New Safari Seeds Continue Performance Improvements, Bug Fixes

[Compile 'em all]

How many times snappier will it be?

As per one slashdot comment:
The Safari performance improvements are coming in Safari 3.1, not yet available to the public. To see them today, you have to be running current WebKit nightlies. The difference between the new WebKit builds and vanilla Safari 3.0.4 is pretty dramatic.

 

[James17]

Safari is a great browser, however, it does have severe memory leak issues. I agree with the person who said they think it's the Adobe Flash Plugin because last night I watched a tech show on the companies website using flash player and Safari was using 500Mb RAM. This isn't the first time it's used this much.

 

[wonderkid]

Some stability fixes would be welcome!

On Tiger and now Leopard (on my 2GB Macbook Black), Safari is the most unstable and unreliable application I have ever used. a) It crashes approx 3 times a day b) Since upgrading to Leopard, it fails to login to certain sites reliably, Yahoo Mail included. c) Generally has problems with sites that include overly complex Javascript. Safari offers excellent usability, however, am tempted to switch permanently to Firefox if Apple don't sort out this mainstay of the web lifestyle within the next few weeks. Phwah phwah, hand me a cigar...

 

[djellison]

I had DREADFULL problems with Safari - half a dozen crashes per day, all sorts of trouble.

I had an MB, and had upgraded the HDD twice, doing a migrate assistant upgrade each time. I did the same moving to an MBP, and the problems remained.

I did a reinstall and didn't migrate - I copied stuff across manually - and Safari is now a lot LOT better than it ever was. Much more stable.

I think Safari's main problem is probably Flash to be honest. Adobe need to sort out the flash implementation on OSX. YouTube will send my MBP into a screaming high-fan-speed fury. On an old 1.1 Ghz cheap PC laptop, Youtube didn't even turn the fans up one notch.

Doug

 

[Wayfarer]

Safari is the worst software on OS X next to the finder.

It needs a lot of love..

Malicious lies!

I'm perfectly content with my Safari on Leopard. Crashes are few and far between for me.

 

[wakerider017]

Perfectly content?

It doesn't freaking work with ebay.com or fedex.com! And it is buggy with gmail.com

How the heck am I supposed to get anything sold? Those are major important websites to a lot of people.

Edit: Oh ya and flash is a problem!

 

[huwemajor]

Perfectly content?

It doesn't freaking work with ebay.com or fedex.com! And it is buggy with gmail.com

How the heck am I supposed to get anything sold? Those are major important websites to a lot of people.

I couldn't agree more. It is such a pain when trying to buy items on ebay when safari tells you it cant load the page. I end up refreshing about 20 times before it will display a page, which usually means i've been out bid and the auction has ended.

So frustrating!

 

[DaBrain]

I couldn't agree more. It is such a pain when trying to buy items on ebay when safari tells you it cant load the page. I end up refreshing about 20 times before it will display a page, which usually means i've been out bid and the auction has ended.

So frustrating!

Some other issues I would really like to see addressed are:

1) Give me the opportunity to increase the font size in bookmarks. Some of us don't have 20/10 vision! I never understood why one can't do this easily without any other software.

2) Fix the centering of pages rendered. Many sites I go to are off set to the right and it really looks like crap. This happens a lot when I choose a larger text view.

3) Make Safari compatible with Ebay and other key sites.

4) Fix when one chooses another tab that it actually does open another tab and NOT another separate Safari window. Even though I have the prefs set right, many times this happens and it's annoying.

Overall I use safari 95% of the time and would love to see these and other improvements.

 

[pounce]

I couldn't agree more. It is such a pain when trying to buy items on ebay when safari tells you it cant load the page. I end up refreshing about 20 times before it will display a page, which usually means i've been out bid and the auction has ended.

So frustrating!

yeah, same here. it totally sucks. i've been seeing some safari crashes recently. a stable build would be welcome.

 

[Cheffy Dave]

thats handy, but doesnt really effect me.. yet..

i get my mac on thursday!!!

Me too, my first, I am excited as well

 

[clevin]

whats with hate towards safari?

Safari starts up WAY WAY faster then firefox, and safari loads pages just as fast, or in some cass faster then firefox.

In features department all firefox has over safari is plugins and skins. But i can live without those, so why all the hate against safari? i use it every day.

safari reading history of some websites is dog slow, and i see no improvement in recent webkit

in features dept. firefox has over safari is plugins (extensions) and skins? please. just compare the features out of box. no extensions involved, firefox is still miles ahead of safari.

single window mode?
advanced tab functions?
find as you type?
save downloaded files to different folders?
remember multiple passwords/username for same page?
full-page zoom?
cross-tab drag and drop of elements?
pop-up blocker whitelist?
anti-phishing protection?
EV support?
keyboard navigation (press F7)?
url bar search auto find your most visited/fav site?
one-click bookmarking?
download search?

and why? when extensions and themes are officially supported and promoted by firefox, you think it deserve no emphasis?

As per one slashdot comment:
The Safari performance improvements are coming in Safari 3.1, not yet available to the public. To see them today, you have to be running current WebKit nightlies. The difference between the new WebKit builds and vanilla Safari 3.0.4 is pretty dramatic.

if you believe /. then there are some others there too..lol

be cautious about expectations of safari 3.1, javascript improvement is drastic, but don't equal that to the whole experience. its only a .1 update for a reason.

 

[sblasl]

How many of these features are actually used?

safari reading history of some websites is dog slow, and i see no improvement in recent webkit

in features dept. firefox has over safari is plugins (extensions) and skins? please. just compare the features out of box. no extensions involved, firefox is still miles ahead of safari.

single window mode?
advanced tab functions?
find as you type?
save downloaded files to different folders?
remember multiple passwords/username for same page?
full-page zoom?
cross-tab drag and drop of elements?
pop-up blocker whitelist?
anti-phishing protection?
EV support?
keyboard navigation (press F7)?
url bar search auto find your most visited/fav site?
one-click bookmarking?
download search?

and why? when extensions and themes are officially supported and promoted by firefox, you think it deserve no emphasis?



if you believe /. then there are some others there too..lol

be cautious about expectations of safari 3.1, javascript improvement is drastic, but don't equal that to the whole experience. its only a .1 update for a reason.

 

[Dreamer2go]

sigh
I wish they improve safari's tab browing...

really would like CMD+1, CMD+2, CMD+3 to be the fast switch browse function.....instead of the stupid "quick bookmarks"

 

[kaiwai]

Saft is your friend. Totally worth $12.

Also, Safari is rock solid for me as well. In fact, it runs the best out of any browser on my PB.

Interesting, looking at the signature: "Help stop children from viewing internet pornography." - have you ever thought of doing your job of being a parent and stopping your own kids before you start being a parent to the world?

Damn socialists, they never know when to quit.

 

[clevin]

How many of these features are actually used?

huh, now we switch topic? okay

I am not interested in braggng about functions that have no practical meanings. I can only speak for myself.

Since I made the list in 2 minutes, you can be sure I use them all the time.

or, just tell me which one do you think is useless, and we can leave it there for other people to read and evaluate themselves

 

[Bubba Satori]

People need to stop saying this.

 

[snakedoctor]

I completely disagree on that! Safari is an ok browser and apple "fixed" finder in Leopard. By far the worst software on OSX is iTunes! It looks old, has horrid UI and is very unstable. When will apple let up have WMP 11 for the mac. IT JUST WORKS BETTER...

You have got to be joking. WMP 11 is a horid product. iTunes is so much cleaner and easier to use for people. Unstable????? iTunes has NEVER had any problems on my Mac...NEVER. It just runs.

Safari is fast, but it seriously lacks a lot of little things. Just a few things that every other browser has, like a sidebar for history or bookmarks, sorting bookmarks, an option to allow a single click to highlight the URL and search bars. The phishing stuff is a little troubling, and Safari has the most websites that wont work, compared to others, including IE.

Until 10.5.2 http://www.cdw.com would just hang, and I had to use Firefox. Either CDW fixed it or the update fixed it.

 

[kkrueger]

I've been using Safari on my WhiteBook since the end of January and have had very few crashes. They usually happened when I was using a specific online journaling site. I haven't had any problems using that site lately though, so maybe it was a website issue, not a Safari one.

 

[snakedoctor]

Just went and downloaded it out of curiosity-- you're right much cleaner. Launches faster now too. Scrolling behavior is a bit funky, but that'll get cleaned up...

Firefox 3 is great, but even the daily build is buggier than Safari right now. From a fresh boot of OS X, Safari launches about 20x faster than FF3. Could be debug code or whatever but FF3 launches very slow. After the first launch its much faster and on par. The only thing to launch slower than FF3 for the first time is Word 2008

 

[fluidinclusion]

Safari is becoming more disappointing

As a long term Mac user (early 1990s), I'm not trolling here, but I've gotten more disappointed with the lack of correct functionality that Safari displays with MANY websites. Some problems are critical and appear not to be related to how the website checks or doesn't check for Safari. Here's one example:

http://www.1728.com/trigcalc.htm

has a trigonometry calculator. The results yielded on Safari are WRONG, but they are correct in Firefox or IE (Windows or Mac). This is NOT a browser dependent website (view source). The example I used was to take the tangent of 23°, which should be 0.42447. On Safari it is off by 2 orders of magnitude! (42.447). You can change the significant figures at the bottom of the page to get the correct answer (but the wrong # of sig figs), so I think it is somewhere in Safari's code. I reported this to Apple, but this kind of functionality is frustrating and common with Safari - and TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE. Mac users will be suffering poor math scores (if they don't have their calculator with them) just because they typically use Safari by default. Shame.

 

[eastcoastsurfer]

I'll never understand why Apple didn't just go with Gecko (the rendering engine in FF/Mozilla/Etc..) when they decided they needed to build their own browser. Think how much farther along we could've been today if they had used FF as their starting point and improved on it, instead of reinventing the wheel once again. Apple's control freakish nature is really starting to get in the way of the pragmatic and often the most logical way to do things.

 

[~Shard~]

Great news, looking forward to seeing the details of what this update will include. I am always torn between using Safari and Firefox, as I really like Safari but Firefox seems to work better for me in certain instances. Hopefully this update will make for a much improved Safari.

 

[Rorikynn]

Safari is by far my favorite browser then Opera.
Firefox is a load of garbage. It crashed on me more than any other browser besides IE7.

 

[thekurgan]

I could do without snappy, but what about ad blocking (no, I don't want to use pithhelmet or another haxy that will break or need constant updating, I want ad blocking native to safari and no, I don't want to use any other browser either)

 

[physicistjedi]

On Tiger and now Leopard (on my 2GB Macbook Black), Safari is the most unstable and unreliable application I have ever used. a) It crashes approx 3 times a day b) Since upgrading to Leopard, it fails to login to certain sites reliably, Yahoo Mail included. c) Generally has problems with sites that include overly complex Javascript. Safari offers excellent usability, however, am tempted to switch permanently to Firefox if Apple don't sort out this mainstay of the web lifestyle within the next few weeks. Phwah phwah, hand me a cigar...

Safari 3 has a problem of losing cookies. Apparently it is not solved in this release as well, even though it is widely known at least since November
I am sending a bug report almost everyday from the menu, but no luck so far.

pj