Those of you with Macs are probably aware that Apple just released a new web browser named Safari. People in the Mac world are raving about this browser, but I’m not too sure if this browser is as great as all those Mac lovers make it out to be.
Sure, Safari is a very capable browser, but if you listen to Steve Jobs he’ll have you believing that it is the best browser on the market for the following reasons…
- It’s fast
- It’s easy to use
- It’s standards compliant
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Sure Safari is fast, but do you really think that a page load that is 1/2 second quicker than it’s competitors will have any great effect on your web browsing experience? The biggest slowdown on the Internet is slow Internet connectivity and latency caused by slow servers. Yes Safari is easy to use, but in it’s ease of use you are really restricted from doing some really simple tasks. Take bookmarks for example. Whenever you create a bookmark, you are asked to create a new name for it. The dialog that results slows down your surfing experience -especially if you don’t want to rename the bookmark. Accessing your bookmarks is also quite difficult. You must click on a bookmark icon that then completely covers the web browsing window and the only way to get the web browsing window back is to click on a bookmark or once again click on the bookmark toolbar icon. Sorry Apple, but every other browser uses panes for bookmarks – a much more effective way to access bookmarks. On standards compliancy, Safari is based on the Open Source KHTML project. Web designers should appreciate this fact, but at the same time, most of your testing will still need to be done on IE. The Google search feature is good, but if you have used the Google search bar in IE or Netscape, I think you will agree that Apple has only partially implemented a good search tool.
On the cool side, Safari has tabbed browsing like Netscape thus keeping all open web pages within the main browser window (unlike the clutter that you get with IE). The AutoTab feature is great – it lets you specify a bookmark folder as being AutoTabbed and when you click on the folder in the bookmarks window, each bookmark in that folder is opened in a separate tab.
On the Mac, Safari is a great web browser with a few shortcomings – too many to convince me to switch. I think I’ll stick with Firebird!
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I have problems with the window.history.back() and window.history.forward() operations for Safari 1.2 After delete some item (the information of the item is contained in a html formulary in hidden fields, item_Id) from a list and push the buttons Back (or equivalent window.history.back()) and next (or equivalent window.history.forward()) Safari shows the message: “Are you sure you want to send a form again”, If I click the button Send, then the browser resend the form and try to delete again the item, this throws an error. I hope that anyone can help me with this issue.