Hey, look. It's another web browser.
by AC - permalink
I've had some time to dick around with Safari, and while it hasn't crashed or anything, it also hasn't done anything spectacular. The bookmarks manager that I mentioned earlier is still a little odd. By default, Safari appears to stick a big mess of links into the general bookmarks pool, along with any Mozilla and IE bookmarks it imported during installation. But only a few are listed under the bookmarks context menu in the menu bar. You'll have to manually drag links or sub-folders into the menu or to your bookmarks toolbar. It's not difficult by any means, but it isn't particularly intuitive either. I wouldn't expect, say, my mom to be able to figure it out.
Safari is definitely fast, though. It appears to start drawing a page on the fly, as it's loading, as opposed to Mozilla browsers, which will display the page after the page data has been downloaded, then start filling in the images and embedded media. But customization is limited. In the beta anyway, there's only one theme and not much can be done with the toolbars. Extra buttons can be added and rearranged horizontally, but toolbars can't be moved. Tab customization is even more limited. There's no "new tab" button, and the only way to add a blank one is to right-click the tab bar and add one from the context menu. Which means the tab bar needs to be enabled even if there's only one open tab. And there doesn't seem to be a "single-window" mode, or a way to redirect links that open new windows into tabs instead. The RSS viewer is not bad at all, although it doesn't have a universal feed menu, as in Flock or Firefox's numerous RSS extensions. To keep them centralized, you'll have to manually create a feeds subfolder in your bookmarks, then put all new feeds into that folder.
Finally, Safari, or the beta anyway, doesn't seem to work with the Java runtime environment at all. Games at Pogo, for example, just don't load up. I ran into an issue earlier today after uninstalling Netscape 8 and K-Meleon 1.0 where my JRE seemed to be broken, so I uninstalled it and upgraded to JRE 6.1. It's working again in Firefox and IE7, but it's still a total bust in Safari.
On top of not having the option to block ads or even create a blacklist for cookies, all these issues are enough to keep me from using Safari for anything other than a novelty, at least for now. I uninstalled Netscape and K-Meleon today for the same reason. I already have Firefox, Flock, Opera, IE7, and Avant Browser 11 installed on this rig, and with no unique features that I can see other than a slight speed boost, the Safari 3 beta looks a little redundant right now.
by AC - permalink
I've had some time to dick around with Safari, and while it hasn't crashed or anything, it also hasn't done anything spectacular. The bookmarks manager that I mentioned earlier is still a little odd. By default, Safari appears to stick a big mess of links into the general bookmarks pool, along with any Mozilla and IE bookmarks it imported during installation. But only a few are listed under the bookmarks context menu in the menu bar. You'll have to manually drag links or sub-folders into the menu or to your bookmarks toolbar. It's not difficult by any means, but it isn't particularly intuitive either. I wouldn't expect, say, my mom to be able to figure it out.
Safari is definitely fast, though. It appears to start drawing a page on the fly, as it's loading, as opposed to Mozilla browsers, which will display the page after the page data has been downloaded, then start filling in the images and embedded media. But customization is limited. In the beta anyway, there's only one theme and not much can be done with the toolbars. Extra buttons can be added and rearranged horizontally, but toolbars can't be moved. Tab customization is even more limited. There's no "new tab" button, and the only way to add a blank one is to right-click the tab bar and add one from the context menu. Which means the tab bar needs to be enabled even if there's only one open tab. And there doesn't seem to be a "single-window" mode, or a way to redirect links that open new windows into tabs instead. The RSS viewer is not bad at all, although it doesn't have a universal feed menu, as in Flock or Firefox's numerous RSS extensions. To keep them centralized, you'll have to manually create a feeds subfolder in your bookmarks, then put all new feeds into that folder.
Finally, Safari, or the beta anyway, doesn't seem to work with the Java runtime environment at all. Games at Pogo, for example, just don't load up. I ran into an issue earlier today after uninstalling Netscape 8 and K-Meleon 1.0 where my JRE seemed to be broken, so I uninstalled it and upgraded to JRE 6.1. It's working again in Firefox and IE7, but it's still a total bust in Safari.
On top of not having the option to block ads or even create a blacklist for cookies, all these issues are enough to keep me from using Safari for anything other than a novelty, at least for now. I uninstalled Netscape and K-Meleon today for the same reason. I already have Firefox, Flock, Opera, IE7, and Avant Browser 11 installed on this rig, and with no unique features that I can see other than a slight speed boost, the Safari 3 beta looks a little redundant right now.
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