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Andy IhnatkoIhnatko's Tiger Report: Safari

by - April 29th, 2005

 

 

The new Safari is nice. But I was hoping for a lot more.

When Safari was first released it was competing against third-party commercial browsers like OmniWeb (which are nice, but have this radical and insane idea where you're apparently meant to pay for a web browser) and, of course, Microsoft Internet Explorer. Which was hardly a fair fight. It's as though the title of Quarterback was a hereditary title, given each year to the eldest male offspring of the team owner. And then one year, the kid was told to put down the stamp collection and suit up, because he won't be getting his salary unless he can stand up to a blitz from the front line of the 2003-4 New England Patriots.

I mean, you almost felt sorry for poor Explorer. But it's a different world today. Explorer is a non-entity and the competition is now Firefox.

Safari's main new feature is RSS support. And clearly, it implements site summaries with a lot more finesse than Firefox. I think it says more about Firefox's shortcomings than it does about mine when I say that I used it for months before I was even aware it had RSS features. When a site summary for an open webpage is available, a tinnnny little orange icon appears in the lower-right corner of the window. Inexplicably, it is the same symbol that most software uses to indicate the presence of a WiFi signal. Click it, and you see sort of hammy little list of articles in a sidebar.

In Safari, you click an obvious RSS button and there's a big, Spotlightable list of articles. Good. Ten points to Safari. But barring a few tweaks, that's really it. I still envy Firefox's customizable search field, and dagnabbit, Safari is still the one web browser I use on any platform that needs regular Tending To. Inevitably, there comes a moment when I sigh and wonder aloud if my twin G4-processors have been replaced the 1 MHz 6502 that ran my old Apple II+. Because somehow, waiting seven minutes for Safari to close one window and open another somehow seems unacceptable.

It's easy enough to clean Safari up but the point is that I shouldn't really have to, you know?

So. Safari. We have to call this one a Parity Release. On balance, Safari's caught up to FireFox but it's lost an opportunity to surpass it. Pity.

Ihnatko's Tiger Report

digs the Mac, and has been writing about the Mac for longer than most of us could tell the difference between a bite of Apple Sauce from a byte of Apple code. You can read his monthly column at Macworld magazine, and his blog at the Colossal Waste of Bandwidth.

Andy's latest book is The Mac OS X Tiger Book (US$16.49 - Amazon).

You can send your comments directly to Andy, or you can also post your comments below.

Most Recent Columns From Andy Ihnatko

Andy Ihnatko's Archives

Observer Comments

Show: Subjects Only | Full Comments
Close Name:Guest
Subject: You got a lot more than you think!

Theirs an article at ARS TECHNICA that explains why Tiger is one of the most significant upgrades to OS X. Instead of plain'ol eye candy, 10.4 is a mjor under the hodd advance in more ways than one can easily count.

It's a large techincal article, but the improvement to the graphic, video, and audio subsystems are huge, both in terms of performance and design.

http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/macosx-10.4.ars/14

Forgot about all of that eye candy. It's what's under the hood that makes hamburger out of Longhorn.

Close Name:Guest
Subject: Clean up Safari question

How does one "clean up" Safari and rid the slooow closing window or tab?

Close Name:Guest
Subject: Clean up safari

I have no idea what he is taking about - never had that trouble.

Close Name:Guest
Subject: great articles

Hi Andy,

thanks for these entertaining and wellwritten articles. A real pleasure to read!

prasado

PS: To poster no.1: You are right, this is not The Ultimate Review Of Every Aspect Of Tiger ... but that's not what you actually want to read here ... since you already read that at Ars Technica, right?

And if you are drooling when reading about under-the-hood improvements, then you are true geek. Andy may be a nerd, but he is not a geek. You'll just have to live with that

Close Name:Guest
Subject: more than just features

I've only experienced Tiger at the Apple Store. However, having played with the same hardware under Panther, I can say that the feel and speed of Tiger is a major upgrade from Panther-- regardless of the new features' pros and cons. Everything is snappier, smoother, and just, well, "cooler." (Show's my age, I suppose.) Apps launch faster and things just work faster. That may not be worth the price of an upgrade but, along with things like built in dictionary and thesaurus-- not mentioned by Andy but of value to a writer like myself-- and Spotlight, etc. the whole is perhaps more than a sum of its parts. Improving the motion to motion experience of the OS is probably more important to me than individual features.
Some of this might be moot if one has a dual 2.7 mhz G5 since things are already so fast; but if one has a less Maserati-ish v. of the Mac the speed and fluidity are a significant upgrade.

Steve

Close Name:Guest
Subject: Re: You got a lot more than you think!

Quote
Anonymous wrote:
Theirs an article at ARS TECHNICA that explains why Tiger sucks. It's eye candy.

It's a large techincal article, but the improvement to the graphic, video, and audio subsystems are nothing, both in terms of performance and design.

http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/macosx-10.4.ars/14

Forgot about all of that eye candy. Get Longhorn.

Close Name:csimmons Posts: 28 Joined: 29 Oct 2003
Subject:

Quote
Guest wrote:
Quote
Anonymous wrote:
Theirs an article at ARS TECHNICA that explains why Tiger sucks. It's eye candy.

It's a large techincal article, but the improvement to the graphic, video, and audio subsystems are nothing, both in terms of performance and design.

http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/macosx-10.4.ars/14

Forgot about all of that eye candy. Get Longhorn.


By the time Longtooth comes out, OS X will be at 10.7.

Moo.

Close Name:Guest
Subject: Microsoft Shills

Okay ... that excellent ARS Technica review spends 16 pages explaining in wonderful detail how cool and revolutionary Tiger is.

"Forgot about all of that eye candy. Get Longhorn."

Longhorn? Longhorn doesn't exist. Maybe it will in 2 years, who knows. (just like Cairo, haha) And the current screenshots of Longhorn look butt-ugly and unusable; even Microsoft fanboys were unimpressed.

Close Name:Guest
Subject: Microsoft Shills

Okay ... that excellent ARS Technica review spends 16 pages explaining in wonderful detail how cool and revolutionary Tiger is.

"Forgot about all of that eye candy. Get Longhorn."

Longhorn? Longhorn doesn't exist. Maybe it will in 2 years, who knows. (just like Cairo, haha) And the current screenshots of Longhorn look butt-ugly and unusable; even Microsoft fanboys were unimpressed.

Close Name:Guest
Subject: clean up safari - 1 tip

Try deleting tons of cookies. (You could go whole-hog and delete them all, but then you'd have to log in again - just once per website that uses cookies to store your login - this doesn't break cookies - to all those websites you've set to "remember me" and you won't remember the password for half of them and then you'll need to figure out each sites' password reset policy, and which email account did you register with on that site anyway, etc, etc, etc.)

Safari - Preferences.
Security tab.
Click "Show Cookies" button.
Select the cookies you want to delete (usual shift-click, cmd-click select options are available) and click Remove.
Or, if you're not bothered by having logging in to websites again, just click Remove All.

Close Name:Guest
Subject: too bad it's on ars

Yeah, Ars certainly isn't the most tolerant place on the net, certainly not for us Mac users.

I used to read <a href="http://www.arstechnica.com">Ars Technica</a>, until it became apparent that "Caesar" <a href="http://arstechnica.com/wankerdesk/bios/caesar.html">Ken Fisher</a> is a racist. He typically comes off like your typical smug armchair intellectual, but once he gets fired up, he's got quite a mouth on him. I've seen him get pretty worked up and go off on people on IRC over basically nothing.

It's too bad, too, since the other guys on the site like Hannibal are actually pretty smart. You know what they say about one bad apple...

Close Name:Guest
Subject: Re: Microsoft Shills

Quote
Anonymous wrote:
Okay ... that excellent ARS Technica review spends 16 pages explaining in wonderful detail how Tiger takes Mac fans to the next level of difficulty regarding troubleshooting.

"Forgot about all of that eye candy. Get Longhorn."

Longhorn? Longhorn doesn't exist. Maybe it will be called into existence by some deity in 2 years, who knows. (just like Cyberdog 2, haha) And the current screenshots of my butt serve as guidelines for Apple's next interface.

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