Apple's Safari.

January 07, 2003 | 8 Comments

You heard it hear first folks…Well, maybe not.

Looks like the big news expected from Apple today was the announcement of their new browser, Safari. Sounds like it’s built to be 100% standards compliant with lots of great features. Jobs used the Wired redesign as an example. Hat tip to Brian for the skinny.

UPDATE

This is pretty big news. Whether you are happy to see it or not. It’s not based on Mozilla, rather based on the khtml codebase, which could very well add a whole bunch of issues to a rather large list if you are developer, but it does seem to have some great features and most of all the Apple brand. That means people will be using it. I’ve not been able to try it out yet myself, and will give a full report when I do, but for now here is some more on Safari from around the way. Looks like there are quite a few quirks and page rendering problems from initial reactions.

From Apple. You can also download the beta here or take a look at some AppleScripts for Sefari.

What others are saying:

Doug Bowman. “As Jobs likes to do, Safari is compared side by side along with other browsers for speed tests in HTML rendering…”

Mena Trott. “Safari looks neat, but is it neat enough for us to switch (at least while it is still in beta)?”

The Register. “Our Jagwyre review last August lamented how the poor browsing experience negated many of the improvements in OS X…”

Mark Pilgrim. “I’ve downloaded and installed Safari on my girlfriend’s iBook. Initial thoughts…”

**Mark has also put together a page detailing various good points as well as bugs and known issues for Web designers.

Todd Dominey. “The only drawback thus far, as expected, is Flash…”

Web-Graphics. “Well, the browser is only minutes old, so this report is a little early, but Yikes this site doesn’t look right in safari…”

Digital Web. “Great UI, too, which is tightly intergrated with Google…”

Filed under: Macs and OSX

Comments

1. James said:

Part of me is dreading this. It doesn’t use the mozilla core engine apparently. Another open-source renderer is used instead. The problem is we get another browser that will TRY to render everything 100% correct, yet we’ll have to deal with the invariable screw-ups and bugs that happen. Grr

Posted on January 7, 2003 10:55 AM | #

2. Keith said:

You know you’re right. I have enough problems getting things to render correctly with what we have now, let alone throwing another into the mix. The developer/designer part of me is groaning, but the user part of me is excited to see what it brings to the table.

Posted on January 7, 2003 11:26 AM | #

3. Brian said:

On the plus side, it’s like killing two birds with one stone. I’ve never tested my stuff in Konquerer, the most popular browser for Linux. So if it works in Safari, it will work in Linux.

Posted on January 7, 2003 12:45 PM | #

4. Keith said:

Well, yeah. Good point. I was just able to take a look at this site, as well as a few others I’ve been working on with Safari, and so far so good. If Safari just replaces IE, which we all know isn’t worth much of anything except DOM support, then I think it could be a good thing overall.

Posted on January 7, 2003 02:20 PM | #

5. Keith said:

I’ve been increasingly impressed with Safari as time goes on. I love the spell checking feature and the way it handles bookmarks.

There is a great review and some historical perspecitve over at Daring Fireball.

Posted on January 8, 2003 12:29 PM | #

6. Stefan said:

Apple really didn’t have much choice in the matter when you think about it.

They wanted their own non-IE browser. Mozilla/Netscape, while boasting several nice features, is bloated, buggy, slow, and to some extent broken beyond repair. Stability and reliability are other very critical and key factors as well.

Mozilla/Netscape has been a big hit amongst web geeks who can tolerate it and deal with all of its issues, however, as an end-user product Mozilla/Netscape is a disappointing failure. Even though I use Mozilla as I type this I could not, with good conscience, recommend it to the umpteen number of ‘average’ non-technical users that I know, whether it be friends, family, co-workers, etc., etc.

KHTML is very fast with a small code size and a very clean design. The webcore is also being worked on by former Mozilla developer, Dave Hyatt.

I encourage you all to read Dave Hyatt’s blog as he as been updating it regularly since the Safari news was made public. He has provided some very good info and cleared up a number of misconceptions / erroneous inferences:

http://www.mozillazine.org/weblogs/hyatt/

Posted on January 9, 2003 03:31 PM | #

7. Keith said:

Thanks Stefan. Hyatt’s blog has been a very interesting read. On another note, as a few days have gone by I’ve found myself liking Safari more and more. I still miss the tabs, but you’re right when you talk about the “average” user – I think if were to recommend something to my mom for instance I’d go with Safari at this point.

Posted on January 10, 2003 03:29 PM | #