Safari 3.1 sees improved form support in latest beta
Apple this month continues to plug away on a small but significant update to its fledgeling Safari web browser, most recently making improvements to the application's handling of web forms and faulty Javascripts.
The cross-platform browser update presently dubbed Safari 3.1 was first made available to the company's developer community last month. Since then, only one external revision has been spotted, arriving last week in the form of three distinct distributions.
A public beta for versions of the Windows operating system carried build number 31A15 and weighed in at 18.5MB, while versions for Mac OS X Tiger and Leopard arrived as builds 8S3021 and 9B4021, weighing in at 48.6MB and 38.9MB, respectively.
In a set of release notes reported to have accompanied the latest distributions, Apple advocated "significant performance, stability, and compatibility improvements" over the builds released just three weeks earlier.
Specifically, the company said Safari 3.1 accepts large amounts of text pastes into forms much faster than its predecessor and that the browser now logs all nasty and unsafe Javascripts to a system log file for later review. In addition, a pesky bug that prevented earlier builds for uploading photos via web forms to online auction sites has also been fixed.
The Mac maker offered no update on the browser's more compelling enhancements, which include support for downloadable web fonts, HTML5 video and audio tags, CSS transitions and animations, and a new SQL storage API.
Improvements to Javascript performance are also a significant focus of the upcoming release, which uses an unreleased version of Apple's Webkit frame work that has proven to be up to 2.5 times as fast in Javascript operations than that of the current version included with the existing Safari 3.0.4 software.
The cross-platform browser update presently dubbed Safari 3.1 was first made available to the company's developer community last month. Since then, only one external revision has been spotted, arriving last week in the form of three distinct distributions.
A public beta for versions of the Windows operating system carried build number 31A15 and weighed in at 18.5MB, while versions for Mac OS X Tiger and Leopard arrived as builds 8S3021 and 9B4021, weighing in at 48.6MB and 38.9MB, respectively.
In a set of release notes reported to have accompanied the latest distributions, Apple advocated "significant performance, stability, and compatibility improvements" over the builds released just three weeks earlier.
Specifically, the company said Safari 3.1 accepts large amounts of text pastes into forms much faster than its predecessor and that the browser now logs all nasty and unsafe Javascripts to a system log file for later review. In addition, a pesky bug that prevented earlier builds for uploading photos via web forms to online auction sites has also been fixed.
The Mac maker offered no update on the browser's more compelling enhancements, which include support for downloadable web fonts, HTML5 video and audio tags, CSS transitions and animations, and a new SQL storage API.
Improvements to Javascript performance are also a significant focus of the upcoming release, which uses an unreleased version of Apple's Webkit frame work that has proven to be up to 2.5 times as fast in Javascript operations than that of the current version included with the existing Safari 3.0.4 software.
Comments
What about rendering issues? I can't be the only one that has them in even Mac friendly sites such as Macworld, when firefox renders just fine.
Can we have an example?
Saving Text in Safari is an absolute mess, it won't just save just the text, it always takes half the web page with it requiring editing later - why bother - and when this is pasted into Text Edit it is often unreadable, turning a paragraph or a line into an immense column of single words stacked one to a line.
UNREADABLE and UNUSABLE.
I'll say it again, INTERNET EXPLORER is the only thing I use for saving Text off the internet, IT DOES THE NICEST JOB.
And I'm using a Mac Pro, not something ancient.
Can we have an example?
lntellicast weather
Can we have an example?
Seriously, I haven't had any rendering issues at all on Safari or Firefox. Unless it's a site I'm building myself, and I've screwed up the CSS somewhere.
Also, Excel spreadsheets saved as web pages and put on my site are faithfully reproduced under Firefox, and even the ancient final Mac version of Explorer, but are hideous when viewed in Safari. Hope that gets worked on too.
lntellicast weather
So what's not rendering properly for you there? It looks fine to me. The flash player on the right isn't loading the news item, but that's not a rendering issue. It's a Flash plug-in issue.
Ahh. If you're referring to the pull-down menus, my guess is that there's something wrong with the CSS or Javascript code, as I've seen plenty of other pull-down menus work fine in Safari.
Just because a development team doesn't test its sites properly in every browser doesn't mean there's something wrong with the browser, necessarily. Sometimes certain browsers are more "forgiving" than others of bad code.
lntellicast weather
Just because the navigation menus on Intellicast's website don't work properly in Safari (they are rendered horizontally), that doesn't necessarily equate to a problem with Safari. The developers of the site are obviously using a non-standard technique that just so happens to work properly in other browsers, or CSS values are slightly off. Browsers should _not_ bend over backwards to accommodate improper html composition.
lntellicast weather
Seems good to me, Safari 3.0.4
Since moving to 3 from 2, browser crashes have become a regular feature for me. In fairness, they seem to have been reduced a bit after recent updates, but still . . .
Also, Excel spreadsheets saved as web pages and put on my site are faithfully reproduced under Firefox, and even the ancient final Mac version of Explorer, but are hideous when viewed in Safari. Hope that gets worked on too.
Excel spreadsheets saved as web pages? You're kidding right? Have you ever looked at the HTML source code generated by those MS products, particularly MS Word? Have you ever looked at the source code of an email composed in MS Word? No wonder Safari isn't handling that very well... the code is a complete nightmare with lots of proprietary MS code.
Excel spreadsheets saved as web pages? You're kidding right? Have you ever looked at the HTML source code generated by those MS products, particularly MS Word? Have you ever looked at the source code of an email composed in MS Word? No wonder Safari isn't handling that very well... the code is a complete nightmare with lots of proprietary MS code.
I don't doubt that, but Firefox seems to handle it fine. What are they doing that Apple isn't?
lntellicast weather
Sorry, funkfeend, no rendering issues at all on my machine. Safari loads and displays the pages fine. I visited a number of pages, played the videos, all without any trouble or issues. Must be something wrong with your installation.
What I wish is that Safari could just save text properly, by that I mean just the text and in that font the way IE does - yup, I keep and use IE for that one single purpose. Firefox/Camino does okay but takes away the fonts and colours, spacings, sizes etc.
Saving Text in Safari is an absolute mess,it won't just save just the text, it always takes half the web page with it requiring editing later - why bother - and when this is pasted into Text Edit it is often unreadable, turning a paragraph or a line into an immense column of single words stacked one to a line.
I'd like an example of this too. I don't often copy large amounts of text from web pages, but I've never noticed any bugginess when I've done it. I tried copying some chunks and pasting them into TextEdit now and I got exactly what I expected.
You seem to want it to copy only the text (sans images, tables, DIVs, etc.) while preserving the text formatting. Safari appears to copy all the actual formatting that takes place within the selected region; if it includes tables or images, those get copied as well.
I prefer Safari's idea; it's more consistent and likely to yield expected results.
Just because the navigation menus on Intellicast's website don't work properly in Safari (they are rendered horizontally), that doesn't necessarily equate to a problem with Safari. The developers of the site are obviously using a non-standard technique that just so happens to work properly in other browsers, or CSS values are slightly off. Browsers should _not_ bend over backwards to accommodate improper html composition.
Obviously? It's not obvious to me. I haven't examined the code. I agree though about browsers not bending over backwards to support non-standard web coding. That is just an example of a page that does not render as intended on Safari, I'm not laying blame. As I recall, the page does render right on Opera, which is pretty standards-strict.
I stopped using Safari 2 because it was so unstable and just used Firefox as my main browser. When Safari 3 came out... I switched back. Since using it including Beta, and ever since I've been on Leopard (first day of release), I've had about 2 or 3 crashes that affected me, cant really recall, hasn't happened in a long time. I often have multiple windows open sometimes with 10+ tabs each, using it every day. I've had times where i was opening through many things and had like 50+ tabs open... The only crashes i see regularly on safari 3 is occasionally when i try to close safari, it hangs up and crashes.. which only bothers me slightly since i was trying to close it anyways.
What I wish is that Safari could just save text properly, by that I mean just the text and in that font the way IE does - yup, I keep and use IE for that one single purpose. Firefox/Camino does okay but takes away the fonts and colours, spacings, sizes etc.
Saving Text in Safari is an absolute mess,it won't just save just the text, it always takes half the web page with it requiring editing later - why bother - and when this is pasted into Text Edit it is often unreadable, turning a paragraph or a line into an immense column of single words stacked one to a line.
If you choose to Paste and Match Style (Control+Option+Shift+V) you;ll get only the text and it will match the size, font and color of that is there.
IE does it by default because it's not robust enough. Unfortunately, i don't think there is a way you can make that the default in OS X.
What about rendering issues? I can't be the only one that has them in even Mac friendly sites such as Macworld, when firefox renders just fine.
Yep, I really miss the stability of Safari 2. I hope they really fix the constant crashing issue when opening multiple tabs.
I have no issues with Safari's rendering or stability. I am using Safari 3.1 as the front-end and the latest WebKit as the back-end. The double-clicking the Tab bar to create a New Tab is a nice feature to 3.1.
Sorry, funkfeend, no rendering issues at all on my machine. Safari loads and displays the pages fine. I visited a number of pages, played the videos, all without any trouble or issues. Must be something wrong with your installation.
If you hover over the JS dropdown lists (Local » Nation » Global » Storms » etc.) you see that they render as a single row instead of a single column.
Obviously? It's not obvious to me. I haven't examined the code. I agree though about browsers not bending over backwards to support non-standard web coding. That is just an example of a page that does not render as intended on Safari, I'm not laying blame. As I recall, the page does render right on Opera, which is pretty standards-strict.
Safari 3.1 is more standards compliant than Opera, I'm not sure about 3.04. This is still a big problem but as WebKit takes hold on phones and Macs get more popular I think we'll start to see more web developers take WebKit into consideration when they build pages.
Seems we have a couple of folks knowledgable about Safari here. Anyone know if this is a Safari problem that might be getting fixed in v3.1 (I'm on PPC, not Intel, if that matters)?
m