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…
Released or not released, that’s the question…
If you’re in the mood of celebrating this historic moment, join a Firefox Release Party close to you. There is even one in Vienna, if you happen to be around this area on Saturday.
Btw, unlike earlier versions, Firefox 2 works like a charm on Macs! I’m using it since release candidate #1 and already prefer it over Safari because of its better compatibility to most heavy JavaScript (vulgo AJAX) sites, the possibility to customize it with add-ons and the built-in SVG support.
Only Apple’s Quicktime and Google’s Toolbar cause sometimes trouble.
I didn’t know that Safari is already supporting parts of CSS3 like {text-shadow} and a few other properties. Apparently its time to dig through some W3C documents.
As numerous news sites already posted, Safari 1.3 came along with Mac OS X 10.3.9. Besides it’s noticable faster it also includes a few new features. A promising one (hopefully not only for security risks) seems to be the beginning of adapting Microsoft’s contentEditable including execCommand and designMode. One of the rare moments when Apple is copying from Microsoft. 
If you are using Safari:
Mark some text here and hit Commad-B for bold text or Command-I for italic text. You can add some text and even drag and drop an image between those lines.
It would be quite useful for editing in blogs, CMS, etc. Lets see what the developer community is preparing for us…
But because of the contentEditable attribute this page no longer validates as XHTML 1.0. So what should one prefer: to observe a standard or to implement a handy feature?
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…