Sunday, July 8, 2007

Safari 3.0.2

Have been trying the new Safari beta for a week or so now...and the thoughts are mixed. If you are coming from IE 6/7, you may just love it, but if you are a Firefox addict anywhere close to me, you may be in for a slight disappointment. Let's see what I found...

New: snapback...ultra cool...and how thoughtful..when you do your next google, try safari..you don't need to track your search results page by going fwd or back..when u do a web search using your the standard search box..the results page is marked as a snapback page..so no matter how deep you have hyperlinked your way thru..you can get back to the search results in a single click...way to show...

Good:

Looks: the typical Apple looks more like QuickTime and iTunes...none of which are much to my liking, crisp toolbars and uncluttered buttons, the lack of lines separating the menu bars, the tool bars, the address bar, all merging onto one. the smallish status bar is cool, and you will not notice it unless you want to. All this translates to more area assigned to the web page and although it does not have an F11, I hardly needed it. that's where it scores over FF, but then even IE does better than FF in this department. the address bar doubles up as the page download status bar as well..and thats really cool..

Speed: Compares to and scores over FF in browsing speeds. Download speed is more or less the same.

stabilty - hasnt crashed yet...but then I havent used it so much..I forced it to crash..half expecting FF's restore session or something similar..but was disappointed..but then..it didnt crash..

Bad:

Navigation: No good shortcut keys, thats where FF is damn good, so I need to use my mouse all the time, a big pain in my fingers :( there is no ctrl+tab..the equivalent is ctrl + } or ctrl + {..so u gotta press shift as well..and that's a pain...
When you type in something in the address bar..and you get some matching choices to show up, you can't edit them as in FF..that's something which I don't do often, so it's not a major inconvenience..

Search: Defaults only to yahoo and google searches, no wiki, no answers.com..but hey, it's just a beta

bookmarks: the default install comes with hundreds of bookmarks: yahoo, NY times, and all the usual yankee crap..but its bookmark management is not that intuitive, like FF or IE; know what I mean..but honestly, I haven't tried enough yet..and yeah, it imports your FF/Mozilla/IE stuff by default. but there lies a catch. I want a central bookmark repository, not one for IE, one for FF and one for SF(Safari); and none of them has this feature. So I have to keep importing 3C2 times all the time :P. It also doesn't have the 'open in tabs' feature from FF..and that's another cool thing amiss here..

scrollbars: they are a real pain..esp with orkut, somehow it does not wrap up everything and I have to scroll an inch horzontally everytime.. I call this a pita(pain in the @$$)...

blogging...good...I am typing this in SF, there is a marked difference between this and FF as I can see how much I have written. Let me confess my laptop has a small screen, and I use a small resolution of 1024 x 768. It is so much better than FF, where I would use F11 all the time..again, for all its good stuff..the Devanagari transliteration is screwed big time..FF does a wonderful job when it comes to showing Devanagari fonts..SF has some homework to do..first up, it messes up with the इ and ई symbols...and moves them around the consonants...so not much fun there...it also screws up the mixed consonants and although you cn read it, it's an eyesore..but wattheheck..it's a beta..I just hope they fix it..sooner the better...

Advanced web features: Not that great with custom UI..php and js things...some things that are expected didn't show up. not sure how good it is at running applets..but then who has designed web apps keeping safari in mind..it's not going to hurt anyone..

ugly: nothing really..

summary: it's a good cross between the appearance of IE and the speed and usability of FF, but as many a wise men said...miles to go...I am a avid fan of microsoft (I hear knives being drawn ;))when it comes to UI...but this is as good as it gets with a beta...and it beats FF 9 out of 10 times when it comes to speed.

verdict: download, install and use...and it's not FF losing it's share... it's IE.


P.S. Here is what it looks like. See for yourself..much more content..but the transliteration went haywire


2 comments:

Ritesh said...

Try this for correct hindi rendering: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Multilingual_support_%28Indic%29

Gary said...

Tried it, doesn't work for Safari on Wintel. Did you check it with Safari?