Apple’s new web browser Safari, is mentioned on a zillion sites, here’s what I’ve got to say.
One issue people bring up is that Apple choose to use KHTML rather than Gecko. Personally I’d rather have seen Gecko used, but I’m assuming Apple went with KHTML because it was much smaller. Smaller in the size of the code, and smaller in the number of developers. In this case anyway, smaller equals faster. (That’s my thought. Read into it what you will about how Apple handles it’s open source relations.)
Apple wanted a fast browser, especially after that hoo-ha last year with the reports that web browsing on new iMacs was slow, slow, slow…
Look, Mac OS X is slow in certain ways. I think we all know that. It’s a price I’m willing to pay. That’s coming from someone who daily uses a 400mhz G4 though, you 1ghz Mac owners with 1 gig of RAM might not agree. Well, you probably do agree, but won’t admit it.
Mozilla on Mac OS X? Well, on the Mac I use at work, it’s slow. As I said, that’s ok. I can live with it. I’m hooked on Mozilla’s features. Tabbed browsing is a must. I just can’t use a browser for anything more than testing unless it’s got tabbed browsing. I know Chimera does, and Mac people seem to like it, but I need Mail and News, since I don’t ever want to launch Classic, especially just to use Outlook. Add that to the fact that on occasion I use Windows or Linux, and I really prefer to use the same browser, with the same features everywhere… Mozilla is a geek’s web browser, a web developer’s web browser, while Safari is a consumer’s web browser, just like Netscape’s browser.
Now, Safari is still beta, and it looks like Apple wants feedback, and oh boy are they getting it. The blogosphere (note, this is most likely the first time I’ve used the term ‘blogosphere’ I apologize for that) is in full effect. I’m guessing there’s a team at Apple reading a zillion weblogs today. Well, I’m hoping there is. I’ve got (some) faith in Apple to try to do the right thing, and be a good web browsing verdor-citizen, and get Safari up to snuff with respect to standards and the like. If you’ve been following Apple for the past few years, you know this is how they work. Release something, get feedback, respond to some of the feedback with some changes, and release again. It’s an infinite loop.
Side note: This site looks OK in Safari, which isn’t a huge surprise, as it looked OK in Konqueror, and I’m not pushing the XHTML or CSS to the extreme as some people are…