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

56 Comments

“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. I have come to the conclusion that all the talk about crashes and problems are NOTHING to do with the software. It is entirely to do with the USER.

    Using 3rd party add-ons with a beta can only lead to problems – or at least tell you where to look for a problem first.

    On my 2nd full day of Safari 3 and it is just fine. Fast effective and reliable.

    It’s all you need though I’ll be happier when I get more control over Cookies with SafariPlus and with ads and the horrible text links everyone insists on using, with SafariBlock. It works now but not 100%.

    Someone else said it crashed each time you print a page to PDF…so I tried expecting to see a crash…nope, worked fine. 14 pages of PDF with links and perfect layout. And no crash.

    Love the zoom for PDF’s and the search highlighting.

    Also remember Safari is one of very few browsers to use color spaces – good news for photographers.

    Reply

  3. ” This really needs a keyboard shortcut by final release, so helpful is it,”

    cool, i didn’t know yoda worked at Ars….

    i have had 3 crashes since i started 3, about 20 minutes after the keynote. oddly, all 3 have been when i tried to quit. not sure if i should just leave it running forever or what. ” width=”19″ height=”19″ alt=”wink” style=”border:0;” />

    Reply

  4. I liked Safari 3 but had to uninstall it because it broke Yahoo! Messenger (3.0 beta 1 release 4). The IM windows would automatically reset to the first line instead of remaining scrolled to the last line like normal.

    Reply

  5. only annoyance/bug that i’ve found so far with Safari 3 is that the Bookmarks Menu takes 5-10 seconds to appear…every time. I have alot of bookmarks and with Safari 2 it would take 5 seconds to show for the first use…but now with Safari 3 it happens every time. it’s a show stopper unfortunately. A browser is not quick if it takes forever to access your bookmarks!

    otherwise, it feels faster and there’s much less spinning beachballs.

    Reply

  7. safari for windows is an English only release… They need to hurry up and release versions in other languages because, alas, XP is not an multi-lingual OS… the menus are blank for non English OSes… hello? bonjour?

    Then the number of downloads could really be massive!!!
    MW: heavy… as in heavy traffic.

    Reply

  10. The killer feature (besides the already mentioned auto complete) with Saft is “unfocused” tabs. I can go to a site like MDN click on all the stories I haven’t read and they’ll all open up in a tab behind the current one. Now before you tell me this is in every browser in the world, the answer is no. Every other browser will focus on that newly opened tab, which means you have to switch windows. This dramatically increases the speed with which I can go through a new site.

    Also I have to credit Saft’s developer with adding a feature two days after I requested it, and that is making plain text URLs clickable.

    I don’t need Private Browsing since no one can see my user account. Not even my wife has my password.

    Reply

  11. Tommy Boy: surely you don’t need Saft to do that. I do the same, but I hit Command Click on all the links I want on the open page, and they get placed sequentially behind/next to the current one.

    Just make sure you don’t have selected the option to go to new Tabs as they’re opened.

    Saft to my mind was far too complex and could do no good for Safari’ efficiency. I say go minimal. Less problems, more speed.

    Reply

  13. Listen, you chowderheads! I oughta poke yer eyes out if you are complaining about crashes in the Safari 3 Beta. Here’s why:

    1. It’s a BETA. What part of that word do you not understand?
    2. If you’re using plug-ins, DISABLE THEM. Again, this is a BETA, which means this is a TEST VERSION, you lame brains. It’s likely that Safari 3 will break almost any plug-in until the developers properly make a compatible update.
    3. If you are experiencing crashes, ask yourself “why” first. Did you toss out the old library prefs? Did you turn off, disable, or uninstall plug-ins? Typically, the cause of crashes is conflicts with incompatible or corrupted software.
    4. If you depend on your Mac (or PC) and your browser for work, then don’t be a Beta tester. Leave that for others.
    5. Re-read 1-4 above.
    6. If you have not done any of the above, and you’re whining, I have a surprise for you: it’s YOUR fault, you knucklehead!

    Why I oughta moider you! Here – pick two…

    Reply

  15. I’m very happy with Safari 3 on my work Mac.

    I spend much of the day filling in text boxes and being able to resize them is very welcome.

    The speed in displaying pages is faster, especially pages that have a lot of JavaScript DOM modifications. JavaScript code executes much more quickly with Safari 3.

    I also love the new find command. Very slick and alone worth the price of admission. The new tab features and warnings also help.

    Finally, colored buttons but still the old, and totally cool drop-down menus. Fantastic. I don’t know how Apple did it but the colored buttons render in a way that is much more pleasing to the eye and easier to look at. At least to my tired, old eyes.

    Two plug-ins I had don’t work with S3 and I had to remove them. Web Dev… didn’t allow the home page to display on start-up and and error message was displayed. Safari Source didn’t allow the source code to display. (SS allows you to color the source code based on tags) But since the FF has much better versions of those two items plus FireBug those two plug-ins are not a great loss. I use FF for that kind of info anyway.

    But I use Safari all day for general browsing and to connect with my main work web site, which uses a lot of text boxes. FireFox is too ‘junky’ to spend that much time with.

    Reply

  16. @MacMan,

    I do need Saft. The problem with Safari’s “Reopen All Windows. . .” is that although it opens all tabs it doesn’t save the history of each tab.

    With Saft the “back” button can be used when you relaunch Safari as though you never quit.

    I really, really miss that. That’s really the only thing I’m missing from Saft to be honest.

    And I love the new Find Text (Command-f)

    Reply

  18. Safari 3 crashed on install (PBG4 1.33GHz, 1GB RAM). Hard restart required. Install won’t launch, in fact no install package for anything will launch. Uninstall won’t launch either.

    Now what do I do?

    I should have listened to that little voice that said “don’t do it!”

    Reply

  22. Dr. Macenstein,

    I’m using the Acrobat 8 plug-in from CS3 and it works perfectly.

    Generally impressive: I’m doing some internal web development at the moment using Dreamweaver CS3’s SPRY/Javascript/AJAX stuff: definitely quicker and thats running on a local machine with no external connections confusing the issue.

    Can throw away the POS that is the Forget-Me-Not plug-in (which 3 doesn’t like anyway) as the new functions in History work far more elegantly.

    Reply

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