Will Safari survive?

well it's quite obvious that apple will be releasing a better safari as part of tiger. go ahead and use firefox if you want--nobody is gonna stop you.

Horrible title. I'd suggest being a bit more forthright about what subject matter your post really entails.

Personally I prefer Safari to Firefox and there doesn't seem that much difference in speed.

My major gripe with Safari is that it is not supported by any of the online banking/financial sites I need. Or is this a complaint with the sites ?

Tabs and bookmarking is far better on Safari.

I use Safari 100% unless testing sites for work. Everything else has an element or two of suckiness and non-Appleness I can't seem to deal with.

Yes, I tried browser x...



I have a problem...

Yes you have two in fact: you have IE, Netscape, Opera, and Shiira on the list, and you are missing OmniWeb.

What do you call the sixth browser down the list?

My bad... just missed it.

I just can't wait until all websites start using standards. I'm as pro mac as they get, but it's sad that I have to think about buying a super cheap-o pc (cheaper than vpc and xp) just to use a few websites that are critical (some online jobs applications, grad school applications, etc).

I've noticed several sites that used to work with Safari that, after the 10.3.7 update, now do not. Even eBay now has problems. Hoping the next update fixes these.

I use Safari for casual browsing, but when it comes to paying bills I use Firefox, or if I'm in a real rush I still use IE, just so I don't have to deal with the headache. That's a terrible situation. I think Safari is a little behind on flexibility right now when compared to Firefox, but as long as you aren't using IE, you are on the side of standards compliance (in my opinion). AKA the losing side Microsoft will own the internet. Give in.

Safari is a pain in the ass. How do all these Mac browsers not have a pull down address bar? Insanity.. only Firefox that I know of supports this in addition to AutoComplete.. unless I'm completely clueless here?

Firefox throws its fits too... there really isn't a perfect OS X broswer yet.. not like IE is for Windows anywhow. I hope that Firefox 1.1 addresses a lot of these problems.

If you believe that IE is the perfect browser for Windows, then I am afraid that we are just going to have to agree to disagree. With the number of Windows users who are abandoning IE or Firefox and other browsers, it would appear that fewer and fewer people agree with you.

Their point is that Safari's failings are not signs of doom any more than any other browser's failings are.

Ever hear of updates?

So why the "doomed/survive" angle?

Why not "Is Safari due for a major update?" or "Will Apple Address Safari Bugs?"

"Is safari Doomed?" implies "Dave Hyatt Quits Apple, Joins Google"

Safari is a good browser, and it surely will survive. WIll it be the *best* browser? I don't know. But sure as hell it won't die, choke, get HIV, or otherwise be doomed.

Sorry i didn't bother to read all posts,
but the title itself implies pure
%$&%RFZ/L§T&/R

I rarely, if ever, run into site compatibility problems these days in Safari.

Speed could be a little zippier, but that's coming.

Anyway, if Apple just fixes a couple of bugs (that ornery lack of undo in text fields, the rollover issue, etc), tries to manage animated gifs from sucking up too much CPU, and sprinkles over with the features advertised in Safari RSS, I'll be pleased as punch.

God, yes.

Oi.. ok, what FIREFOX is to Windows then. What IE ONCE WAS.. argh you people! Sorry, had to do a fresh install on the powerbook today. I'm pissed.

Safari will survive as long as Apple sees strategic value in developing their own browser. Considering Cyberdog, this does not necessarily have to be that long.

I, myself have dropped Safari in favor of FireFox, since FF allows you to install all those nifty extensions that make browsing (and for me, web development) so much more pleasant.

i hate that, since forever in any MacOS, you can't select items in pull-down menus with TAB like you can in Winblows. Especially when you have to select a country and wait those few seconds for the list to download, render or whatever the fuck Safari is doing.

Also, GMAIL is a bit loopy sometimes when trying to log in.

Nonetheless, I agree. The title of this post sucks.

type the first 2 or 3 letters of your desired item. e.g. If you do want to select "Zimbawe", type in "z-i". Selection will jump to the desired item.
done

Btw, what do you want to select via TAB?

I am extensive Mac user but no nothing whatsoever about programming/Java/etc. - only how to use the thing. So can someone explain something to me?

If IE has a non-standard way of doing things that means that some IE-supporting sites will not work on Safari/Firefox ... why can't Safari/Firefox just adopt the IE standard?

I appreciate that to those in the know this must be a stupid suggestion - otherwise they would have done it. But I hope you can explain it to a dunce like me!

I understand the *moral* reason of course (not giving in to MS etc.), but is there also a technical reason?

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) spends a lot of time and effort producing open standards and logical ways of structuring "languages" like HTML, XHTML and CSS that are used to create web pages.

Browsers like Firefox and Safari try (not always successfully) to render code in accordance with the standards which means that a designer should be able to predict excatly how his code will look like on a standards-compliant browser.

IE has many quirks and bugs. See this link for examples of some of the disasters in the IE rendering engine.

However, as you say, it would be possible for all browsers to work towards the (flawed) IE model rather than the W3C standards and so IE-compliant sites would work in their browsers. However, then standards-compliant sites would break instead. Also it would be very difficult for developers of those browsers as they would never have a fixed target of what to aim for as they would have to wait for each version of IE to come out and then fully road-test it to discover all its quirks in order to replicate them in their browser - they would always be a version or two beind and web developers wouldn't have a clue what they were supposed to be developing for. Not an ideal situation for anyone other than MS!

IE is slowly moving towards the standards and is switchable (by use of a doctype in the web page) between a legacy "quirks" mode and a "standards-compliant" mode. However, it is in quirks mode by default and many inexperienced web developers still design their pages by trial and error to work in the IE quirks mode without ever testing them in other standards-compliant browsers.

What I mean is, for example, the tab at the bottom right of the page you are reading now. To select which forum you want to go to. In Internet Exploder you can use the TAB key to get there (without mouse). You can then select up and down and press the key of the first letter of the selection (or country for example) you want. If I want France, and I am filling out an order form for example where I press Tab to go to the next field and get to the country tab, I get there and just keep pressing "f". Or scroll up and down with arrow keys.

Cant do that on Mac AFAIK.

There are several reasons to start. One is that IE developers chose to allow IE to render misformed HTML. By definition, such code is ambiguous. Correctly written code has only one meaning. Erroneous code can mean darned near anything. For other browsers to render erroneous code the same way that IE does, their developers would have to reverse engineer and clone IE. A second is that IE actually does a pretty good job of rendering standard HTML. There is rarely a technical reason for using IE-specific features. A major reason for such features is that the web site developer is ignorant or lazy or both. My third reason is something that some people don't understand or don't care about, but is probably the most important. The Internet was developed using taxpayer money as a way for disparate computers to communicate with each other. The World Wide Web was developed by Prof. Timothy Berners-Lee to allow scientists using disparate hardware to collaborate on their research and publications. His work was supported by taxpayers. What I am getting at is that the Internet, in general, and the World Wide Web, in particular, belong to all of us. We should not surrender our network to Microsoft.

You are making the assumption that IE has a "standard" that makes sense. IE is all over the map if you take a look at where they have been... and that is just counting the Windows versions (Mac IE was a completely different beast altogether).

And the big problem is not how IE handles good markup (although there are issues there). The big problem is how IE handles broken markup. Because it has to guess what the designer meant the behaviors become ver sensitive to small changes. If you want to try and follow that behavior you wind up reverse-engineering the code, and on something as complex as a web browser that is a prohibitively difficult task. And since Microsoft has a number of patents strewn in the path, it would probably wind up illegal somewhere along the line.

That being said, a lot of browsers have tried their hands at emulating IE's handling of broken code, ironically including later versions of IE! Usually this is called "quirks" mode, and there is a lot of web pages out there dedicated to that discussion...

Um...if i press TAB right of this page
i am going to select the "Forum selection". Like you
suggested. I always do this. You can browse through the list
via arrow keys up/down. No big deal if you ask me

Don't have to press the mousebutton, hitting enter will do as well... Don't you have to enable full keyboard access for this make it work?

Yeah i know see above

Who cares if Safari lives or dies a horrible painfull death it's not like the browser is the most profounding piece of software.

You guys should try out the Camino nightlies... They have come a looong way.

i love firefox when i get my mac ill give safari a shot

FF doesn't even support mac OSX services.... thats why i use camino. camino has a lot more features than safari (i.e. saving complete webpages to disc) and is more reliable.

Just tried Firefox 1.0 for the first time. OMG, it blows Safari AWAY. I am now going to transfer my bookmarks with this App

http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/11550

"Safari bookmark exporter"


Looks ok to me. We'll see

Edit: Works like a charm

SDW2001,

don't forget to check out Live Bookmarks - RSS feeds, if you use any.

Camino is a good App, and has a mac look and feel to it. Firefox has more people working on it, thus gets more attention.

I think that just about everybody would switch to FireFox if it was mac-like like Camino.

Camino renders faster than Safari. camino's bookmarks open instantly, without the annoying delay.

I tried omniweb, bought the license. Then I got annoyed with how long it takes to open bookmarks page. After playing with it, I got annoyed with the drawer-styled tabs too.

Safari is great for me. Sometimes it renders slowly. I wish it had a "Mail Liink" toolbar button like Camino and OmniWeb.

I personally prefer Netscape(I've always used Netscape and see no reason to switch) and cannot understand why so many people hate. On Windows its unbelieveably slow but on OS X its pretty fast, faster than Safari. I also dont understand why anyone would pay for a web browser (Omniweb) nowadays as there are so many free alternatives.