DrunkenBlog

Safari beta 0.67

Had this handed to me a few days ago, but just got around to installing and playing with it last night and noticed no weirdness so it's now became my standard. Sorry to hear about Apple closing the beta program, but it's understandable as really, I shouldn't have it, but I'm glad I do.

There are some cool things in this build of Safari that really make my day, namely:

• Noticeable speedups both in tabs, typing in forms and page loading
• Less "hiccups"
• There's an option now to have the tab bar always show: this is cool, as in the last release the page would resize vertically every time you added a tab, and OSX doesn't exactly excel at resizing, and when you went down to one page it resized back.
• Seems to be more stable with a lot of tabs open- I was having stability and redraw problems with the prior version with a bunch of tabs open
• There's an option now to have tabs open in the same window when a new page is requested by another app... very very cool for something like netnewswire.

There are a few things that still throw me with Safari, which are:

• The metal interface is a bit dichotic... You see this in a bunch of other iApps, such as iChat, but in Safari it really grates. What I'm talking about is the fact that while you have a metal interface, the whole thing isn't metal, just most of it. Open up the preferences window, and it's aqua. When you run out of space for tabs, the pop-up is aqua... etc. Just makes it feel dichotic and a bit hacked. This is more of a general UI issue on OSX though, I suppose.
• For the life of me I can't get autofill to work correctly, and wasn't able to in the last build either. I'm wondering if I'm doing something wrong in expecting it to work like other brothers- but I really need it to pick up user/passes to specific sites I have to go into many times a day. Just won't do it. Filling in information from the address book (name, email, etc) seems to work fine, but I can live without that.
• There still seems to be some intermitten weirdness with certain server/script combinations, such as movabletype. Using movabletype as an example, it seems to have gotten faster at displaying certain pages but some just don't work with this build, such as trying to upload an image.

I'm really excited by Safari, it is really shaping up. I wish Camino (a.k.a Chimera) still had the development speed of old in order to have some better competition.

w00t!

 Posted by drunkenbatman
    March 24, 2003, at 08:50 PM