December 20th, 2012
Well, not really. This post is really about how Don Melton doesn’t remember how Safari got its name and how there are a lot of stories to tell you about later.
So, to whoever suggested the name “Safari,” thank you.
Though I’m a Chrome guy now (Safari is just far too slow) I too thank the person that came up with Safari rather than Freedom as the browser’s name.
December 25th, 2011
“Experian Hitwise has released its yearly search term statistics and once again, Facebook and YouTube top the list. The remainder of the top 10 includes three more Facebook-related terms, a couple of Yahoo! variants, craigslist, eBay, and MapQuest. Of course it’s highly unlikely that all the millions of people putting those terms in the top 10 are actually looking for information or the latest news about them; they just want a quick way to the site without having to clumsily type dots and slashes.”
The fact that people do this boggles my mind. I remember the first time I saw it – when I was doing support for a local ISP as one of my first jobs in IT – someone searched for Google.com using the Yahoo search field. I nearly fell to the ground. I asked them why they searched for Google.com instead of just typing it into the location bar. They said “What’s the difference?”
I agree with Parish that people aren’t searching for information about Facebook, Youtube, etc. They are, in fact, using search as the location bar. But I disagree that people are doing it as a way to get away from the confusing “dots and slashes”. I’ve seen people type in “.com”. They simply do not know the difference between the search field and the location field.
Think about it. Most modern-day web browsers combine the location and search fields. Safari doesn’t but it only maintains a small marketshare. Internet Explorer, Chrome, and Firefox combine the search and location fields into one field that you can type just about anything in and the browser will figure out what you are looking for. So, are they searching for information about Facebook when they type in Facebook? Or are they simply hitting ‘Enter’ too quickly and they really want to navigate to that URL?
I’m sure extensive user testing would be needed to determine the plethora of habits of people; novice and expert alike. One thing is sure, the browsers should be doing a much better job of taking people to web pages instead of search results in different situations. But, why would they? They make their money on searches too.
October 27th, 2011
Great tip. To restore a recently closed tab on iPad just hold down the new tab + button to see a list.
iOS 5 and up only.
/via Shawn Blanc.
September 8th, 2011
Footnotify is a great extension for Safari or Chrome that enhances the default way these browsers handle footnotes. I’ve been using it for a week and I can’t imagine not having it now.
July 25th, 2011
Interesting read: The History of Webkit by Zach LeBar.
March 23rd, 2011
You know that feeling you get when two of your friends ask you to do something different on the same day? That feeling in your stomach when you don’t know which one to let down? You sit there agonizing over the choice between two friends, two things great things to do!
Firefox 4 was released today and once again I’m made to feel this same nauseating feeling. Every single time a new Browser is released, well Safari, Chrome, or Firefox (we’ll leave Internet Explorer, Opera and others out of this), I’m torn between making the jump from one browser to the other.
I’ve jumped around a lot over the years. And it always comes back to one thing that determines whether or not I use a Browser every day; speed. I don’t use many extensions, themes, or add-ons in any Browser. I had used Safari before it even supported such things. Speed, however, keeps me loyal to a Browser until – inevitably – the next-fastest Browser released pulls me away.
On the outset Firefox 4 feels very snappy. Just about as fast as Chrome (if not faster) and a lot faster than Safari. Chrome and Firefox 4 are now neck-and-neck for winning my default Browser of choice. But that’s today and I’m sure that won’t last long and, once again, I’ll be left with the nauseating choice of jumping ship.
November 15th, 2010
Usually when there is a war there is a winner and a loser and a lot of casualties in between. It would seem that in the browser wars there is no clear winner, no clear loser, and the bodies are piling up. With no end in sight.
Here are the statistics for the last 30 days here on my personal site. Internet Explorer is still #1 in spite of every single geek on the planet wanting it to simply go away. But it isn’t winning by much. Firefox and Safari are pretty close behind and Chrome is catching up quickly.
The Safari number includes both iPhone and iPad as well as the Macintosh and Windows. The Mac and iPhone split up the biggest portion of this with Windows and iPad nearly tying.
Interestingly, if you combine Chrome and Safari, which both run the Webkit rendering engine, then Webkit clearly stands out as the #1 rendering engine for all HTML/JS on my site.
So it looks like it is Internet Explorer vs. Webkit – at this point – as being the two main contenders in this war. Firefox, which is doing very very well on its own, is beginning to show signs of lagging behind both Safari and Chrome in their growth rates. This could all change in one day with one killer update from Mozilla – but I’m not holding my breath.
So why do I say that there are ton of casualties in this war? Because the people who spend all of their time building websites and applications have more browsers to build against than ever before, not less. More screens, more devices means more problems. Choice for the end user means headaches for the builders.
This problem probably won’t go away even if every browser manufacturer united under the banner of Webkit. If they did the spirit and motivation of competition would be gone – leaving only the end-user to suffer from lack of progress.
It appears that this war is not going to end and the bodies will continue to pile.
May 10th, 2010
So Chrome is faster than Safari again. Not one month ago I said:
“I’m back to Safari. I still love Chrome but Safari’s latest update made it edge out Chrome for speed. Speed, it seems, is the killer feature for me in Web browsers.”
It seems I’m going to follow the speed and it turns out that Chrome is faster than lightning. I’m glad to be back on Chrome as Safari’s address bar is, as Jonathan Christopher put it, annoying but I will miss the Top Sites screen and visual history search.
April 12th, 2010
I’m back to Safari. I still love Chrome but Safari’s latest update made it edge out Chrome for speed. Speed, it seems, is the killer feature for me in Web browsers.
Until this latest release the Top Sites page in Safari was too slow for me to find useful. Now, however, it is much faster and I’m liking it very much. I liked Chrome’s New Tab page a lot. However, unlike Safari it wasn’t really all that useful for more than giving you a clickable tile to go to your favorite sites. Safari’s Top Sites page does a bit more.
First, it shows a ‘page-curl white star on blue’ icon to show which pages have been updated since you visited them last. This makes is quick and easy to go to the pages that have been updated rather than checking them yourself. Second, Safari allows you to choose how many sites show up on this page. Chrome does not. Depending on your screen size you can choose between Small, Medium and Large tiles for each site. Small is more, large is less.
Third, but not necessarily specific to the Top Sites page, Safari allows you to search your history in a visual way right from the Top Sites page itself. As you type in your search query a coverflow like window shows you a thumbnail of the Web sites that match it. It makes finding pages you’ve been to in the past much, much easier than in Chrome.
So, for now I’m back to Safari.
My Top Sites in Safari are (from left to right and down) this site, my WordPress admin, Twitter (although I rarely use this because I use Echofon so it may be replaced soon), Facebook, Gmail, Instapaper, Tumblr, 37Signals Launchpad, Flickr, Viddler’s Recently Uploaded page, GitHub and Google Reader.
January 4th, 2010
According to Mashable (via Net Applications via The Apple Blog) Chrome has surpassed Safari for third place among browsers in terms of market share. I’m as big an Apple fan as anyone but this is pretty well deserved on speed alone.
October 30th, 2009
I’m a big fan of Webkit. Although I had been a die hard fan of Safari for a while I’m now using Google Chrome as my primary browser. The great thing about Chrome is that it too uses the Webkit rendering engine. I’ll catalog my reasons for using Chrome in another post.
The next version of Webkit that will be released will come with a new version of the Web Inspector, a tool used by Web developers to “inspect” an already-loaded Web page for debugging, testing, etc., that has some really great new features thanks in part to Joseph Pecoraro.
I love that I can choose either Safari or Chrome and I will still benefit from this update.
August 5th, 2009
I’ve been playing with recent developer preview releases of Google Chrome for Mac and I got to thinking about how important it is for Google to get the Mac version of Chrome right. Not for Google, really. For us, the users.
As it stands Safari is far and away the best browser available on the Macintosh. Firefox, which is a really solid browser and is much loved by many developers, just isn’t “Mac enough” for us real, devout Mac users. There are so many things missing when an application is not built as a native Macintosh application. Simple things, really. Being able to look up things from the built-in Mac OS X dictionary is one thing. Native spell check. Speed! These are simple things, since Firefox handles some of these things on its own, but once you’ve grown accustomed how real, native Mac applications feel – you want that from all applications on your Mac. Opera and Camino, both very respectable browsers, just are not as lean and mean as Safari is. The are other browsers, to be sure, but none that are backed by corporations with enough resources, or an active enough development community, to really push for the top-spot on the Mac.
Which is why it’d be great for a really, really good browser to emerge on the Macintosh to rival Safari. Both Safari and the Webkit teams are on a tear lately. They have made tremendous strides towards making Safari better and Webkit (along with Squirelfish which is now called Nitro) much, much faster. They’ve improved Webkit’s page rendering (or, how it displays the page based on open standards) to such a degree that it is the envy of all other engines. But, they could do better.
For example, Chrome renders pages faster than Safari. I don’t need a fancy graph or test to show me this – I’ve loaded pages on my Macbook Pro using Chrome and the speed at which the page becomes usable is hands-down much, much faster in Chrome than in Safari (and Safari is fast).
For example, Firefox has add-ons which enhance the features of the core browser. There are add-ons for everything like plugging into your favorite Web sites, aggregating content, security and privacy enhancements, music, calendaring, etc. etc. etc. All optional, based on your needs/wants. Chrome will also support extensions, which are similar to add-ons, that will use open standards (this excites me very, very much).
Competition. That is what it comes down to. Not just competition based on marketing or market share or even mindshare – but an all-out race to be the best. The unequivocal best even if you’re not the biggest. If Google Chrome for Mac is released and is only marginally better than the developer preview releases I’ve been using – the people that are responsible for making Safari will need to trot a little quicker to keep up with where Google is going.
Hooray for us.
I’d be tempted to use the developer preview releases of Google Chrome for Mac full time but there are a few key things that are ultimately missing from the application that are vital to my daily browsing needs. Here they are, in case you’re wondering:
That’s really about it. If I had these things I could probably make the jump to do some real testing of Google Chrome for Mac. For now, I’ll stick with the best browser available for the Mac, Safari.
July 16th, 2009
Keyboard shortcuts, both for the browser itself and for Web sites that take advantage of them, can be extremely powerful. Google Reader set the precedent for keyboard shortcuts by working through a stream of information using J to advance and K to move backward through the stream. The Big Picture, Ffffound, and now Tumblr’s Dashboard all follow this convention.
Glims, a plugin (read: input manager hack) for Safari, enables a lot of preferences around searching that Safari simply doesn’t have built-in. I originally installed it because I wanted to play around with Bing, Microsoft’s latest version of their search efforts. However, it came with a caveat that I can’t seem to find a solution to no matter what combination of preferences I choose. Keyboard shortcuts, such as those found in Google Reader, do not work when I have Glims installed.
So, I’ve uninstalled Glims – for now. The benefits of keyboard shortcuts in my most used Web applications outweigh those of trying out other search engines besides Google. I’ll be watching Glims for an update.
June 17th, 2009
After reading this review by Pierre Igot I gave Safari 4′s full-page zoom feature a spin. It is incredibly impressive. I wish the browser wars were not such a tight race right now so that choosing a browser wouldn’t be such a hard decision. (via John Gruber)
March 24th, 2009
Glims for Safari is a input-manager hack (I think) that enables a few ‘nice to have’ features. First, it adds favicons to tabs. I am not sure about you, but the new tabs (when you have a lot of them) are really hard to tell one from another. This helps. It also does things like add thumbnails to search results and makes the search history/recommendations look like Inquisitor a bit.
I might give this a spin.
Source: Glims for Safari.
Via: Shaun Inman.
February 26th, 2009
Nearly every browser has “hidden” preferences. Options that you can set by running a command, editing a file, or changing an entry here or there. The Safari 4 Beta, which has only been out for a few days, is no different.
Caius, of Random Genius, recently published some of these hidden preferences including:
I am not sure why you’d want to change some of these preferences (as I feel they are some of the best features of the new version of Safari), but they are there, you can if you want, and Caius shows you how.
Source:Â Safari 4 Hidden Preferences.
September 4th, 2008
Google’s Chrome, the new Web browser by Google, has been getting a lot of attention because of its simple approach to browsing the Web. Â But there is more here than meets the eye. It is all about the approach.
The new application has its flaws, for sure, but what it gets wrong it makes up for in what it gets right. Â Google has long been an advocate of speed. Â ”Speed is a feature.” Â Many other browser manufacturers, namely Apple, Microsoft, and Mozilla, have continuously strived to push the needle on speed, faster page loading time, and overall memory usage of their software products. They’ve done this while also trying to jam more features into the browser. Â What they’ve ultimately failed to do though, is what Google succeeded at; removing the application from the application.
Google’s approach here is interesting. Â This is the first real step towards making the Web the application, and the browser just the “thing” that loads it into view. Â Over on Daring Fireball John Gruber quoted this bit, which I find really interesting:
“In the long term, we think of Chromium as a tabbed window manager or shell for the web rather than a browser application. We avoid putting things into our UI in the same way you would hope that Apple and Microsoft would avoid putting things into the standard window frames of applications on their operating systems.”
You know how the iPhone or iPod touch loads web applications with nearly no UI unless you scroll up? Â That is sort of the approach that Google Chrome is taking. Â Just render the page in an insanely fast and stable way – that is the goal.
Is Google Chrome a “Single Site Browser” the way the next version of Safari is going to be or the way that Fluid already is? Â Sort of. Â In the “Page control” menu (not sure I like that name either) there is an option to “Create application short cuts”. Â You can install these shortcuts on your Desktop, Start Menu, and Quick Launch bar. Â Personally I think it would have been neat if they automatically asked to setup Gmail, Google Reader, Calendar, etc. when I installed – but everyone knows that they would have caught some serious heat for that if they did. Â For those of us liking the SSB experience, Google Chrome works.
It is tough to say what Google Chrome “gets wrong”. Â I’ve seen reports of various rendering problems, but I don’t think that is something Chrome got wrong. Â That is fairly easily fixed in the next version so long as they iron out their use of Webkit.
To sum up; the approach Google is taking here is refreshing. Â Clean, simple, and fast. A feature for feature comparison of Google Chrome against any browser would not be a fair way to gauge its affect on the marketplace. Â Time will tell.
Now, when they release a Macintosh version, then I’ll really kick the tires.
July 1st, 2008
Aaron Brazell, who has done just about as much development on top of WordPress as anyone I’ve ever met, likes to break down each release of WordPress just prior to its release with these lists of things you should know about it.
It is obvious that Aaron knows WordPress down to its very core, including even the unused code, and that makes him perfectly suited for these types of updates. Â He probably does research on each release before it comes out because his previous job position at b5media demanded that he know what was coming on the platform. Â He still uses WordPress on a daily basis as he is the cofounder and lead editor for Technosailor on which this article is written.
These lists are extremely useful to those that do not have the expertise nor the time to focus on what is coming in each release of WordPress before they are released.
A note about WordPress 2.6: This, like 2.5, is an excellent release and I’m really looking forward to it.  I’m hoping that Apple updates to a version of Safari that Google Gears can run on, since Google has said it runs in the latest Webkit nightlies, soon since I won’t be able to use the Gears integration with WordPress until they do.
Source: Technosailor:Â 10 Things You Need to Know About WordPress 2.6.
June 18th, 2008
It is a race that has an end at 0.00. Well, not really. But you’d have to think that the speed at which a browser can render a certain amount of HTML, JavaScript, and CSS (the bits that make up every Web page on the Internet) has to have a floor. Meaning, at some point a browser’s ability to render a page simply will not be able to get any faster.
But we haven’t seen that floor yet.
Downloading Firefox 3 today I have experienced, what I feel, is the quickest page rendering experience I’ve had on the Macintosh since, well, downloading the latest version of Safari. Before that I thought Camino was the quickest at rendering a page on my Mac. Just prior to that, it was Safari. And, according to Ariya Hidayat tests, it seems like when the next version of Safari is released to the public it will again hold the top spot in this rendering speed war that is being waged.
Granted the tests Ariya ran on a recent nightly build of Webkit, the rendering engine beneath the Safari browser, are dedicated to Webkit’s ability to parse through JavaScript only (leaving out the all important HTML and CSS rendering speed capabilities) – but one can assume that Safari will feel much snappier when the next update is release.
So, the beat goes on and on and on. Rendering speeds in these browsers are going to continue to get better until they reach some sort of limit. I suppose the limit could be considered “virtually instantaneous” but I wonder how long it will be until we see that.
When does it end?
April 10th, 2008
A few of my geekiest and most nit-pickiest brain cells just exploded. After reading about Safari’s odd tab dragging behavior, on two different Web sites on the same day, I am not sure I can take much more.
Both Pierre Igot and John Gruber cover this topic in great detail; the fact that the first user interaction with Safari’s tabs while dragging ultimately determine their ability to either reorder the tab and/or open a new window/tab. But that’s generalizing it far too much.
If you’re an anal Safari nut, like me, I suggest you read both of their articles.
Source: Safari 3.0: Dragging tabs up or down to move them sideways.
Secondary, source: Safari’s Tab Dragging Modes.