Past EED rants

Labels

Live leaderboard

Poker leaderboard

Voice of EED

Friday 12 June 2009

Safari So Goody

image

Being the OCD sort for trying out new stuff, I downloaded & installed Safari 4 for Windows final, even though I found the beta, utter utter rubbish.

And you know what? It isn't half bad.

 

Things I like:

  • It’s quick. Noticeably so over Firefox & especially IE8. It makes Google Reader & mail a whiz.
  • It’s sleek. Typically Apple, the UI is very good, much more visually appealing than other browsers.
  • No more crappy Apple font rendering, it defaults to Windows rendering. Although you can still choose the Apple one if you’re weird.
  • Top Sites. This is a special page that comprises of your most visited sites, presented in a flashy pseudo 3d curve. It makes a nice compromise between having one home page and multiple home pages like FF & IE and means your frequent sites are just 2 clicks away.
  • Page Search. Works very well. On finding a match Safari dims the page and highlights where the matches are in white, the current position in the search is yellow. Caret hunting when searching is something that continually frustrates me in FF & IE.
  • RSS. Handling is pretty good & better than other in-browser viewers. If you have a small number of subscriptions it would be really good, but for RSS addicts it’s, still no match for Google Reader. I’d go so far as to say it would be worth using for some high priority feeds (that have full text) in addition for using Google reader for the others. No sharing mechanism though.
  • Search Results SnapBack. If you Google something (forgetting to open a new tab), follow a link browse around a bit, whacking SnapBack jumps you straight back to your search results page. Neat!
  • Installation recognised I was British & the dictionary spells “colour” !
  • Cover-Flow. I thought this was a bit of a gimmick, but… Cover-Flow. I thought this was a bit of a gimmick, but… it’s absolutely fantastic for browsing your history, especially when you can’t remember the URL you’re looking for.

“Not so much”:

  • No add-ins. On Windows anyway. There are some on Mac, but they’re mostly pay-for, yuck. So no add-block, X-Marks etc ;( Although poking about in the installation folder does reveal a Java plug-ins JAR.
  • Password saving, not a handy-dandy one like in FF anyway.
  • Search bar. You are limited to google.com, & yahoo.com in the search bar. I heard somewhere before that there were other countries besides the US, but I think it was just a rumour. You can’t  change it to google.co.uk, www.google.se or whatever.  You can’t add your own search providers. Steve Jobs uses google.com, so you should use google.com Doing things your own way is not the Apple way. You do things Steve’s way or you are not cool. </sarcasm> Retarded.

For me, it’s very nearly a Firefox-killer. Lack of extra search providers being the main deal-breakers. If you’re not fussed about this it’s well worth a look.

I did find a way of synchronising bookmarks, but it’s a bit of a faff. You have to create a sync folder using either Dropbox or Mesh and also locally sync your Safari bookmarks file with copies in these folders using something like PureSync.

You don’t really want to sync the whole Safari data folder (%appdata%\Apple Computer\Safari) as that will sync your cookies and history too, and I doubt your boss would appreciate your seeing adult sites list :) It would also trigger Mesh or Dropbox to sync every time a cookie landed or your history changed.

3 comments:

  1. Wow really? I found the beta really good, very very fast but it used a sackload of RAM I mean it was out of control. I'll defo have to give it a spin.

    Course I'd already be using Chrome if there was some kind of solution for the Google bookmarks scenario which still seems absurd that they've not dealt with it by now.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I was pleasantly surprised aswell. Huge improvement for sure.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Play the most effective actual cash slots in minutes at any of the shortlisted casinos on this page. With hundreds of slot machines and progressives from top suppliers, these on-line casinos offer profitable slots bonuses to get you started. Read on to seek out|to search out} the most effective slots casinos and key suggestions half in} on-line slots for actual cash. Each machine has a desk that lists 카지노사이트 the number of credit the player will receive if the symbols listed on the pay desk line up on the pay line of the machine. Some symbols are wild and can characterize many, or all, of the other symbols to finish a profitable line.

    ReplyDelete