Posted on 02/25/2009 12:38:22 AM PST by Swordmaker
Apple, Inc. has made a beta of Safari 4 available to the public and says its the fastest and most innovative browser for the Mac and Windows. New features in Safari 4 include new views, tabs and a Nitro JavaScript engine that Apple says is up to 30 times faster than Internet Explorer 7. Safari 4 is the first browser to support advanced CSS Effects.
The browser wars are starting again. Apple on Tuesday launched the public beta of Safari 4. The maker of the Mac is billing its latest browser version as the world's fastest and most innovative for both Mac and Windows PCs. Analysts said Apple is right to brag about its latest innovations.
The Safari 4 beta comes with a slew of new features that aim to make browsing more intuitive and enjoyable. Top Sites, for example, offers a visual preview of frequently visited pages. Full History Search lets you search through titles, Web addresses and the complete text of recently viewed pages. And Cover Flow lets you flip through Web history or bookmarks much the same way you flip through your album covers on the iPod.
"Apple created Safari to bring innovation, speed and open standards back into Web browsers, and today it takes another big step forward," said Philip Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of worldwide product marketing. "Safari 4 is the fastest and most efficient browser for Mac and Windows, with great integration of HTML 5 and CSS 3 Web standards that enables the next generation of interactive Web applications."
The Lightning Round
According to Apple, the Nitro JavaScript engine in Safari 4 is the world's most advanced browser technology. The claims are impressive. Apple said Nitro runs JavaScript 4.2 times faster than Safari 3, up to 30 times faster than Internet Explorer 7, and more than three times faster than Firefox 3. Apple also said Safari loads HTML Web pages three times faster than IE 7 and almost three times faster than Firefox 3.
"It's hard to innovate on the browsing experience these days. It's simple. It's familiar. It works. But Apple really has done some nice stuff with the Safari 4 beta," said Michael Gartenberg, vice president of strategy and analysis at Interpret. "I have only been using it for a few minutes, but it definitely feels like there's a speed bump here."
Beyond the speed, Apple has also integrated nine new key features in Safari 4. Tabs on Top aims to offer better tabbed browsing with drag-and-drop tab management tools and an intuitive button for opening new ones. The Smart Address Field automatically completes Web addresses by displaying an easy-to-read list of suggestions from Top Sites, bookmarks and browsing history. And Smart Search Field lets users fine-tune searches with recommendations from Google Suggest or a list of recent searches.
What's more, Full Page Zoom offers a closer look at any Web site without degrading the quality of the site's layout and text. Built-in Web developer tools debug, tweak and optimize a Web site for peak performance and compatibility. A new Windows-native look in Safari for Windows uses standard Windows font rendering and native title bar, borders and toolbars so Safari fits the look and feel of other Windows XP and Windows Vista applications. (continued...)
Battling for Browser Share
As Gartenberg sees it, Apple is indicating it is serious about the Web and taking the experience to the next level. Safari 4 includes HTML 5 support for offline technologies so Web-based applications can store information locally without an Internet connection, and is the first browser to support advanced CSS Effects that enable Web graphics using reflections, gradients and precision masks.
"What we have here is a whole new era of browser wars going on with Microsoft , Apple, Mozilla and Google battling it out. The stakes may be different, but they are no less important than they were in the last century," Gartenberg said. "Safari 4 cements the Safari position on Mac OS. Mac OS users have a first-class integrated browsing experience and don't have to look elsewhere. But it also drives the technology further onto the Windows platform."
It's now Firefox. Sort of. A little history:
In the beginning, there was Mosaic. And the Web saw it, and it was good. But limited. It didn't have forms, tables, and the only images it displayed were .GIFs. Mosaic was developed at NCSA (the National Center for Supercomputing Applications) by a student named Marc Andreessen; Andreessen went on to found a private company he called Mozilla (MOsaic + godZILLA).
By the time Mozilla actually found its way to the Web, the company had changed its name to Netscape, and it called its browser Navigator. Netscape added inline viewing of JPEG images, online forms, tables, and other goodies.
In order to pull off some of its tricks, Netscape used "extensions" -- bits of code that were developed by Netscape alone and were not part of the official HTML specification.
Netscape's business model was to give the browser away for home and non-profit users, and charge businesses. That model was shattered when Microsoft announced Internet Explorer, its own browser that was free to everyone. IE introduced its own set of "extensions," and the Web was a pretty big mess for a while. Eventually, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the group that sets the official specs, incorporated many of these extensions.
Meanwhile, Sun Microsystems introduced a cross-platform programming language called Java, and a pared-down language for Web browsers called Javascript. Macromedia introduced a browser plug-in called Shockwave that added sound, animation and interactivity; this would evolve into something called Flash.
So Netscape and IE were the main competitors in the Great Browser Wars of the late 1990s. Netscape made its money mainly from its server software, which offered featres that the free server Apache lacked. We all know how Microsoft made its money.
In the fullness of time, Netscape was floundering, and was bought by America Online. You might not remember them, but they were pretty big once. AOL stuck with Navigator for a while, but as it continued to hemorrhage money and market share, eventually Navigator was discontinued. the code base for Navigator was released as open source software, and that project went back to Andreessen's original name: Mozilla.
The Mozilla project's first, and still its main, product is a Web browser called Firefox. They also make an e-mail client called Thunderbird that's pretty neat. Because it's open source, there are other browsers that use the Mozilla codebase, notably Camino for Mac and Fennec for mobile phones.
Other browser makers, with a lot less fanfare, were working on their own projects. Opera ran a fairly steady third place, and the open-source Konqueror engine begat WebKit, the basis of Apple's Safari browser, which made its debut with Mac OS X.
Aren't you glad you asked?
Look under the Safari Develop menu item.... invoke "Disable Javascript."
I’m using it now. It’s definitely faster, and I like the top sites tab. The only thing I haven’t found is a way to change the default search engine from Google. The tabs on top feature is “eh, just a change to make a change,” but doesn’t bother me. It doesn’t feel like a Beta release at all. Very stable and smooth.
Sounds nice, but Firefox still does what I want it to do on my Mac, so it’s going to take a lot to convert me. In the mean time, Firefox 3.1 is looking very good, making the hurdle for Safari even higher.
Speed might be what does it.
Once they killed Netscape, MS quit innovating on IE, and browsers lounged until Firefox and Safari came out. I think Firefox had tabbed browsing for a couple of years before IE finally released an update.
AOL did pretty well when the net was the wild west, but they thought that they could keep users in an AOL sandbox. I think their losses darned near sunk Time-Warner. Acquiring them was probably the biggest mistake Time-Warner ever made. Anybody remember for a couple of years, the official company name was AOL Time-Warner?
I like Safari, but Firefox is an excellent browser, also.
The refresh button is now permanently incorporated at the right end of the address field.
Could it mean the page has updated since last visited? I see it on Mac Daily News... but then Drudge doesn't have it.
It is fast... snappier. Also the format retaining, graphic and font resolution size independence of the Zoom feature are great!
The concentration on a fast JavaScript engine is what is required for some of the upcoming web applications.
Sadly, I think JavaScript is the wrong tool for the job, but that’s me. ActiveX is the even-worse tool for the job. They’re both unsafe and can manipulate files on your computer...
but I see where Apple is going here, and it is this: they want to be the fast-fast-fast browser for net-based and distributed apps.
I rarely hear anyone say they use Camino. Why is that? I have used it for a couple of years and it suits my limited needs. My ISP, Suddenlink, has run out of bandwidth and my download speeds are not much better than my uploads. My informant there tells me they will have another pipe up and running in San Jose this weekend?
That's much less of a problem than it used to be, and I'm optimistic about open, platform-agnostic standards winning out. I still run across sites that only work properly on IE, and a few that only work on IE/Windows, mostly due to ActiveX; I have a few choice and non-FR-appropriate words for Web designers too lazy to learn the standards and test on multiple browsers and platforms.
Once they killed Netscape, MS quit innovating on IE, and browsers lounged until Firefox and Safari came out. I think Firefox had tabbed browsing for a couple of years before IE finally released an update.
They were aided by a public that was mis- and under-informed about how the Internet worked. Millions of people thought Explorer *was* the Internet. So you get folks who know you're "good with computers" asking for help, saying that "my e-mail works, but not my Internet." It was the plethora of IE security holes that finally forced a lot of folks to look at alternative browsers, and the DOJ that made it easier to stop using IE.
AOL did pretty well when the net was the wild west, but they thought that they could keep users in an AOL sandbox.
AOL was born when the Internet was an exotic playground for the few; they were an online service, not an ISP, alongside the likes of Compuserve and Prodigy (I had all three at one point, and beta tested Prodigy for Mac). They did all right at the beginning of the Internet boom, when they had the easiest way to connect and one of the first nationwide banks of local dial-in numbers. But by the end of the '90s, other ISPs and both WIndows and Mac OS had made connecting to the 'Net easy, and much of the country had much faster options available.
I think their losses darned near sunk Time-Warner. Acquiring them was probably the biggest mistake Time-Warner ever made. Anybody remember for a couple of years, the official company name was AOL Time-Warner?
I worked for TW at the time. When the merger went through, I got stock options ... at 45. That's how I know that I was really a dot-com pioneer; worthless stock options are a badge of honor in that club.
AOL pulled a fast one with that merger (and BTW, though it was billed as a "merger," AOL in fact acquired TW). They were selling ads for 10 years out and booking the revenue in the current quarter, tricks like that. They just had to keep up the facade until the TW merger went through. AOL got the gold mine, and TW the shaft.
Yes, AOL shares tanked, but they would have gone to zero had the company not used its bubble money to acquire something with real value. Like them or not, CNN, HBO, Time, and the movie and music properties have a real business model, and AOL didn't. TW had been flailing around for an "Internet strategy" for years (remember Pathfinder?), and they thought the AOL whiz kids had one. They were mistaken.
—Aren’t you glad you asked?—
Yes, I am glad I asked. I learned something new. And of course I remember AOL. I wish I had a dime for every one of those CD-ROMs of theirs I tossed after getting them in my mail!
I have Windows XP - any feedback running Safari4 and why I should “upgrade” from IE7? (everything stable but more speed is always helpful)
Which matches Safari for the iPhone. I suspect that isn't a coincidence.
CNet reports Safari 4.0 is 42 times faster than Internet Explorer, 3.5 times faster than Firefox 3.
That appears to be what it is. When I click a top site with a star, and then go back to the Top Sites screen, the star is gone.
On the other stuff, I was going back to the history of when it was IE and Netscape, and really no other browsers. You're right about most people not having a clue about browsers. A lot of people don't realize you can change your home page.
ActiveX is probably the biggest security risk in browsers. They can install themselves as executables, and have full system access. If security settings are low enough, Windows won't even ask before executing.
Do you know if there is a way to make Safari default to opening links in a new tab instead of a new window? That is my only beef with Safari.
A small addendum:
Netscape was superior to IE at Netscape 4 and IE 4. But then IE went to 5 and Netscape was having problems getting that old codebase to do what they wanted. So Netscape decided upon a complete code rewrite, and IE owned the browser market by the time they were done a couple of years later.
That killed Netscape. But the code rewrite lived on in Mozilla and later the browser-only spinoff, Firefox. The decision for a rewrite was a bad business move back then, but it is paying off now in a superior browser.
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