Finally, Safari 3.1! For a long time now I've been using a variety of hacks on my install of Safari to make it more usable. Most notably, plugins like Twicetab which offered the ability to double click in the tab bar and open a new tab, or Safari Stand which opened up a series of debug menu options. The new release of Safari now makes all those things unnecessary. Double clicking the tab bar works - just like you would expect it to, and a "Develop" menu bar is revealed by a simple checkbox in the Safari Preferences. This menu bar reveals access to the Web Inspector, Console and best of all new "Disable Caches" option - something every web develop has been patiently waiting (and hoping) for!
I believe all these cool new perks, plus an amazing score of 75 on the Acid3 tests are available for Windows users. Safari has definitely out-done Firefox, it pains me to say that, but it's true. It's fast, usable and now developer-friendly. I remember when Safari 2 came out and it was rumored to be a "legitimate" browser and I just laughed. I used Camino for 95% of my browsing experience in those days, and defaulted to Firefox 1.5 for the rest of it. Firefox 2 was a little faster on the Mac, but not enough to replace my default of Camino. When the Safari 3 betas came out things were promising and I comfortably converted. I've used nightly webkits for development purpose routinely, but I never quite felt comfortable using it as my main browser since I'm really bad about downloading new nightlies. The advent of Firefox 3 pre5 had me reconsidering, since it was finally truly macified, and was fast enough for general usage. Safari 3.1 has made all that bunk now, and I'm happy to say I've even uninstalled most of my hacks.
If you haven't downloaded it yet, run over to http://www.apple.com/safari/ and get it right away.
Comments:
I tried using Safari this last week, and I'm just a little disappointed by it. Safari didn't handle font smoothing very well on my laptop, even when I backed it down to Standard. The tabs are dark, and if I moved my mouse over to the X for a tab, it got darker, so it was hard to see if I was over it. It was also a memory hog on my machine, using up to 100MB without my using it very much.
I have been using Firefox 3 Beta 3 and now 4, and I'm pretty impressed by it. Memory performance is well improved. It doesn't do the ICC profiles like Safari, but I'm not that much of a photoshopper to worry about it yet. :)
As for Macification, my favorite GUI is OS/2 Presentation Manager, so X, Mac, and Windows pretty equally irk me. :) Peace!
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