Apple Releases Safari 3.1

[coolsoldier]

v3.1 is noticeably faster than Safari 3.0 for me, but slower than Firefox 3.

Of course, I don't really care about the speed vs. Firefox until Firefox can display inline PDFs. As long as Safari is the only browser with PDF support, its the only browser that matters.

 

[parapup]

Yeah, but how does it fare versus Webkit nightly?

WebKit nightly is slightly better than Safari 3.1 - 4234.0ms which is still significantly slower than FF3 nightly.

 

[xUKHCx]

WebKit nightly is slightly better than Safari 3.1 - 4234.0ms which is still significantly slower than FF3 nightly.

Webkit nightly is a lot faster than Safari 3.1 and only slightly slower than Firefox nightly

 

[parapup]

Webkit nightly is a lot faster than Safari 3.1 and only slightly slower than Firefox nightly

To be completely fair -

FF3 3832 ---------------------------- 0
SF31 4400 --------------------------- +568 from baseline FF3
SF3.1-WkNN is 4234 ----------------- +402 from baseline FF3

So what I said is correct - SF3.1-WkNN is slightly better than SF3.1 (568 - 402 = 166ms ) and significantly slower than FF3 (402ms).

Of course the slightly and significantly are relative - in practice the differences hardly matter.

 

[compuguy1088]

Well, that's just silly. Whatever next?

View attachment 108382

Also: why does it ask me for confirmation when I change my home
page? I mean, there's a trillion gazillion other options, and it doesn't
ask me when I change those.

You know, it starts like this, innocent enough. But mark my words.
The day will come when you can't open a door without some bloke
asking you if you are sure. Of course I'm blinkin' sure. I'm not stark
raving mad, you know.

This kind of reminds me of Vista's UAC, and that Apple ad that poked fun at how annoying the prompts are (they have been reduced with sp1).

 

[xUKHCx]

To be completely fair -

FF3 3832 ---------------------------- 0
SF31 4400 --------------------------- +568 from baseline FF3
SF3.1-WkNN is 4234 ----------------- +402 from baseline FF3

So what I said is correct - SF3.1-WkNN is slightly better than SF3.1 (568 - 402 = 166ms ) and significantly slower than FF3 (402ms).

I take it those numbers are from sunspider test.

Hmm because that is not what I am seeing, just ran all the tests again (all latest nightlies) and got:


FF nightly 3258.8
Webkit nightly 3393.8 (or +135ms 4% but could be as low as 1%)
Safari 3499.8 (or +241ms/7% or +106ms )
Firefox for me has consistently had a large error over the last 2ish weeks which suggests that it might be fast but also stalls sometimes.

So what I said is correct.

Of course the slightly and significantly are relative - in practice the differences hardly matter.

What to see the difference, run this test

 

[HLdan]

Any Firefox 3 lovers out their sing all your praise if you want but I just downloaded Firefox 3 on my newly reformatted Intel iMac and it crashed twice within 5 minutes. How can one praise a beta product so well, at least Safari is stable.

 

[parapup]

Any Firefox 3 lovers out their sing all your praise if you want but I just downloaded Firefox 3 on my newly reformatted Intel iMac and it crashed twice within 5 minutes. How can one praise a beta product so well, at least Safari is stable.

I am running FF3 nightlies for some time now - both Mac and Windows and with heavy surfing. No crashes whatsoever. You are just not loving it enough - take your eyes away from Safari and retry

 

[HLdan]

I am running FF3 nightlies for some time now - both Mac and Windows and with heavy surfing. No crashes whatsoever. You are just not loving it enough - take your eyes away from Safari and retry

LOL, I will, I'm giving it a chance, I sorta like the new Safari-like interface.

 

[parapup]

I take it those numbers are from sunspider test.

Hmm because that is not what I am seeing, just ran all the tests again (all latest nightlies) and got:

No - that's because you are running FF3 nightly on Mac which does not have the PGO optimizations enabled - run the tests on Windows and see for yourself.

 

[xUKHCx]

No - that's because you are running FF3 nightly on Mac which does not have the PGO optimizations enabled - run the tests on Windows and see for yourself.

But if it isn't enabled on the mac then why bother, especially if I use OS X 90% of the time. Therefore it is what I have to use and is a fair test of how FF compares to Safari/Webkit on OS X.

Any Firefox 3 lovers out their sing all your praise if you want but I just downloaded Firefox 3 on my newly reformatted Intel iMac and it crashed twice within 5 minutes. How can one praise a beta product so well, at least Safari is stable.

I am running FF3 nightlies for some time now - both Mac and Windows and with heavy surfing. No crashes whatsoever. You are just not loving it enough - take your eyes away from Safari and retry

I have also been running FF nightlies for some time and webkit too and they are both very stable.

 

[parapup]

But if it isn't enabled on the mac then why bother, especially if I use OS X 90% of the time. Therefore it is what I have to use and is a fair test of how FF compares to Safari/Webkit on OS X.

But it will be enabled on the Mac - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=419348 soon. When FF3 is released it will most likely use the PGO benefit on all the major platforms - Win/Mac/Lin.

 

[fly75]

Windows Safari doesn't even load Apple's home page for me.

 

[xUKHCx]

But it will be enabled on the Mac - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=419348 soon. When FF3 is released it will most likely use the PGO benefit on all the major platforms - Win/Mac/Lin.

Well then we are back to

Of course the slightly and significantly are relative - in practice the differences hardly matter.

 

[parapup]

Well then we are back to

Yeah - show me Adblock plus for Safari and then you win

 

[TCM333]

Safari is seriously snappier!!!!

 

[xUKHCx]

Yeah - show me Adblock plus for Safari and then you win

This could go on and on and you can name every firefox extension under the sun and probably win. However note I having been switching to firefox over the last month or so, the benefits of extensions seemed great a first but slowly wared off. This will change when they are all compatible again. Also note that there are many things that Safari is better at than firefox, dictionary, os integration, interface etc.

I come back to webkit because it doesn't seem as clunky as Firefox, so much faster to start up and also I use the zoom button quite a lot and firefox full screen = no thanks.

In regards to your point about ads, the websites I visit don't really have ads.

Comes down to personal preferences/usage.

Also if you want to say which is better (without ad-ons) then we can go back to various tests such as acid 3.

 

[Mindcrime]

Anyone else having problems with iTunes' built-in browser after Safari upgrade?

I just posted this over at the Apple Discussion forums, was wondering if anyone here has run into the same issue or not:

I upgraded to 3.1 on two different computers - a 1.83 ghz intel iMac and a 1.0 ghz G4 Powerbook, and in both cases I'm getting the exact same kind of problems with the iTunes store (or the built-in iTunes web browser, if you will) - tons of broken image links, pages not loading correctly, missing CSS, no sound when watching movie trailers, music previews don't even begin to stream, etc.

After I installed, I did a Repair Permissions and rebooted. I also cleared my caches and after a couple more reboots I am still seeing this problem.

 

[Quillz]

Just installed it. Doesn't strike me as all that different/faster.

 

[NickCatal]

Whats the Link for the Nightly Builds?

It is not called 'Firefox' it is called 'Minefield', it will break a lot of your current plugins (although probably not all that much more than B4 did) and it will import everything from your existing firefox profiles, and moving back to a 2.x build is going to be a pain for you, so back that up

http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/contrib/latest-trunk/ << click on the .dmg , obviously

And I have the nightly builds of Webkit on my machine too, and I find that both are speedy.

 

[The Monkey]

Just installed it. Doesn't strike me as all that different/faster.

Agreed. Non-event.

 

[dvd]

Yeah - show me Adblock plus for Safari and then you win

SafariBlock 2.1

 

[Detektiv-Pinky]

v3.1 is noticeably faster than Safari 3.0 for me, but slower than Firefox 3.

Of course, I don't really care about the speed vs. Firefox until Firefox can display inline PDFs. As long as Safari is the only browser with PDF support, its the only browser that matters.

My biggest complaint about the speediness of Safari is the fact that it ALWAYS reloads the complete page even if I am just returning to it after I had (briefly) followed up on some article.
If this is a very graphically intense site, such as www.spiegel.de it usually takes a while for the whole page to build up (even if it fast) and this is really annoying if I am just skimming some headlines.

Other browsers cache the page and bring me right back to the place i had visited.

 

[MagnusVonMagnum]

I agree this update is still way below Firefox 3 beta 4 in terms of performance.
Again why did Apple choose Webkit opposed to Gecko?
FF for the win!

Perhaps because Webkit is multi-threaded (I get multiple threads here anyway) and Gecko is not and probably never will be (based on comments from the Firefox folks)? The lack of multi-threading is going to kill Firefox in the long haul (i.e. dual-core = multi-threaded needed for maximum efficiency plus multiple threads ensures a mis-behaving javascript page won't bring your browser, if not your machine to a crawl).

Beyond that matter, yes, Firefox 3 beta 4 is pretty nice. I stopped using Safari the minute I tried the beta 4 (because of the plugin system, which is still extremely useful, although many of mine are broken in Firefox 3 from Firefox 2 as are several themes. I miss Noia 2.0 Extreme already, although the default FF3 theme isn't bad; it looks similar to Safari).

 

[slb]

I agree this update is still way below Firefox 3 beta 4 in terms of performance.
Again why did Apple choose Webkit opposed to Gecko?
FF for the win!

Because Gecko is a mess of spaghetti code compared to KHTML, which was cleaner and faster to work with. Firefox 3 beta is not faster than this new version of Safari in my experience. Firefox was good once upon a time.