down and paste the text file 565 kb above, control x, y (yes) and press return to save file.

    4: reboot and come back here, MDN will load is mere seconds. Not only that, your surfing will be safer and more secure.

    You can learn more how to make your computer refuse to connect to wesites, simply add 127.0.0.1 http://www.badsitehere.com to the file. Using # before any line for the computer to ignore that line.

  6. Quote: MacMan
    You don’t need Saft: just go to “History: Reopen all windows from last session.”

    Thanks MacMan! Great tip! I always have about a dozen tabs open, and never realized there was an easy way to reopen all my favorite tabs again after a reboot. Sweet!

  7. The ‘Merge All Windows’ command located under the Window Menu turns multiple windows into a single one with tabs. This really needs a keyboard shortcut by final release, so helpful is it

    So assign one to it using System Preferences -> Keyboard & Mouse -> Keyboard Shortcuts already. I’ve bound it to Cmd-Option-Ctrl-M, and I’ve probably used it a dozen times already to tame those pesky “I’m so important I have to open a new window” links.

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