While talking to a friend of mine (yes, believe it or not I do have a few friends) he asked if I had seen the new Safari web browser. I will admit, I don’t follow Apple stuff to much. I’m not a hater, or a die hard Microsoft user, I just no Apply fan boi. So really I didn’t even know that Safari is up to version 4, or that it had a major release a few weeks ago. I was informed that it was really cool, and looked great, so I figured I’d give it a shot.
It’s kind of funny though, to go to the Apple website you wouldn’t know that the software was recently released. As a matter of fact to look at the website as I type this, there is no mention what-so-ever about the release that happened in July 8th (today being the 17th so 9 days later). After a little bit of searching I found the page (if your interested its apple.com/safari It can also be found by clicking the downloads link on the anywhere in the apple site), and took a look at the marketing spiel. One thing I beginning to hate about companies and their use of the word Innovation. They don’t seem to care if a technology or setup is out there or not. As long as it wasn’t done “Their Way”, then they are providing innovation to the market. The example here is:
With Top Sites, Safari keeps a running tally of the websites you visit and automatically creates a graphically rich page that displays up to 24 thumbnails of your favorites.
This is not Innovation in itself as the Google browser, Chrome, has had this since release I do believe. Now they didn’t have it on a stylish solid background, with the thumbnails looking like they curve around the screen. All that though is just display, displaying a users top sites is not a Apple Innovation. The items below on the page are not even innovative, really they are nothing more then the normal progression of features. HTML 5 is a up coming recommendation (though not fully set yet) the same with CSS3. Really the only thing on the page that is possibly innovative is the WebKit project as it is a true derivative work of the KDE project’s KHTML software library. Also, you would think that companies would word security statements a little bit better. A few months ago, at a “security conference” a Mac was hacked into in under 10 seconds via a Safari 3.2 library. So reading that a software package has “be built From the ground up with security in mind” tends to make me nervous. Let me mention again, that yes I’m tearing about the marketing speak on Safari page, but they are not the only ones guilty of this. So I’m not being a hater, just it happens to be the site I’m talking about right now.
With the negative marketing speak out of the way, I’ve downloaded and installed the software on my laptop, and fired it up. If anything can be said about the products Apple releases, they look great. Safari is no exception to this. Really, if Apple really wants’ to innovate the market, they should leave the feature creep to the other developers and just show the world how to make those functions work and look good. Safari’s version of top sites looks many times better then Chromes version, same with the history search that uses page thumbnails so you can see which page on a site your selecting. Apple lists 150 features for the Safari browser on their website, some new, others not, but since this is my first run with safari, I guess they will be new to me.
One feature that I need to check out a bit more is the Speculative Loading. Basically Safari is going to try to guess which page or document your going to go to next and pre-load it ahead of time. This probably ties in with Apples claim that Safari is faster then the competition. It might not actually be faster in processing information, it might have just had a head start getting it. Where as this has some obvious benefits in the rendering category, I have to wonder what it’s going to due to my cell phone bill. You see many times when I’m on the web with my laptop, I tend to be in places that don’t have wi-fi access. So instead of Wi-Fi, I’m tethered to my Blackberry under Verizon’s plan. I get 6GB a month of bandwidth, which, since I tend not to be on YouTube or Hulu when I’m tethered, has been more then enough (I will admit though, I really wish there was more bandwidth usage for my money so I can view more video. But then who doesn’t wish they had more when there is a hard and set limit.) My concern is though, say I’m on a news site with links to Video that I wouldn’t normally click on cause I’m using the tethered cell connection, that Safari may still be downloading all that information anyhow. I’m going to have to remember to test that.
Well looks like I’ve got my work cut out for me to test out this browser. Granted I’m sure if I do some surfing, someone else has already done the work for me, but what fun is that?!
