Safari 7.0 streamlined and accelerated for OS X Mavericks
Apple's new Safari 7.0 is faster, more efficient and sports streamlined new interface enhancements in OS X Mavericks.
Safari 7.0 Top Sites
In keeping with Apple's new direction for iOS 7 and OS X, the enhanced web browser strips Safari of some superfluous adornments. One example is Top Sites, which now presents simple thumbnails of previously visited as squares (above), rather than wide, curved images with a faux floor reflection.
Users now have a preference of displaying up to two dozen images on the Top Sites page, and pinning or rearranging the squares no longer requires hitting an Edit button; simply mousing over an image displays its editing controls.
Safari 7.0 Bookmarks
Instead, History simply shows a simple, hierarchical list of your browsing history. Bookmarks is also greatly simplified, now depicting three types of links; the first is your standard Bookmarks (with a preview rather than a duplicate set of listings and Coverflow imagery, above).
When you scroll to the bottom of a Reading List article, the next item in your list follows it, allowing you a magazine like experience even more similar to Instapaper.
The third is a new feature: Shared Links. This combs through the URLs of social networks you've configured your Mac to follow (currently supporting Twitter and LinkedIn) to present a social bookmark list (below).
Safari 7.0 Shared Links
Like your own personal Reading List, you can quickly scan through the webpages shared by users you follow, optionally using Reader, with each article flowing into the next.
At the top of each page is a banner that shows who shared it, what they commented about it, along with a button you can use to retweet it to your followers (above).
When you perform a search in Safari 7.0 via the Smart Search bar, it immediately begins loading the suggested top hit in the background before you even chose it, resulting in a snappy, responsive feel. You can turn this preloading off, and even turn off the instant search engine suggestions as you type a search query.
Safari also waits to load Internet plugins (ahem, "Adobe Flash animations") until you click, similar to the functionality of Click To Flash.
This saves battery life so the browser isn't constantly loading and rendering lots of inefficient animations, ads and other content unless you opt to actually see this stuff. As a side note, this will be brutal to advertisers who haven't yet migrated from Flash to HTML5.
Safari also benefits from other battery saving initiatives in OS X Mavericks designed to idle the processing of content that isn't visible (or playing desired content such as background music).
As a result of these various optimizations, Safari is not just significantly faster than Chrome and Firefox in both general SunSpider and task-oriented JSBench tests, but also delivers a noticeable edge in CPU energy efficiency (and therefore battery life) and uses much less memory at the same time.
Safari 7 also plugs into other enhancements of OS X Mavericks, including iCloud Keychains for secure storage of not just passwords, but also credit card information (iCloud Keychain sync uses multiple factor authentication), and also now supports web site push notifications, so you can be updated on events you select (such as online auctions, or web-based messaging systems).
Safari 7.0 Top Sites
In keeping with Apple's new direction for iOS 7 and OS X, the enhanced web browser strips Safari of some superfluous adornments. One example is Top Sites, which now presents simple thumbnails of previously visited as squares (above), rather than wide, curved images with a faux floor reflection.
Users now have a preference of displaying up to two dozen images on the Top Sites page, and pinning or rearranging the squares no longer requires hitting an Edit button; simply mousing over an image displays its editing controls.
Goodbye, Coverflow
Another rarely useful visualization is also gone in Safari 7.0 (but not from OS X Mavericks' new Finder): a Coverflow display of cached websites in History or Bookmarks, including the Favorites Bar that appears above tabs (currently referred to as the "Bookmarks Bar").Safari 7.0 Bookmarks
Instead, History simply shows a simple, hierarchical list of your browsing history. Bookmarks is also greatly simplified, now depicting three types of links; the first is your standard Bookmarks (with a preview rather than a duplicate set of listings and Coverflow imagery, above).
Reading List magazine
The second set is your cross-device, iCloud synced Reading List. To catch up on your saved articles (which you can add to the list via the Share button) simply click on on a page to view it either on the standard page, or via Reader in a simplified, no distraction environment.When you scroll to the bottom of a Reading List article, the next item in your list follows it, allowing you a magazine like experience even more similar to Instapaper.
The third is a new feature: Shared Links. This combs through the URLs of social networks you've configured your Mac to follow (currently supporting Twitter and LinkedIn) to present a social bookmark list (below).
Safari 7.0 Shared Links
Like your own personal Reading List, you can quickly scan through the webpages shared by users you follow, optionally using Reader, with each article flowing into the next.
At the top of each page is a banner that shows who shared it, what they commented about it, along with a button you can use to retweet it to your followers (above).
Faster and more efficient
Safari 7.0 also benefits from a year of WebKit development, including a new "Nitro Tiered JIT" (Nitro is Apple's JavaScript engine, and the tiered Just In Time compiler is a mechanism to efficiently decide how best to execute code when loading web pages, using one of its optimized alternative processes).When you perform a search in Safari 7.0 via the Smart Search bar, it immediately begins loading the suggested top hit in the background before you even chose it, resulting in a snappy, responsive feel. You can turn this preloading off, and even turn off the instant search engine suggestions as you type a search query.
Safari also waits to load Internet plugins (ahem, "Adobe Flash animations") until you click, similar to the functionality of Click To Flash.
This saves battery life so the browser isn't constantly loading and rendering lots of inefficient animations, ads and other content unless you opt to actually see this stuff. As a side note, this will be brutal to advertisers who haven't yet migrated from Flash to HTML5.
Safari also benefits from other battery saving initiatives in OS X Mavericks designed to idle the processing of content that isn't visible (or playing desired content such as background music).
As a result of these various optimizations, Safari is not just significantly faster than Chrome and Firefox in both general SunSpider and task-oriented JSBench tests, but also delivers a noticeable edge in CPU energy efficiency (and therefore battery life) and uses much less memory at the same time.
Safari 7 also plugs into other enhancements of OS X Mavericks, including iCloud Keychains for secure storage of not just passwords, but also credit card information (iCloud Keychain sync uses multiple factor authentication), and also now supports web site push notifications, so you can be updated on events you select (such as online auctions, or web-based messaging systems).
Comments
[LIST]
[*] History isn't selectable anywhere but the Menu Bar (might just be a bug).
[*] Tab View is still completely and utterly worthless.
[*] Activity window seems to be gone for good.
[/LIST]
Things I like:
[LIST]
[*] Ludicrous speed.
[*] Smooth animations.
[*] Built-in Click2Flash-style Flash stopper.
[*] The look of Top Sites.
[/LIST]
Bugs:
[LIST]
[*] Dragging out images hangs (and if dragged to an application in the Dock, crashes Safari and hangs the Dock).
[*] Bookmarks button doesn't toggle bookmark view.
[/LIST]
http://peacekeeper.futuremark.com
Chrome still beats Safari. I use Safari, but just need to know why Chrome is better at this test suite.
I have Mavericks DP1 installed on my Core2Duo hackintosh and there is a *huge* difference in performance between Safari 6 and 7 (I also have ML installed on another HD as my main release). This is not the usual "snappy" thing. The difference is very real. BTW, it is also true when comparing Mavericks to ML as a whole. Much faster, much more responsive and more productive (full screen apps multi monitor behaviour).
I have the impression that Mavericks is going to be a huge release, quality wise - reminiscent of Tiger.
That was awesome!
The only thing that matters is whether or not this new Safari is faster than Chrome. If it is, I'll switch back but right now it's no contest.
Are they testing Safari 7 or Safari 6?
The exceptions would be loading the content, if I already clicked to load/play it.
Where can you even find results for that? It won't show me anything but my own (2736).
Ah, ran it again and got 2829. This time I didn't switch to any other tabs or Spaces while it was running. Interesting.
Oh, Chrome has an advantage because the test involves WebM, which no self-respecting browser would support in the first place.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Nano_tube
It's true.
I have Mavericks DP1 installed on my Core2Duo hackintosh and there is a *huge* difference in performance between Safari 6 and 7 (I also have ML installed on another HD as my main release). This is not the usual "snappy" thing. The difference is very real. BTW, it is also true when comparing Mavericks to ML as a whole. Much faster, much more responsive and more productive (full screen apps multi monitor behaviour).
I have the impression that Mavericks is going to be a huge release, quality wise - reminiscent of Tiger.
for me... it's the memory issue. I typically have 20+ tabs and 4+ windows running on my 8GB 2008MBP (yeah yeah, it's sometimes a curse to buy such damn fine hardware;-)). Safari and it's helper apps will eat up a whole bunch of memory (especially if you have some privacy extensions added... e.g. adBlock, CookieStumbler, DisConnect), and you have some auto-updating webpages (I'm looking at you google News!), it's not unusual for the safari suite to take up 2+GB of memory, and the kernel swell to a GB.
If Safari (and Mavericks) can keep memory utilization down, I'm ecstatic (especially because I'm definitely tasting one of those 8gb MBAs after my next paycheck).
I'm hoping the individual processes will help too (swapping out undisplayed windows, etc), but I can't help but think in place memory compression (reducing the times and the amounts of swapping thereof) is a major overall win
Does anyone have a decent assessment of the memory footprint now? Say running a couple flash based videos and Ajax some AJAX/local storage laden pages?
Quote:
Originally Posted by j1h15233
The only thing that matters is whether or not this new Safari is faster than Chrome. If it is, I'll switch back but right now it's no contest.
I find these kind of comments ludicrous. The difference between the fastest browser and the slowest browser is always just a second or so, often it's just some portion of a second.
It's far more reasonable to choose one's browser based on features and ease of use, or because it's fit to some particular purpose than it is to pick it because you *must* have the fastest browser.
Like most tech workers, I use all the big three browsers (Safari, Chrome and Firefox), all day every day and usually have them running all at once because some tasks are better isolated in a separate browser. When I switch back and forth, the difference between one and the other in terms of speed is negligible. As long as you have a fairly up to date browser running on a fairly up to date computer, to say that one is better than the other because of a few microseconds of time is just silly.
Even when I have to use something awful on some old hunk-o-junk laptop that someone lends me, the "glacial" speed is mostly an illusion based on comparative experience. What seems like "forever" is really just a few seconds.
Quote:
Originally Posted by studentx
"Chrome still beats Safari. I use Safari, but just need to know why Chrome is better at this test suite."
Are they testing Safari 7 or Safari 6?
That's not a standard test of any sort. I think they just made most of it up. I quit after the first minute when it said that my browser (Safari 6), didn't even support parts of it, which is patently ridiculous.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Tallest Skil
Things I don't like:
Activity window seems to be gone for good.
Activity window was gone in Mountain Lion.
AppleInsider
snappy
Drink!
Attached is a screenshot from my desktop. I'm running 10.9 DP1, Safari 7 and Activity Monitor. On Safari I have Adblock plus and JavaScript blocker installed.
You can see in the Activity Monitor the memory usage of Safari.
My mackintosh specs are nothing special:
Core2Duo Quad CPU @ 2.4GHz
8 GB DDR2 RAM
Regular Hard Disk
Nvidia 512MB VRAM video card
Opened tabs: Appleinsider, 2 1080HD youtube videos, 1 720HD youtube video, Gmail, Facebook and CNN.com.
All in all it is using 977.8MB RAM
... Yes, and as it hasn't returned, which would have happened with popular demand, one might say it seems gone for good.
This damn comment may have cost me a developers licence...
R.I.P. (Rest In Perpetuity)
I'm on 10.8.4. Just updated. Safari STILL judders on the corner pulling to make the window bigger. It's the only app that seems to do this.
Will Saf' 7 change this?
Lemon Bon Bon.