Preview of Safari 3.0 features

bbloke

bbloke

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Musings from Mars is showing an article which previews features of Safari version 3.0, which comes with Leopard. The page includes video clips to show the features in action and include:
  1. Rearranging tabs in a window
  2. Dragging tabs from a window to create a new browser window
  3. Dragging tabs between open windows
  4. A "Find" feature which updates as you type
  5. The new "Find" feature can dim the screen and highlight the search results only
  6. Text boxes (TEXTAREA) can now be resized within the browser window at will
The new features look quite promising to me, especially the handling of tabs and the new Find method. I had always thought Safari's method for finding text was a little crude, particularly when compared to Firefox.
 
I'm all for the tab-handling. I miss this a lot - mostly when I accidentally close a tab which should be at the left-most position. I'm not so sure about the textarea thing yet, though. I'll have to actually use it before I can like it... (OmniWeb has a similar feature which works fine in my opinion. A plus sign in text areas creates an actual _window_ for the textarea. I like that and might prefer it to design-altering techniques.)
 
All these features are great, but something tells me there is more features that Apple doesn't want to tell us.
 
Yeah, those new features certainly don't warrant a full point increase. I'd like to see the features from Saft integrated.
 
I'd like a "are you sure you want to close all the tabs?" feature because I'm getting tired of accidentally hitting Apple + Q instead of W and closing the program..
 
Sounds really, really nice!!

But again Firefox 2 is going to be stable soon!!!

Decisions!!

Would Safari 3 only come with Leopard?
 
Sunnz said:
Would Safari 3 only come with Leopard?
Click to expand...
There will probably be a final update to Safari 2 for Tiger which would include enhancements but none of Safari 3's features. That's the way it's been with past OS updates.
 
firefox 2. i don't think there's a browser out there that can beat it. i'm running it right now and it runs flawlessly....mmmm....delicious. hahaha.
peace
 
spgmr2005 said:
firefox 2. i don't think there's a browser out there that can beat it. i'm running it right now and it runs flawlessly....mmmm....delicious. hahaha.
peace
Click to expand...
I'm using it, too....as my secondary browser. Safari is still my #1. Firefox 2 does not seem revolutionary to me. I'm really not sure why they're not calling it 1.6.

Anyway, Firefox will probably never be the hands-down best because the Mozilla folks value cross-platform consistency above all else. In other words, they bring OS X down to the level of Windows and Linux. Until Mozilla makes a standard, native UI, I doubt Firefox will ever be my #1 pick. It's just too rough around the edges. Even the final releases feel like betas.


But Apple really does have some work to do. There are a bunch of things I'd like to see in Safari. In order of importance:

1. Filtering. It doesn't need to be as powerful as iCab, but it should have something besides the popup blocker. At the very least they should improve the popup blocker! PithHelmet is great, but add-ons will always introduce incompatibility and instability.

2. Better multithreading. Every page should be operating under its own thread. I should never need to wait for a background tab to finish loading before I can scroll.

3. Smooth scrolling that Doesn't Suck™. Really, it's not that hard. Opera had it down back the days of OS 8 (they might have it again, but I haven't tested it in a while).

4. Crash recovery. I hate it when a page crashes and I lose all 15 tabs I had open. Errg!

5. A zoom feature, like what Opera has. Considering that most modern sites break if you try to increase the font size, zooming is important. A nice bonus would be an option to scale everything except images (i.e., text, tables, layout, etc.)

6. The option to spawn new tabs instead of new windows when clicking that kind of link.

7. Offline mode. Or at least some reasonable way to navigate the cache.
 
yeah...those sound pretty good, but i'm happy with firefox. i think it does exactly what an interweb browser should do. i don't think it matters that mozilla specializes in all operating systems. i think thats great. it gives everyone out there the ability to have a great experience browsing the web, and i also believe firefox has a nice set of tools to keep you going without all the worry of popups and adware. if i were to develop something, i'd want it to be a joyful experience on any platform. firefox runs the same on every OS, and thats perfect.
 
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