Apple has announced Safari 3 beta for OS X and Windows. To make room for more important thoughts in my head, here’s the associated Brain Dump™.
- Updated version of WebKit. Nothing new to Omniweb 5.5 users, but my un-scientific perception is that it’s speedier. I think there will be some users complaining of ‘ugly form buttons’ though…
- Draggable Tabs. Yay!
- Inline Find, and very nicely implemented it is too. Yay!
- Resizable textareas, extra yay. Is this the only browser to do this by default?
- The Web Inspector is in there too. Not a patch on Firebug, but a welcome addition.
- Its wonderful looking at a website on XP, and seeing gorgeous text smoothing. Even the apps menu’s are smooth - presumably it’s using webkit to display the interface too?
- WebClips are conspicuous by their absence, but I’m assuming that this is a Leopard only feature.
- No session saving. I wasn’t really expecting it, but this does make Safari the only browser that doesn’t reopen your tabs inbetween launches. As some commenters have pointed out, you can ‘Reopen previous windows’ from the History menu, but sorry, there really needs to be a preference for this, so that the process is automatic.
- Looking at the preferences window in Windows is slightly scary. Like those PC-esque interfaces in early version of Firebird/Firefox for the Mac. I did feel that the interface should’ve been a better Windows Citizen.
- I wondered if installing this on Windows would make Lucide Grande available to the OS. It seems that like iTunes, it doesn’t and keeps it to itself. Shame, I really hoped it would available to IE, Firefox and Opera as well, although as Ben Darlow points out, it does look ropey when aliased!
- Also wondering if Apple will give a copy of the updated webkit to 10.4 users, in the same way they did for Panther users?
- The sizable textareas thing and smooth text rendering seem to be only new browser features to Windows users. Is that right? If you’re a Windows user, and have tried the Safari 3 beta, I’d love to know what you think: Does it make you want to switch over?
- Developing Javascript to work in Safari in the past has been a pain in the arse, so I would love to know from any Javascript developers whether the situation is improved in v3.
- I wonder if/when developers of Saft, SafariStand and Inquisitor will update their plugins for SF3? My money is on Hetima getting a SafariStand b18 out first. (Update: Inquisitor actually works fine! Also, SafariStand will work if you turn off ‘Enable Site Alteration’).
- I find the new interface too dark, but I use the Uno shade which for me is just right. To clarify: I’m referring to the screenshots of the Leopard version, which I find darker than the brushed metal. The UNO shade I find just right.