Apple Thanks WebKit Developers

[FaasNat]

I disagree, I think Safari is great. What are the specific reasons why you find it so poor? Just curious. It's all I use on my Mac, and Firefox on my PC - no mroe need for IE, I love it! 😀
[.....]

I think Safari is nice as well, but it could learn some things from Firefox. I like Firefox's ability to configure which sites are allowed to have popup windows and which don't, it's ability to block images from certain servers, the way it searches for words on the page, and its cookie management. I also like Google's googlebar implementation on Firefox much better than the Google search box in Safari.

 

[FaasNat]

maybe this will put to rest the accusations that apple neglects its open source community -- taking and never giving back?

I think the thought behind that complaint was that Apple wasn't contributing code back to the community.

 

[Stella]

I think Safari is nice as well, but it could learn some things from Firefox. I like Firefox's ability to configure which sites are allowed to have popup windows and which don't, it's ability to block images from certain servers, the way it searches for words on the page, and its cookie management. I also like Google's googlebar implementation on Firefox much better than the Google search box in Safari.

I too like that ability and wish Safari had this.

But Apple won't implement this in Safari.

Why?

Too complex ( for the below average capable user ).

 

[Stridder44]

Nice move Apple!


Reading this and the comments makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside

 

[manu chao]

This is subjective, but does Camino suck? 'Cause they were out well before safari.

It sucked back then because it crashed a lot. Now it's my browser of choice.

 

[aftk2]

Can't agree with that - Gecko ( that is Mozilla, Firefox etc ) based browers have always been good.

*cough* Netscape 6 Beta *cough*

Although I suppose that's not really fair.

 

[pinto32]

Once again, kudos to apple for showing thier thanks. Hopefully, they keep this up. I also wouldnt be surprised if those 5 developers that are going to WWDC end up on the Apple payroll in a few months...it looks like working on open source can be a route to a great job.

 

[Fender2112]

Pretty cool as long as Apple doesn't ship them with a 1099. 😀 That's always the down side of freebies.

 

[sehix]

For me, Safari blows because:

• Many websites take forEVER to render. NewEgg.com is a perfect example. Best Buy is another. Shopping at these sites with Safari is painful.

• 
  
  Newegg would probably come up faster if you tried http:// instead of htpp:// in your link.
  
  Seriously, there may be more of an issue with your ISP than with Safari itself; both sites pop up quickly, and navigation is unexceptional here, whether on an intel iMac, or a Mini.

 

[CubaTBird]

freakin' awesome.. apple is really pro open source as far as i can tell.. i belive steve even mentioned it at the mwsf 2003 keynote address if i am not mistaken? 😕 that was when safari had just debuted into beta form.

 

[bankshot]

Newegg would probably come up faster if you tried http:// instead of htpp:// in your link.

Uhh, what are you talking about? (fixed, thanks 😀)

Seriously, there may be more of an issue with your ISP than with Safari itself; both sites pop up quickly, and navigation is unexceptional here, whether on an intel iMac, or a Mini.

Nope. ISP is fine, and plenty of other sites with similar complexity load quite fast in Safari. I don't just mean it's slow, which could be more of a network issue than anything else. It takes a huge amount of CPU time to render these sites, resulting in a nice beachball while I wait for my page. At home I'm on a 733 MHz G4, and it's ridiculously slow - well over a minute burning full CPU to render a page with lots of stuff listed.

Just for fun, I did a little test on a dual 2.0 G5 here at work (Panther Server, Safari 1.2.4). Using the unix 'top' program, I watched total CPU usage as Safari loaded the main NewEgg page. It used 10 seconds of 2.0 GHz G5 CPU time. Not just 10 seconds real time, but 10 seconds CPU time. Firefox 1.5.0.1 takes 2.4 seconds on the same machine, and renders the page more correctly too. To be fair, I don't recall the same rendering bug on Safari 1.3 and up, but I don't have that in front of me right now.

This page, listing 100 items, is even worse. Safari took 22 seconds of CPU time to render it on the G5. Just imagine how slow it is on my G4! Firefox took 6 seconds on the G5.

Obviously these sites may have needless complexities in their HTML, since others with similar layouts render much faster on both browsers. Good thing Steve didn't use NewEgg or Best Buy to demonstrate how Safari on the Intel iMac is "instant." I'm sure it's fast, but nowhere near instant on these sites.

And yeah, the G4 was low end when I bought it 4 years ago, but it's still quite snappy for the vast majority of websites, so I wouldn't blame it on an old machine. All I'm saying is that Safari still has plenty of room for improvement. And with open source contributors continuing to refine kHTML and therefore WebKit, I'm hoping it'll get there. MacBooks as thanks won't hurt. (yay, finally back on the main topic here) 😉

 

[FaasNat]

[.....]

Too complex ( for the below average capable user ).

Well, this could be address by a toggle in the preferences. Much like how the tabbed browsing is disabled by default and needs to be turned on to be able to use it. Something like that....

 

[Fiveos22]

This page, listing 100 items, is even worse. Safari took 22 seconds of CPU time to render it on the G5. Just imagine how slow it is on my G4! Firefox took 6 seconds on the G5.

That page took me 22 seconds to load with FF on a windows machine (its not internet connection, unless a fibre connection to I2 is considered slow).

I think that it may just be a poorly coded page...but I dunno.

 

[Mr. Mister]

Too bad I've already switched to Firefox. 🙄

 

[Fireburst]

Safari has sure come a long way this last year. I prefer Safari to Firefox when on a Mac but use Firefox on PC's. The new version of IE is actually quite nice (I never thought I would say that!) so I may switch back to the dark side for when I am using a PC 😱