Apparently Apple focused Safari development on gaining milliseconds instead of improving their web browser. According to Apple’s marketing department Safari 3 outperforms every other available browser. And you really need those milliseconds to compensate the time you loose while using Safari caused by the lack of new and innovative features, compared to other popular web browsers.
E.g. the implementation of a simple but very handy feature like bookmark keywords and the wonderful %s for adding search functionality:
In Firefox or Camino I simply
- type a bookmark keyword followed by a blank and the search term into the address bar – just like “wiki Apple” for looking up the word “Apple” on Wikipedia for instance
- and hit enter
That way I can possibly search every searchable site on the internet very fast and easily.
In Safari I use
- the Bookmark Bar or Bookmark Menu to
- find the right bookmark,
- click on it or type the site address into the address bar,
- wait until the page loads – btw, in Safari it really loads blazingly fast now!
- figure out where the searchbar is on the site,
- click in it to activate it – now I think you even can resize text input fields in Safari, and be honest, we all anxiously waited for this feature!
- type in my search term
- hit enter or the search button.
You see what I mean?
Search is one of the most important features on the internet, a web browser should therefore ease the access to search and information.
By definition beta software is feature complete and ready for testing. So that means I’ll have to wait for Safari 4 until I eventually see more features…
Camino 1.5 was released today, a Mac OS X browser based on Gecko, the rendering engine behind Firefox and Mozilla. But unlike Firefox, Camino doesn’t feel like an alien on Mac OS X regarding visual appearance and features like access to the system’s Keychain to store passwords for instance.
One feature of Firefox which I couldn’t find in Camino’s feature list but as I just found out does work in Camino too are “search bookmarklets”. They work as follows:
E.g. for searching Wikipedia I save a bookmark with the location http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/%s and add the keyword wiki to it. Then I’m able to search Wikipedia by simply typing the word wiki followed by a blank and my search term into the address bar. %s stands as placeholder for the search term in the bookmark address. An easy and very convenient way to quickly access any available search site.
Another example: for quickly looking up a location in Google maps I assigned the keyword map to the bookmark http://maps.google.com/maps?q=%s, so typing map mylocation into the address bar will return me a Google map showing mylocation.
In Firefox you can add a search bookmarklet for any searchfield you see on a website by a simple right click on the search field. Camino unfortunately doesn’t offer that, so I have to find the search parameters to create a valid search command for a specific website. Maybe it’s an upcoming feature of Camino.
It’s probably only a small step for mankind, but a major improvement for any Firefox user on Mac OS X: the next version of the famous open source browser comes with good looking Mac OS X native form controls. Anyone interested can download an early preview here.
Just in case you’re trying to access SharePoint with IE7 and the server kindly keeps telling you to upgrade your Internet Explorer to version 5.5 or higher, here is the solution:
At evolt.org Browser Archive you can download any old Internet Explorer version as standalone application and run it on the very same machine together with your (automatic updated) IE7 installation.
Besides, I really had no idea how many different browsers exist!
Strange thing I noticed after the update to Camino 1.0.1: to load and view some sites correctly I had to clear the browser’s cache, otherwise some CSS appeared completely messed up.
Even if there is an ugly 3 year old Mac-Firefox-bug, this G5-optimized Firefox 1.5 version is definitely worth a look!
Flock has landed and this is the 78,340th post about it (c.f. Technorati Flock search). However I just wanted to add my 2 cents about this “new” superbrowser.
I really started liking it, but took me 2 tries. After the first attempt I immediatly uninstalled it because I wasn’t able to import all my settings, bookmarks and passwords from my other browser (Firefox). Then I read a few articles about it and gave it a second try. Now I used it the whole day, and honestly, the concept, the few new addons are not bad at all.
First, I had to get accostumed to the new bookmark concept. It’s hard to find a bookmark when you’re used to browse through folders instead of finding it via tags. One time you discovered the search-as-you-type feature in the search bar, this new concept is awesome, though. I would love to enable that feature using a keyboard-shortcut (like spotlight works for instance).
A fantastic new feature imho is the shelf. Just put interesting stuff there temporary and either store it or delete it later – easy and practical.
What I’m missing is a way to keep some favorites private, in other words not to publish them on del.icio.us. It would be big help for new users like me to get accostumed to the new bookmark concept by implementing something like “intelligent collections”, rule based collections that auto-aggregate given tags for instance (without switching back to the folder concept). Yes I know, seen on iTunes and Mac OS X and other places but still damn’ useful!
And please enable the right-cick in the favorites bar to edit properties.
However, Flock has potential but for now I’ll stick with Firefox. Even if I appreciate the built-in blog editor very much, but it froze/crashed one time while I was writing this post, I had to clean up the code by hand and migrate the Technorati tags to my WordPress plugin. To use it on a daily basis you’ll need a lot of patience, it’s still a developer preview.
Recenty I switched to Mozilla Firefox as preferred web browser on my mac. The main reason why I still used Safari was it’s Keychain integration. It’s something very convenient and I’m sure that Firefox will come up with that feature shortly. The high degree of customisation by installing various extensions and themes is why I finally moved to Firefox.
The default Firefox installation looks like a kind of an alien on Mac OS X, so I googled on how to change this behaviour. An excellent guide I found here.I followed not every hint, but achieved a pretty mac-like interface for Firefox:
- Use Arronax’s GrApple themes to get a nicer user interface.
- Install Aqua Firefox Set to Aqua-fy buttons, etc.
- If you’re already using (a free and not feature-overloaded) RSS Reader I recommend Sage with that stylesheet.
- To speed Firefox a little up you might want to try a G4 or G5 optimized build.
Once the Keychain integration is implemented on Mac OS X it definitely will be the perfect browser ;o)
April 10th, 2005 – update:
Totally forgot about Camino! Another browser based on the Gecko HTML rendering engine Mozilla 1.7 but unlike Firefox it’s not ported but built for Mac OS X 
. Camino is no alien on Mac OS X, it integrates smoothly into to the system (fast programm start, UI, features like Keychain access). The only thing missing is RSS support…