January 07, 2003

Safari: Apple's new web browser

Apple released a new browser today: Safari. I've been using it for all of about ten minutes now, so here are my very informed first impressions.

Pros:


  • Good standards support. Apple said they improved on the KHTML library that is currently used to power the Konqueror browser for linux. Standards geeks will likely pound on Safari in the next few days, so we'll have a better sense of just how good the standards support is.

  • Kills pop-ups (like Mozilla and Chimera).

  • Google search built into the toolbar.

  • Fast (although I can't tell much difference between it and the already fast Chimera).

  • Good bookmark management (I don't tend to bother much with bookmarks anyway, so its not a huge feature for me).

  • A bug/feedback form. I've already used it twice (is that a pro or a con??).

Cons:


  • I don't care much for the brushed metal user interface.

  • Interface is minimalist (although I turned on the status bar 'cause I like to know where I'm going.

  • I don't much like the looks of the buttons on the toolbar. They seem to stand out too much from the metallic window. I suppose you want buttons to stand out, but...

  • No tabbed browsing. I tend to have a lot of browser windows open at once. Chimera allows me to group multiple windows within one window using tabs. Hard to explain, but it really is a cool feature.

  • Its had trouble rendering Apple's home page. This could be due to the post-MacWorld Keynote traffic, but its still odd.

All in all, it looks good. I don't think it willl make me switch just quite yet. It is still Beta software.

It will be interesting to get a closer look at the KHTML rendering engine that is the heart of the browser. Hopefully it doesn't have too many quirks and bugs, and hopefully they got the standards support right.

UPDATE: Mark Pilgrim has a review of Safari. The highlights: Safari identifies itself as "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/48 (like Gecko) Safari/48." The "like Gecko" part could trip up browser sniffers expecting it to be a Gecko-based browser (NN6/7, Mozilla, Chimera). Text is defaulted to 72 dpi, unlike pretty much every other browser on every other platform (96dpi), making text seem small. And there are a host of CSS-related bugs. Mark also complained about the lack of tabs...

Another Update: Mena Trott ads her comments about Safari. She noticed a very cool feature: spell check in text entry boxes. This is a great feature for anyone writing in a web browser (like I am right now!). Very cool. Has Microsoft done this for IE? Why not?

Other places where folks are talking about Safari: Webgraphics, Asterisk*, Awholelogofnothing.com, and Macintouch. A good quote from the conversation on Asterisk*: "The developer/designer part of me is groaning, but the user part of me is excited." I agree.

Yet another update: Dave Hyatt, one of the developers of Safari, Responds to some of the early reviews of the beta browser.