Matthew's Personal Blog

I never thought I’d see the day that I would blog about an Apple prod­uct… I just took a good look at the newly released Safari 4, and I must say that it looks… impres­sive to say the least.

Before I get into fur­ther details, let me first say that the Safari 4 inter­face looks strik­ingly famil­iar. As a web devel­oper, I have to make sure that my web­sites look the same across all web browsers. That means that I have most of the browsers in the world on my com­puter: Mozilla Fire­fox (my favorite), Flock, Orca, Opera, Chrome, Safari, Inter­net Explorer (why Is that piece of junk called a web browser any­way?), Kon­queror, Epiphany, and so on… Now I’ll get to the point: Safari is basi­cally Google Chrome under a dif­fer­ent name. Chrome intro­duced the min­i­mal­is­tic user inter­face (back and for­ward but­tons on the right side, an address/​search bar in thr mid­dle, and only two menus–“Page” and “Settings”–on the left. The rest of the screen was devoted to dis­play­ing web page con­tent. Apple’s Safari 4 looks iden­ti­cal to Chrome except the search bar is a sep­a­rate text field in Safari. The only thing that Apple did to make it dif­fer­ent was throw in a cou­ple of glitzy effects: Chrome’s “Most vis­ited sites” page has been given a 3D effect and has been renamed to “top sites”. I must admit that the book­mark man­age­ment is bet­ter in Safari than in Chrome, but I’m just mad that Apple had to steal another idea and call it their own. Don’t even get me started on the fact that Apple stole Com­piz from Linux…

On a more pos­i­tive note, Apple’s new release of Safari 4 has full sup­port for many new and excit­ing (for devel­op­ers like me) web fea­tures like JavaScript, CSS 3, HTML 5, etc. In fact, Safari scores a per­fect ‘100’ on the Acid3 Test, and it is the first web browser to do so. How­ever, Apple proudly boasts that Safari is the “World’s Fastest Web Browser,” but I still have yet to see their speed stats hold true on any machine: Gmail runs faster on Chrome and Fire­fox than Safari; Safari takes the longest to load on my machine at (28 seconds–22 more than Fire­fox); and Safari takes up the most RAM of all browsers on my computer.

Safari has jumped from it’s posi­tion next to Inter­net Explorer up next to Chrome on my browser rank­ing scale, but it still has to get through Opera and Flock before it has even a remote chance of replac­ing Fire­fox as my favorite browser. If Safari were truly as fast as Apple says it is, did not take up so much RAM, and had a huge data­base of add-​​ons that enable you to do any­thing, then it might have a shot at being my favorite.