Safari may be Apple’s default web browser, and it may have been announced simultaneously with the new features in Leopard, but strangely enough, it actually isn’t a Leopard-specific feature. Safari 3 has been available in a Public Beta for Tiger users since early June, however it wasn’t in a perfect state and did cause some compatibility problems with other applications because of the new version of WebKit that it installed. However, shortly after Leopard was out, a final version of Safari 3 was also delivered for Tiger users.

And of course, Safari is one of the few Mac applications that is available on other platforms, most specifically (and most controversially) the Windows platform. Larry and I had a 30 minute-long debate about this on PreviewCast #035. Safari 3 is still in a public beta for the Windows platform, unlike both the Tiger and Leopard versions which are now fully stable releases. The lagging of the Windows side could possibly be attributed to the fact that despite Safari’s “focus on security from day one,” the Windows Safari was ripped to shreds by hackers on day two. Oh, and Safari also exists, probably most famously, on the iPhone and iPod touch.

But I’ve upgraded to Leopard, and for me, the guy who threw out Safari Public Beta on day three because of how much it messed up my other apps at the time, Safari 3 is a new feature in Leopard, and so I’m going to review it from a Safari 2 on Tiger to Safari 3 in Leopard point of view. Things that I talk about in this Leopard Feature Presentation may not necessarily reflect your Safari 3 experience on Tiger or on Windows, and most definitely will not reflect your Safari experience on the iPhone/iPod touch. Nevertheless, despite my previous heartfelt love for Camino, I’ve spent the last few weeks giving Safari a whirl, and I’m ready to give it its review.

Apple’s most touted feature for Safari 3 is its speed, claiming that Safari is the fastest browser on the Mac. Now, I can’t say for sure if Safari is the fastest browser on the Mac, but it’s certainly much faster and much more responsive than Safari 2 was. I certainly can’t make any complaints in terms of lag.

In Safari 3, Apple has made some really nice innovations in the browser that really offer detail towards how the internet should be used. For one thing, tabs are now really flexible. You can reorder tabs within a window, you can drag tabs from one window to another window, or you can just drag a tab out from the tab bar and it will blow up into a brand new window. And, from the Window menu, you can quickly merge all open windows into one single window of tabs. While Safari isn’t quite as far along as Camino and Firefox are in allowing me to force ANY link that would open a new window into opening a new tab, thus guaranteeing that I always have one window, the ability to quickly get everything back into one single window is a compromise that I can live with. And, Safari does get halfway to my tabs utopia, in that you can actually set in Preferences for links from applications to open in a new tab within the current window. I do wish, however, that the Merge All Windows menu item could have been given a keyboard shortcut, or perhaps a button for the toolbar, but it’s still better than nothing.

Safari 3 has to be the first browser that has FINALLY figured out the right way to search text within a web page. Command-F brings up a minimalist search box above the web page, and if you type a query in there, the whole page fades out, with the exception of each occurrence of your query. Then, use the arrows next to the search box or use the Command-G shortcut, and that will jump you around the page as each query highlights itself in bright yellow and pops out at your just to make sure that you see it. For once, finding text on a web page is actually easy and actually readable, and this feature is a total winner.

Safari is a friendlier web browser too. Suppose you have a window full of tabs open, and you accidentally close the window or quit Safari. (It’s happened to me many times.) Surprise, you’ve just lost your whole workspace! Now, Safari issues a warning before your close or quit with a window with multiple open tabs in it. Safari also issues a warning if you’ve typed content into a form on a page and you’re about to close the window and lose all of your form data. However, if you are still dumb enough that you click through this warning message, Safari still has your back. From the History menu, there are options where you can Reopen Last Closed Window, which will bring back the window that you just closed (without quitting Safari), even if you had multiple tabs. Or, if you accidentally quit Safari, or if Safari accidentally quits itself, the History menu offers a Reopen All Windows from Last Session option, and you can probably guess what that does.

Oh, and FINALLY, Safari lets you search through your history. Not only can you search through the names of the pages that are in your history, but Safari fully indexes the text of websites, so you can search the contents of your history too. Safari 3 also adds some actual functionality to its built-in PDF viewer. Safari 2 introduced a built-in PDF viewer, but it couldn’t do much more besides, well, um, view PDFs. Apple now has roll-over controls that let you zoom in and out from the PDF while in Safari, or open it instantly in Preview (full review of Preview coming later this month) to do more controls with it, still without having to save it in your Downloads folder. Or, of course, you can click a button and the PDF will be instantly copied into your Downloads folder. And, one really nice thing is that Safari has now added the ability to instantly resize any text field in any form to whatever size you want. Although with a few website layouts, this may break the page (because web designers aren’t exactly intending for you to be resizing the text field), but for most websites, Safari can rescale the page without problems. This is really handy for when you need to write longer things in these fields, like, *ahem*, blog posts.

However, I’m sure that some of the people reading this right now like Larry and Robert and other people whom I’ve fought browser wars with have their brains exploding from their heads or something wondering how it is that I am praising Safari all of a sudden, when I have appeared before as such an avid opponent of Safari up until now. But quite frankly, it’s because my experiences with Safari during the last two weeks have shown that it works dramatically better. The new features that I’ve mentioned above are really nice, and having Safari be significantly faster is also beneficial, but the biggest thing that I’ve noticed is that the new version of WebKit that comes with Safari 3 seems to have so much better support for various sites on the internet. Another thing that I notice is that Apple is no longer being so strict with using its own designs for form elements in web pages. Now, when web pages (like ones in WordPress) specify certain custom CSS for these buttons, Safari now goes along with it. It would probably be impossible for me to go through everything I’ve noticed, but to say it in a nutshell, Safari 3 feels more compatible with the internet than it’s ever been before. (And the fact that all those apps that caused me problems with Safari 3 in June have now been updated to fix all the WebKit compatibility issues is also very helpful.)

But just to make sure I don’t completely freak everyone out, I still do have some complaints. My biggest gripe is that Safari does not have any solution for blocking web advertisements. Camino, the web browser that I was using up until 2 weeks ago, had one of the best annoyance blockers I have ever used. Camino would not just block pop-ups, but could also block 95% of all web advertisements as well. However, when Camino blocked a pop-up, it would show you a nice little notice right above your page that let you know that it had actually blocked a pop up, with buttons to Allow the pop-up Once, to Always Allow pop-ups from the site, to Never Allow pop-ups from the site (which would dismiss the pop-up notifier permanently in the future), or to ignore. Safari has pop-up blocking, but it’s sort of a mystery whether it’s blocking pop-ups or not, and Safari STILL has no ad-blocking, even though Camino and OmniWeb have ad-blocking built-in and Firefox has a great addon (AdBlock Plus) available. Also, Camino/Firefox allow you to setup a whitelist–a list of sites for which ad-blocking and pop-up blocking do not take effect, whereas Safari does not give you such control.

Another gripe that I’ve had is Safari’s auto-completing address bar. It comes from the old days of web browsers, where if you started typing a URL into the address bar, it would auto-complete it, and then drop-down a list of other auto-completes below. However, I’ve found this auto-complete to be rather frustrating. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve entered a particular URL and hit enter, but instants before I hit enter, Safari auto-completed what I had typed with a different URL, and I wound up somewhere different than I wanted to go. For just this reason, Camino, Firefox, and OmniWeb do NOT auto-complete what you’re typing, although they do show the drop-down list below so you can arrow or mouse down and pick a URL if you want, but it has to be your initiative. I wish Apple would add this idea to its repertoire of user interface ideas.

And I have some other gripes which are less significant. I’d like Apple to make better use of this new-fangled thing called favicons. Apple has recently allowed you to see the favicons in the History menu, but I’d also like to see favicons display in the Bookmarks Bar and also in the various open tabs. I also have a gripe with Apple being the last major web browser to adopt the feed icon standard, instead insisting on continuing to use its proprietary blue “RSS” icon. And, it would be nice if Apple supported more search engines than just Google and Yahoo!, but the solution to that would be to install the wonderful Inquisitor add-on.

Although my initial experiences with the Public Beta of Safari 3 last June made me skeptical of the update, I must say in all fairness and honesty that Safari 3 is a really nice and significant update over Safari 2. Although it doesn’t rectify all of my qualms over Apple’s little web browser, it sure fixes a number of the things that had been left out of its earlier versions, feels a lot nicer, plays a lot better with various websites, and just for a little extra punch it brings a number of innovative new features to the table. Will I be staying with Safari, having used it for the past two weeks? It’s hard to say. One of the biggest reasons that I have such transient habits between web browsers (I haven’t used a single web browser more than 8 months in a row for the past three years!) is because web browsers keep improving, innovating, delivering more features and better compatibility. Without a doubt, the plethora of browser options for Mac users is one of the biggest reasons why the options for our web experience keep getting better and better. My future decisions for my standard browser remain uncertain, however I plan to give a few of the other browsers out there a whirl, and I will be covering my experiences with them in a future blog post during December or January. But for now, I should say that Safari 3 has succeeded in impressing me, and for now, has turned my opinions around.

Feature Satisfaction Rating:

Be sure to check out the other articles in the Leopard Feature Presentation, occurring throughout the month of November here on Webmacster87.info.

Tags: beta, blocking, bookmarks, features, forms, innovation, Leopard Feature Presentation, Mac OS X Leopard, review, Safari, tabs, web browser, WebKit