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June 11, 2007

software

WWDC ‘07: First thoughts on Safari 3.0 Public Beta

Posted Jun. 11, ’07, 5:44 PM PT by Dan Moren
Category | Software

Safari 3.0 BetaSafari may have blazed a trail to Windows, but that doesn’t mean that Mac users are left out in the cold. Alongside the new version for that other platform, Apple dropped a public beta of the forthcoming Safari 3.0 for those of us on the light side. I took a quick look at the good, the bad, and the sexy.

First off, you’ll note that installing the Safari 3.0 beta is a little more complicated than drag-and-drop. The new version requires a restart—why? A tip from my colleague Dan Frakes points out that not only is a new version of Safari (and WebKit) installed, but also a new version of the Dock and the Dashboard client. Why? Presumably for the Web Clip functionality that Steve has showed off, though that’s something that isn’t available in the Beta.

After going through the laborious restart process, launching the app wasn’t terribly pleasant either. Safari informed me that one of my plug-ins, a SIMBL extension called ForgetMeNot was incompatible with Safari 3.0, and had been disabled. Rats. As if that wasn’t bad enough, trying to open any site gave instead me a blank, white page, fresh as a newly fallen sheet of snow. Pretty, but not useful.

The culprit in that case was, of course, another extension—Safari Stand. Disabling that got Safari 3.0 working at last, albeit without the features from my cherished plug-ins. Fortunately, Safari 3.0 adds in many of the things I’d used those plug-ins for (session saving and draggable tabs, for example). For Safari Stand’s indispensable address bar searching I did manage to scrounge up a working extension, SafariSIA. I also used Safari Stand’s ability to reskin the browser as a Unified Toolbar app, rather than a brushed metal monstrosity, but the 3.0 beta brought me back to my metal hell, making me long all the more for Leopard’s far off promise of a consistent window interface.

Enough about third parties: how does Safari 3.0 perform?

Put simply: it is fast. Apple brags about the speed of Safari versus Internet Explorer and Firefox on the Windows side, but it’s no slouch on good old OS X. In my limited experience today, sites seemed to load noticeably quicker, even ones with complicated elements like Google Maps’s new Street View. While I haven’t subjected the app to an exhaustive battery of speed tests, it seems pretty clear that Apple’s engineers have spent some time under the hood of this beast, and she purrs along quite nicely now.

Speed’s all well and good, but what about those new features? Safari 3.0 finally gives us draggable tabs. No more resorting to third-party add-ons or resigning yourself to the order of your tabs; now you can not only rearrange tabs within a window, but you can easily drag a tab out from one window to make it a standalone window, or drag tabs between windows. A menu command lets you merge all of your windows into one gigantor window too.

The History menu adds a pair of new commands: Reopen Last Closed Window and Reopen All Windows from Last Session. The first is great for those instances in which you accidentally close an entire window instead of just that one tab you meant to close (though in 3.0, Safari will now warn you if you try to close a window with multiple tabs); the second gives you some semblance of session saving, though it would be nice if they gave you the option to have your last session opened by default. And sorely missing is an “Unclose Last Tab” command, for when you accidentally hit that little “X” and didn’t mean to.

PDF viewing has also been given an overhaul in Safari 3.0. Like browsing in general, it seemed a lot snappier to me. Right clicking will bring up a contextual menu with options for zooming in and out, opening in preview, skipping from page to page, et cetera. The Safari page on Apple’s site suggests a floating overlay of controls is also available, but I couldn’t figure out how to bring it forth (to be fair, I’ve mucked a bit with Safari’s PDF displaying in the past, so that may be my fault).

Finally, the sexiest new feature of Safari is the slick Find banner (an idea that appears to have been *ahem* borrowed from Firefox). When you hit command-F or choose Find from the Edit menu, you’ll no longer see a dialog box. Instead, a thin blue panel will slide down from below the tab bar with a search field, a pair of arrows, and a done button. Entering a term in the search field will dim the page and highlight all of the matching results. Using the arrow buttons next to the search field (or command-G/Edit -> Find Next), you can cycle through all the hits, with each one “popping” up in turn (command-shift-G/Edit -> Find Previous will cycle through backwards). To any who, like myself, often found their eyes straining to locate a desired bit of text in the past, this is a godsend. I don’t care if they stole it from Firefox—I’m just glad it’s there. Interestingly enough, the find banner is tab-specific; i.e., if you search for “tiger” in one tab, and then switch to another tab, you’ll see that the banner isn’t there, unless you’ve specifically summoned it (not sure if that’s a bug or feature, though).

I’ve only had a little time to use the beta, so one big question remains: Safari’s long term performance issues. A few months back I complained that Safari was a CPU-eating and memory-devouring monster, thanks in no small part to its WebKit underpinnings. Alongside a new version of the Dock though, Safari 3.0 installs an updated WebKit framework, and thus far, it seems to be vastly more stable, and far less resource-intensive. But since the worst issues arise when Safari’s been open for a long time, it remains to be seen just how good this new version is. I’ll keep on top of it, and rest assured, if the monster returns, I’ll be the first person to grab a torch and pitchfork.


18 Comments

Teilas Author Profile Page said:

Regarding the brushed metal appearance, this can be easily changed without using any third-party plug-ins, provided you have the developer tools installed (don't worry, it's nothing difficult). What you need to do is right-click on Safari.app and choose Show Package Contents. Now navigate to Contents > Resources > English.lproj and open the file called Browser.nib. This will open Interface Builder. Now press shift-command-i to bring up the inspector and click on the "Window" icon in the Browser.nib window. In the inspector uncheck Has Texture and check Unified title/toolbar look. Save, quit, and launch Safari. It should now be rid of the (in my opinion, completely hideous) brushed metal.

Speed-wise, Safari does indeed seem much snappier, and I can now browse Goodle Maps much faster than I ever remembering being able to. My favourite new feature is the ability to resize text boxes. Very handy in those situations where the web developer has chosen a ridiculously small text box to type in.

June 11, 2007 6:52 PM
Chris MacMinn said:

I had some trouble with SafariStand at first too, but it seems to work fine now (I only use it for the session restoring) -- make sure "Site Alteration" is disabled and you should be OK (unless that's the feature you can't live without).

June 11, 2007 7:14 PM
Joe said:

"rather than a brushed metal monstrosity, but the 3.0 beta brought me back to my metal hell,"

You need to get out more, maybe get a job in the real world where people have real problems. And what's up with the complaint about a restart?

BTW, I'm in Safari 3 right now, running SafariStand. I had no problems. It even restored my last Safari 2 session, and Inquisitor still rocks.

About grabbing a "torch and pitchfork," dude you've got some serious issues. Step away from the keyboard. Put down the mouse. Take a deep breath and go get some sunshine.

June 11, 2007 7:32 PM
Johnnie said:

@ Teilas

How and what do I need to do to get Safari 3 out of this brushed metal look? What are the developer tools I need to have?

June 11, 2007 7:56 PM
brotherStefan said:

I'm afraid I quit reading when I got to the line about the "laborious restart process". I've never gotten much useful information from any author who describes a Mac restart as "laborious".

June 11, 2007 8:23 PM
Davidlow said:

"And sorely missing is an “Unclose Last Tab” command, for when you accidentally hit that little “X” and didn’t mean to."

Try Command-Z, or Undo from the Edit menu. This works in the current version but I haven't installed the beta.

June 11, 2007 8:45 PM
Dan Moren Author Profile Page said:

@Teilas: Yes, I totally forgot to mention the resizeable textareas, which are insanely cool. In fact I'm resizing this one as I'm writing it. Awesome.

@Chris: Thanks for the Safari Stand suggestion, I'll check it out.

@Davidlow: Thanks for the tip; I gave it a try on the Beta. On the first attempt, it crashed Safari, and on the second attempt is just beeped and didn't do anything. So that function seems not to be present. Another thing I noticed is that unlike in the current version of Safari, if you mistakenly open a new set of tabs on an existing set of tabs (via command-clicking on a folder of bookmarks, for example), you cannot go back to your previous set of tabs by clicking on the back button. Annoying, but I presume it'll make it into the final version.

@Johnnie: The developer tools come on an extra disc with your Tiger install. You can also download them from Apple's developer site. Then just follow Teilas's instructions.

As far as complaints about having to restart go, well, when you're working and have a bunch of apps and windows open, it can be a pretty big disruption to have to shut them all down, reboot, and reopen all of your apps to get back to where you were. And I'm not convinced that there's anything in there that requires a restart; we're not talking about loading kernel extensions, or anything. Just killing and restarting a few apps.

June 11, 2007 11:54 PM
V.M.R. said:

The new WebKit that the beta installs seems to do rude things to other WebKit apps. I use Shiira as my main browser, but thought I would take a dip back into Safari with the beta. A noble goal, but it turned out to be not quite what I was looking for, so I went back to Shiira. Except that Shiira now misbehaved somewhat atrociously (unexpectedly quitting anywhere between ten seconds and four minutes after launching, along with simply stopping loading pages after a similar timeframe, was the main symptom), and I was forced to uninstall Safari beta. So I'm not doing the beta thing anymore, but it is a beta, and it uninstalled cleanly (with a restart), so no harm no foul, but just the warning.

June 12, 2007 1:18 AM
Jan said:

The Windows builds seem to be a little shabbier than those on OS X. I tried Safari and it kept crashing while doing simple things like Google searching. Also, it did not render some pages properly. So as much as I esteem Apple, Safari(beta) for Windows is still too buggy for every-day use. Hope it gets to a stable release as soon as possible.

June 12, 2007 2:44 AM
Erik said:

The new version of WebKit appears to have had an impact on software such as Yahoo! Messenger 3.0 beta 1.

Instead of scrolling down to the latest message, the window will jump up to the first message each time a message has been received.

I just hope either Apple or Yahoo! release an update soon.

June 12, 2007 3:33 AM
Darren Jaffe said:

Chris: Re Safari now works okay after I disabled Site Alteration on Safari Stand. However, Safari Stand no longer produces bookmarks in the Stand Bar, which is a feature I enjoyed. Hopefully there will be an update for 3.0.

June 12, 2007 4:08 AM
jackfrost said:

I'm betting that the restart was required because of the dashboard functionality in the Leopard release of Safari. It's possible that Safari needed to change Dashboard in some way, and rather then just having you log out and back in to restart Dashboard, Apple's installer just had you restart. I don't think I've every seen an installer from Apple have you log out and back in.

June 12, 2007 4:44 AM
Walt said:

Yeah, I totally agree with the whole restart thing. Things open at any given time for me: iCal, Mail, iChat, NetNewsWire, OmniWeb (with insane tabbage), MacJournal, iPhoto, & iTunes. Those are just my automatic load at start applications. There just as many, if not more that get opened as needed, and some loaded in background (think keycue and QuickSilver (thus fulfilling the token QS plug quota for the week)). It’s not the actual restart that’s a pain, but the whole getting back to where you were in the workflow.

Another SIMBL gone awry with Safari would be my now can’t-live-without 1passwd (thanks Thomas G-vL). I was about to fire off some select words to the developers. How inconsiderate of them to not take into account a new beta of Safari! They should be… Then I came to my senses and checked their website. Of course they are at WWDC, knew nothing about this new Safari, and plan to release something by tonight or tomorrow night, depending on what day they posted the message. Meanwhile, the poor moderator left in charge of the forums was handling the resulting flood of support questions/feedback/death threats from this update.

Did you notice the separate uninstaller? I assume this will put your old Safari (and dock and webkit thingies) snuggly back in place.

As for the Windows version… man… zippety doo! I was very impressed. Very fast. Firefox *was* my choice of browser on my PC, but now it will be Safari.

June 12, 2007 7:10 AM
Fletcher said:

I think the issue is that they replace not just Safari, but also WebKit, the Dock, and parts of the Dashboard. Since WebKit is used throughout the OS they probably just want to make sure that everything which relies on it is quit and started back up again.

It actually reminds me a lot of Internet Explorer upgrades on Windows. They were never very simple upgrades since so many system components relied on the guts of IE to render Web pages. IE upgrades ended up feeling more like service packs than simple application modifications.

June 12, 2007 7:40 AM
Kate Marshall Author Profile Page said:

The Safari 3 beta (Mac version) behaved itself pretty well last night on my MacBook-- so far.

June 12, 2007 8:10 AM
RossGGG said:

It seems Safari 3.0 doesn't recognize the PicLens plugin, or maybe it's the other way around. I guess I'll have to go back to view images the old-fashioned way.

June 12, 2007 8:34 AM
Paul said:

"A few months back I complained that Safari was a CPU-eating and memory-devouring monster, thanks in no small part to its WebKit underpinnings."

I left Safari 3 beta running overnight. When I came to it this morning, I checked Activity Monitor, and Safari was assigned a whopping 253MB.

My Wired memory was 243MB, Active memory was 265MB, Inactive memory was 760MB. I quit Safari and checked memory usage again. Wired was unchanged, Active was 260MB and Inactive and dropped to just over 500MB. So most of the 253MB assigned memory was inactive memory and available to the OS if needed.

I hardly ever used Safari 2, since I found it too slow, so I didn't think to test this before installed the 3.0 beta.

This doesn't seem like a memory hog to me, and I'm very tempted to switch from Firefox.

June 12, 2007 9:07 AM
George B. said:

I used Safari 3 for several hours today, did not have time to find out all the great new features but its asking me to be careful closing a window with several tabs open was super nice. In the past, I have closed too many tabs without even realizing it.

June 12, 2007 11:11 AM

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