Safari 3.1 sees improved form support in latest beta

[AppleInsider]

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.

[ View this article at AppleInsider.com ]

[NasserAE]

Yep, I really miss the stability of Safari 2. I hope they really fix the constant crashing issue when opening multiple tabs.

[melgross]

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.

[nevenmrgan]

Originally Posted by melgross

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?

[Banalltv]

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.

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.

[funkfeend]

Originally Posted by nevenmrgan

Can we have an example?

lntellicast weather

[mrjoec123]

Originally Posted by nevenmrgan

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.

[Robin Huber]

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.

[mrjoec123]

Originally Posted by funkfeend

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.

[CREB]

I am truly looking forward to this release!

[coolfactor]

Originally Posted by funkfeend

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.

[Elijahg]

Originally Posted by funkfeend

lntellicast weather

Seems good to me, Safari 3.0.4

[coolfactor]

Originally Posted by Robin Huber

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.

[Robin Huber]

Originally Posted by coolfactor

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?

[lkrupp]

Originally Posted by funkfeend

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.

[nevenmrgan]

Originally Posted by Banalltv

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.

[funkfeend]

Originally Posted by coolfactor

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.

[doh123]

i'm surprised people are saying Safari 3 crashes more.

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.

[solipsism]

Originally Posted by Banalltv

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.

Originally Posted by melgross

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.

Originally Posted by NasserAE

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.

Originally Posted by lkrupp

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.

Originally Posted by funkfeend

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.

[Wiggin]

Not sure if the problem is Safari or Flip4Mac, but ever since upgrading to Safari 3 whenever the Flip4Mac plug-in loads (because there is a .wmv video on the page) the CPU pegs to 100% and stays there, even after closing all Safari windows and putting it in the background. The only rememdy is to quit Safari. A few posts I read put the blame on a change made in v3 in how Safari manages resources with regards to plug-ins. But that doesn't rule out that Flip4Mac was maybe doing something odd with their plug-in, and it just wasn't apparent until Safari 3.

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)?

[mstone]

I hope they fix one bug that is giving me problems. The SVG support is not working that well. I have some basic scripting in SVG files which work perfectly in all other browsers, but not with Safari. SVG never really caught on even though it is very useful in certain circumstances. Even Adobe is abandoning support for the plug-in because they say SVG is now supported natively by almost all browsers. I wonder which one is the 'almost'.

m

[sandor]

Originally Posted by funkfeend

lntellicast weather

i think the problems are based on poor coding, not safari:


http://validator.w3.org/
http://tinyurl.com/yweguq (the results)


http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/
http://tinyurl.com/2cftdg (the results)

[Cubert]

I hope Safari finally passes Firefox in render speed. On my Cube, my PowerBook, and my friend's 2nd generation MacBook Pro, Firefox is noticeably faster than Safari - on every site.

[Gatesbasher]

I guess I'm good at avoiding non standards-compliant websites, as I've had no problems at all in this area. A few will say "for a better experience" I might want to try Firefox. Since I don't want a freakin' "experience," I just want to check my e-mail or whatever, Safari works fine. The only problem I've ever had is on Flash pages like MacWorld, or nasa.gov seems to be the worst: about one time out of five, when you hit the back button, Safari will beachball until you force quit it. I don't blame Safari for this in any way, shape, or form...the culprit is Adobe. Flash is pure crap! Avoid it like the plague it is!

I see a few people claiming Firefox renders faster on their setup than Safari. For the life of me I don't know how that's possible. Firefox takes ten times as long to do anything for me, except load: that takes thirty times as long! I guess machines and installations are different, but I still say Safari is Much, MUCH, faster.

[Xian Zhu Xuande]

Originally Posted by funkfeend

lntellicast weather

It is frustrating, but the problem here is poor site design. This is probably one of many websites which were originally designed and tested only for Internet Explorer by inept coders, or it has been patched up over time based on really old code. Even then, the problems with the menu are likely poor JavaScript or CSS.

One of the reasons why Safari runs so quickly is because it doesn't bog itself down trying to cypher through all sorts of bad code. It looks for a number of expected errors and offers corrections, but when the site offers a DOCTYPE, Safari holds it to task.

That could also be the problem here. Intellicast uses a transitional XHTML DOCTYPE which tells browsers to assume a certain level of competence and leaves them expecting certain things from the code. As you can see in the validation results above, they don't deliver on this promise. All we can hope for is the gradual decline of Internet Explorer's market share and the gradual advancement of standards-based design and awareness of other browsers (and thus, other business). Fortunately these changes have been taking place in full swing for years now.

Originally Posted by Cubert

I hope Safari finally passes Firefox in render speed. On my Cube, my PowerBook, and my friend's 2nd generation MacBook Pro, Firefox is noticeably faster than Safari - on every site.

That's pretty interesting, actually. I used to use Firefox on my G4 Power Mac but since I moved to the Intel platform (first with a Mac Mini and now with a 3.2 GHz Mac Pro), especially under Leopard, I have found Safari to be much faster. Furthermore, the Webkit nightly builds are much faster than the stable 3.x build of Safari.

[ShinySteelRobot]

It would be really nice if Apple added some anti-phishing technology in Safari so that they no longer get dinged in the press for being the only major browser without it.

Wasn't Safari 3.0 originally supposed to have anti-phishing per AppleInsider? What happened to that feature?
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles..._3_builds.html

[mstone]

Originally Posted by Xian Zhu Xuande

All we can hope for is the gradual decline of Internet Explorer's market share and the gradual advancement of standards-based design and awareness of other browsers (and thus, other business).

IE 8 is supposed to be a bit better at standards compliance but by deciding to adopt the standards MS is going to break a lot of pages that right now are using workarounds to avoid IE's odd behaviors or in the case of MS centric sites, using the undocumented non-compliant features supported by the current IE version to deploy special functionality. In either case there will be a lot of work to do once they release it.

[Xian Zhu Xuande]

Originally Posted by mstone

IE 8 is supposed to be a bit better at standards compliance but by deciding to adopt the standards MS is going to break a lot of pages that right now are using workarounds to avoid IE's odd behaviors or in the case of MS centric sites, using the undocumented non-compliant features supported by the current IE version to deploy special functionality. In either case there will be a lot of work to do once they release it.

They already broke nearly every hack with IE7.

Instead they've introduced a new way to version target which they are actually supporting. It is not an ideal solution, but at least it is something. What we really need is standards support on par with those offered by Gecko, Webkit and Opera.

[melgross]

Originally Posted by nevenmrgan

Can we have an example?

Macworld renders incorrectly. I put two examples on Flikr.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/24380667@N03/show/

[teckstud]

Does anyone know why FLAVR (browser app to capture video i,e, youtube) does not work on the new Safari? It worked great on Tiger's. Thanks.

[solipsism]

Originally Posted by melgross

Macworld renders incorrectly. I put two examples on Flikr.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/24380667@N03/show/

Interesting, I don't have these same issues, nor have i ever AFAIK.

I can duplicate your Macworld.com mainpage issue when I use a text size that is one above normal, but this doesn't carry over to the benchmarks page.

Are you using a style sheet?

[solipsism]

Originally Posted by teckstud

Does anyone know why FLAVR (browser app to capture video i,e, youtube) does not work on the new Safari? It worked great on Tiger's. Thanks.

From a quick Gogole serach it appears that they changed the name to Videobox and that it works with both 10.4 and 10.5. If this isn't it, the issue will still fall with the OS, not the browser.

• http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/32110

[melgross]

Originally Posted by solipsism

Interesting, I don't have these same issues, nor have i ever AFAIK.

I can duplicate your Macworld.com mainpage issue when I use a text size that is one above normal, but this doesn't carry over to the benchmarks page.

Are you using a style sheet?

No, nothing unusual.

The mainpage issue shouldn't occur either, and doesn't, with Firefox, no matter how I change the font sizes.

I have similar problems with other sites, including the weather site posted.

As Macworld is a Mac site, you would think that there would be no problems with Safari, either theirs, or Safari's.

[reallynotnick]

I can say from the latest builds of webkit Safari is SMOKING FAST!

WebKit 8881.0ms
FireFox 3 (b3) 17562.2ms
Safari 3.04 19501.4ms
FireFox 2.0.12 33711.4ms

This was from running this javascript test here


It runs each test 5 times to get a good average, I can totally feel the difference going from FireFox 2 to the webkit, night and day and that is on a 3Mb/s internet connection and a 2ghz G5 iMac.

(I also ran the G5 optimized builds of FF, and that only improved the scores by ~3%)

[solipsism]

Originally Posted by reallynotnick

I can say from the latest builds of webkit Safari is SMOKING FAST!
...
This was from running this javascript test here

It runs each test 5 times to get a good average, I can totally feel the difference going from FireFox 2 to the webkit, night and day and that is on a 3Mb/s internet connection and a 2ghz G5 iMac.

The lag people seem to have with Safari is not from JS, which that exclusively tests.

[reallynotnick]

Originally Posted by solipsism

The lag people seem to have with Safari is not from JS, which that exclusively tests.

Lag? That old problem where Apple would not start rendering the page on your screen for a couple seconds so you would not see it load in? Is that what you are referring to?
I don't have that with WebKit at all, I thought that was removed from Safari but I am not sure. It's really an easy fix though.

If that is not it I don't know what you are referring to.


WebKit is clearly the fastest browser just from me using it, MAYBE when FireFox 3 is released that will be usable to me again, but going back to FF2 is just painful.


I recommend every just try it out for themselves, it's an amazing browser.
http://nightly.webkit.org/

[solipsism]

Originally Posted by reallynotnick

Lag? That old problem where Apple would not start rendering the page on your screen for a couple seconds so you would not see it load in? Is that what you are referring to?

I think it was November of last year the WebKit team made some significant speed changes with WebKit rendering JS. Now there is a lot of unhealthy, non-compliant code out there and WebKit is the best suited to deal with it (as this thread is covering) so that could be the result of some of the rendering slowness, but also webpages are not make up of just JS, there is a plethora of other codes that WebKit has to render and it be optimized for IE, which means it's not optimized for WebKit (unless the server detects the browser and generates optimized code on the fly).

I'm not saying it's a bad browser. In fact, I'm a longtime user of WebKit nightlies. It does what it's made to do well, but there is a large part of the internet not even considered WebKit or compliance.

[Endymion]

Originally Posted by melgross

No, nothing unusual.

The mainpage issue shouldn't occur either, and doesn't, with Firefox, no matter how I change the font sizes.

I have similar problems with other sites, including the weather site posted.

As Macworld is a Mac site, you would think that there would be no problems with Safari, either theirs, or Safari's.

As someone already mentioned, the site's broken because you have your font size increased. Try resetting it with View-->Make Text Normal Size.

If I increase the font size in Firefox it starts to break also. Some sites are designed to scale up the fonts well, clearly Macworld is not.

To check if you're running a custom stylesheet, go to Preferences-->Advanced-->Style sheet:

[Banalltv]

Hi Solipsism and Nevenmrgan, Ta for the tip, it doesn't give me the result I want though.

Here's a quick illustration of what I get using last week's Circuits newsletter e-mail from NYT, it's the best example I have to hand ( and sorry about the depressing subject matter therein ):

Link to last week's newsletter from NYT:

http://www.nytimes.com/indexes/2008/...ail/index.html

What I get saving the text:
http://img526.imageshack.us/my.php?i...icture2nc8.jpg

1: How the e-mail looks in Safari.

2: Pasting directly into TextEdit, I'm not crushing it, this is how it appears and requires much messing about to make it nice and keepable.

3: Paste And Match Style, same boring result from all four browsers and same as Paste from Firefox and Camino.

4: Pasting from Explorer, just right, minimal fiddling about for keeping. This doesn't save the links and I have to be careful about that, but it's not a problem. This is no good for saving Tables either, but again, not often an issue for me.

It often looks much worse than this, this is just the best example I have to hand.

[solipsism]

Originally Posted by Banalltv

Hi Solipsism and Nevenmrgan, Ta for the tip, it doesn't give me the result I want though.
...
It often looks much worse than this, this is just the best example I have to hand.

I think you're screwed. I can't thing of a single way to make Safari copy the styles, but not the formatting.