Apple releases Safari 4 beta

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What the hell is with the first time start up?

I open Safari and all of a sudden my mouse cursor gets slow and I think there's something wrong with my mouse, but I realise the whole computer is lagging.
Safari then pops up and starts to play what I think is supposed to be a grand introduction video, but it stutters and then crashes. :lol
 
For some reason, Top Sites refuses to add GAF, no matter how many of them I delete and replace with new suggestions. It's added all the other pages I regularly visit.
 
EmSeta said:
For some reason, Top Sites refuses to add GAF, no matter how many of them I delete and replace with new suggestions. It's added all the other pages I regularly visit.
it's becoming self aware
 
EmSeta said:
For some reason, Top Sites refuses to add GAF, no matter how many of them I delete and replace with new suggestions. It's added all the other pages I regularly visit.
Mine are only gaming blogs and sites. I have 3 GAF suggestions.:lol
 
-Winnie- said:
What the hell is with the first time start up?

I open Safari and all of a sudden my mouse cursor gets slow and I think there's something wrong with my mouse, but I realise the whole computer is lagging.
Safari then pops up and starts to play what I think is supposed to be a grand introduction video, but it stutters and then crashes. :lol

It's not a movie, it's done entirely in CSS or something, to show off a new feature in Safari 4. Kinda neat.

http://www.apple.com/safari/welcome/
 
Shiggie said:
not having to search trough all those windows... and just clicking in the same window. Its right there and not all over the place.

What do you mean by all over the place? Click "Window" and all open windows are listed in a vertical list, much easier to look through than a horizontal one I'd say
 
Kuramu said:
What do you mean by all over the place? Click "Window" and all open windows are listed in a vertical list, much easier to look through than a horizontal one I'd say
A reason to have to do that in the first place.
 
Sean said:
It's not a movie, it's done entirely in CSS or something, to show off a new feature in Safari 4. Kinda neat.

http://www.apple.com/safari/welcome/
CSS Animations and HTML5. Mmm.

For some reason, Top Sites refuses to add GAF, no matter how many of them I delete and replace with new suggestions. It's added all the other pages I regularly visit.
To add a site to the Top Sites: click edit. drag the favicon from another window into it.
 
B!TCH said:
Tabs on top? Seriously? That's what you are choosing to complain about?

It is not what you expect, yes, but it is also not difficult to get used to it.
Tabs on top actually saves a good amount of web space than having it on the bottom.
 
So I caved and ran the terminal orders to put the tabs back on the bottom and bring back the blue loading bar.

It was really annoying having to grab the top corner of the tab to drag it.

i hope they keep these hidden config options around for the final version.

but, on the plus side, it's fast as hell, better with gifs (that first crash I had with one was a one time thing), top sites and history search is great and the address bar seach options work great.

a solid improvement over safari 3.
 
Looks really nice, and I like new tabs (more screen space always welcome) but Inquisitor is not working, and the Smart Search is really like a poor man's replacement for that. So I'll skip for now, and wait for the final release.

Hated that the removed the blue bar, good thing that's repairable.
 
Something that has become super-obvious is that everyone browses the web very differently. This is not like many other apps, where people tend to use them similarly.

For web browsing people use history, tabs, windows, searches, homepages and so on VERY differently. It's nigh on impossible to provide a single interface to please a majority. Too bad Apple believe in telling us what we want as opposed to more options in this case (usually I don't mind - -and to be honest I don't mind so much here, but I can see others do).
 
Used it all day yesterday - still prefer Chrome.

- Chrome seems to be, generally speaking, slightly faster, especially at start up.
- I like the way it displays tabs better than Safari (they look nicer and I like the smaller width - makes it easier to go from one tab to another - less mouse movement)
- The Chrome starting page loads faster - probably because it's not 3D. Further, the pages load faster when you click on them because you don't have to sit through the 3-D zooming in animation that you have on Safari)
- Refresh button on the left.
- All in one search and address bar - I love the way the omni-box works.
 
Safari 4 is a beast on my home computers, but I just put it on my old work computer, and it's unusable on some sites.

Chrome is still the way to go if you're not on at least a Core 2 Duo.
 
StopMakingSense said:
Try this in terminal:

defaults write com.apple.Safari TargetedClicksCreateTabs -bool true

Restart Safari. This should enable a Single Window Mode, and every link that would create a new window will end up in a new tab.

That doesn't appear to do anything with clicks from external programs.
 
Burai said:
That doesn't appear to do anything with clicks from external programs.

If you want external programs to open new tabs instead of windows, this has been around for a while.

just got the safari preferences, and on the "general" page select the option to have new links open up as a tab in the current window.

I've been doing this for years.
 
TheHeretic said:
You can pin certain websites, but you can't create them.

Scroll up a page or so. There was an explanation. It's convoluted but it works.

Press the Edit Button, type in a URL but do NOT press enter. Grab the Globe and drag that puppy down into the top sites area and drop it. It will create a Top Site then.
 
mrkgoo said:
Something that has become super-obvious is that everyone browses the web very differently. This is not like many other apps, where people tend to use them similarly.

For web browsing people use history, tabs, windows, searches, homepages and so on VERY differently. It's nigh on impossible to provide a single interface to please a majority. Too bad Apple believe in telling us what we want as opposed to more options in this case (usually I don't mind - -and to be honest I don't mind so much here, but I can see others do).

Sometimes the options are just to use a different browser. Otherwise, why would there be people who use Opera over Firefox (I used to before Safari 4)? Or Safari or IE? So on and so forth.

I'm digging Safari 4 thus far. After I solved my Top Sites dilemma, I'm good to go. I like my tabs at the very top as it affords more screen real estate for me. I never have more than 4+ sites open at any given time anyway. I also like that it's faster than the latest Opera. I'm not a power user by any means, so a lot of what people are complaining about I simply don't understand, but more power to them. The one thing I wish was "solved" was GIF heavy pages not chugging. I don't really understand that but maybe I'm doing something wrong?
 
LCfiner said:
If you want external programs to open new tabs instead of windows, this has been around for a while.

just got the safari preferences, and on the "general" page select the option to have new links open up as a tab in the current window.

I've been doing this for years.

Aaaaaaah. Thanks! I was expecting it to be in the Tabs section. I've been waiting for this since Safari 2! :(
 
It's running really good for me so far on Windows 7.

Chrome is a little bit faster but it doesn't display some web pages correctly. For example, when I'm online banking on Wachovia.com some buttons won't show up and some buttons just don't work when I click on them.

Firefox is a mess for me. Every once in a while it'll just start hogging up 80% of my RAM for no reason.
 
I might be switching through this and FF3. This is a teensy bit faster than my FF3, but there are some things that irk me:

for Macbook users, Pro especially: Are you guys getting weird noises when you use two-finger scroll with Safari? It's not like that in Firefox, but I get a fairly loud clicking noise that sounded sorta like a mousewheel scroll sound. Is that normal?
 
Alfarif said:
Scroll up a page or so. There was an explanation. It's convoluted but it works.

Press the Edit Button, type in a URL but do NOT press enter. Grab the Globe and drag that puppy down into the top sites area and drop it. It will create a Top Site then.
Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhh. Yeah, never would've thought of that!
 
BrandNew said:
I might be switching through this and FF3. This is a teensy bit faster than my FF3, but there are some things that irk me:

for Macbook users, Pro especially: Are you guys getting weird noises when you use two-finger scroll with Safari? It's not like that in Firefox, but I get a fairly loud clicking noise that sounded sorta like a mousewheel scroll sound. Is that normal?

Nope. But it does sound familiar - I used to think I had something like that - never know what happened to it. It was intermittent and very quiet.
 
Is there a way to run Safari 4 Beta without Administrative privileges? I'm not allowed to install apps on my work computer and don't feel like bothering tech support.
 
Boards of Canada said:
Is there a way to run Safari 4 Beta without Administrative privileges? I'm not allowed to install apps on my work computer and don't feel like bothering tech support.

Try changing the install directory to something right off the C: drive. Like C:\safari\
 
The beta crashes a bit too often and doesn't seem to want to play nice with DivX videos, so I'm going back to Firefox for now.
 
How does Top Sites work? Because I browsed the Penny Arcade website for the first time in month (I've visited it like 1 or 2 times before, and it threw it in my Top Sites.
 
I am impressed, but am too rooted into FireFox and its many add-ons to switch back again. I rely too much on stuff I can't do in Safari. I can't even upgrade to Firefox 3.1 yet because Tab Mix Plus is still not working there. I do love the space saving tabs at top feature though. I wish FireFox did this. Safari 4 saves even more space than Chrome does. Wow.

Sean said:
It's not a movie, it's done entirely in CSS or something, to show off a new feature in Safari 4. Kinda neat.

http://www.apple.com/safari/welcome/
Shit! I fucking love WebKit. I wish every browser used it. No more of this bullshit different engine for every browser stuff. Just one engine to rule them all. If all browsers used the same engine, we wouldn't have to test sites in IE and Opera and FireFox and Safari just to make sure the hacks we busted our asses over work fine across platforms. FUCKING IDIOTS GET TOGETHER AND GET SOME STANDARDS FOR CHRIST'S SAKE! Sorry... for a minute there I lost myself. I'm too passionate about this stuff. I notice that page uses a new <audio> object to play the music on the page. I wonder how customizable and manipulat-able it is via JS...

WebKit rocks. And it makes a great game development platform. Check out this stuff in Safari or WebKit. Some of it will blow your mind. (Mind you a lot of them work in other browsers too, but with WebKit's super fast JavaScript it just seems logical to use that.)

http://games.nihilogic.dk/

Most notable:
A DOOM style engine using Canvas: http://games.nihilogic.dk/2009/02/canvex.html (Not bad for a start)

Who needs Windows when you have World of Solitaire: http://games.nihilogic.dk/2009/02/world-of-solitaire.html (Animation and everything with dozens of Solitaire game modes)

Super Mario Bros (The first two levels): http://games.nihilogic.dk/2009/02/super-mario-bros.html

Torus; a Tetris game wrapped around a circle: http://games.nihilogic.dk/2008/12/torus.html

Fuck Flash! JavaScript and CSS is the new hotness!
 
Man this browser is so nice, but the little problems just annoy the shit out of me. The history for example is fucking stupid, limited to the last 5 pages visited with the rest taken up by bookmarks. WTF are they doing there?

Is it so hard to just have a list of most recent visited pages not capped to some ridiculously small number?

With the right tweaks this could be one of the best browsers out there. As of now it needs some of Apples interface designers to wake the fuck up.
 
AndersTheSwede said:
Man this browser is so nice, but the little problems just annoy the shit out of me. The history for example is fucking stupid, limited to the last 5 pages visited with the rest taken up by bookmarks. WTF are they doing there?
Huh?
 
Liu Kang Baking A Pie said:

When I bring up history in the address bar (just typing www) it is segmented (good) into 3 categories. Top Hit (good), History (good, but limited to only 5 entries... wtf), and Bookmarks (WTF! are they doing here?)

I navigate using most visited history in all my browsers and to have it limited to only 5 entries is pretty pathetic especially when half the space is taken up by bookmarks that I didn't make. I rarely if ever use bookmarks.
 
AndersTheSwede said:
When I bring up history in the address bar (just typing www) it is segmented (good) into 3 categories. Top Hit (good), History (good, but limited to only 5 entries... wtf), and Bookmarks (WTF! are they doing here?)

I navigate using most visited history in all my browsers and to have it limited to only 5 entries is pretty pathetic especially when half the space is taken up by bookmarks that I didn't make. I rarely if ever use bookmarks.
Oh, I see. I can understand that. I turned up the amount of results in FF3.

I just use a bookmark bar. It's pretty much exactly what you're doing anyway except without typing.
 
CyberSearch in FireFox kicks anything Safari has up there in the ass sadly. One text box for everything is just too logical and smart. This is 2009 and we still need to have both a Location box AND a Search box? Not on my watch we don't!

Also, I have downloaded all the files used by that Welcome page so I can examine it line by line. There's some awesome shit in this thing. It's amazing. It has new <audio> and <video> tags for simple as hell embedding (WHY THE FUCK did it take this long to get video and audio embedded so simply? Why have we been relying on confusing bulky <embed> and <object> tags for 15 years?) as well as preloading and zooming and timing. It's amazing. And it's all in less than 400K. No video. No Flash. All through code.

As someone said, I too wish I were developing for the web 10 years from now. Shame a lot of this stuff can't even be used for real web site work.
 
Even when I make a bookmark (heresy) it doesn't show up with those listed in the address bar history... come on apple, I could care a rats ass about "Top Sites!" when I can't even control basic things like address bar history lists or opening all links in a new tab.

Just about everything else is fantastic. Nicely laid out, looks sharp, good font smoothing, fast as all hell, pretty stable for a beta, meh memory usage but whatever.

But I'm OCD about these little details as they're part of my browsing habits, not having them by default is one thing, but having no way to customize the browser to your specific habits makes it practically useless as an everyday app.
 
Jasoco said:
CyberSearch in FireFox kicks anything Safari has up there in the ass sadly. One text box for everything is just too logical and smart. This is 2009 and we still need to have both a Location box AND a Search box? Not on my watch we don't!

The one nice thing about having separate boxes is that if I type apple on my address bar, it looks first for apple.com, then goes through .net, .org etc. and then returns a not found page.
 
So I decided to download the Safari 4 beta and see how it is, and I'm liking it. The only other time I've used Safari is on my iPod Touch, and I'm liking it on my laptop. I've been using Opera but it's been going pretty slow recently so I think I may just switch to using Safari since it seems faster.
 
On the Top Sites thing:

You can drag web addresses from another window into the Top Sites window, and that will add them to the page. A little simpler than the other method I saw mentioned.

Also, anybody else getting little thumbnails when they do a Google search through Safari? I tried in on Firefox and Camino, and got nothing. Is this a new Safari thing, or am I missing something?
 
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