Earlier this week, Apple released a beta of its latest and greatest version of Safari (4.0). Utilizing the latest WebKit, Safari 4 makes impressive leaps in standards compliance and speed, incorporating a speedy new JavaScript engine called Nitro and many HTML 5 features, such as client-side database storage. Safari’s interface also features a facelift, which in my opinion, is long overdue! Some of its new eye candy includes a revamped toolbar, which moves slimmer tabs to the top (à la Google’s Chrome), a “smart” address and search bar, CoverFlow for bookmarks & history, and a new “Top Sites” view, which displays your most visited sites in a 3D fashion (a version of Chrome’s “Recent Pages” page, with souped-up eye candy). I’m very thankful Apple is moving Safari forward, but I am a little concerned that with the current speed of Chrome and FireFox releases (and MS’s new-found intensity with IE 8 ), it’s taken the company almost two years to do it. Apple can’t expect to compete in the browser space (at least on Windows) if major Safari releases only come once a year – Safari needs to be constantly updated with new features. Like many people, I spend the majority of my time in front of my computer using a browser, so not surprisingly, I want my experience to be good, fast, and lightweight on resources. Now that I’ve made my rant on update frequency and browser usage, let’s look at some individual complaints I have about Safari 4 after a day of use, and my wish list of features for the future:

Safari 4 Complaints:

• Speed/Performance: While Safari 4’s speed is touted as a major feature, and its render may be faster, the whole app feels slower – and this is ultimately what counts! On my PowerBook, Safari 4 uses more resources and feels at least 50% slower than Safari 3. On Windows, rendering common web pages and navigating the app in normal usage felt at least twice as slow as my current browser of choice, Chrome. I’m wondering if any of this has to do with the new eye candy - CoverFlow and “Top Sites” views – if so, it would be nice if we could turn them off. I don’t want to sacrifice speed for superfluous eye candy. Bottom line: Safari 4’s interface and the general app needs to be faster in order to compete!

• Not Good – “Safari Webpage Preview Fetcher” using 90%+ of my CPU: This is not good at all, especially on a laptop. My PowerBook’s fan is spinning out of control, and I’m being burned (not to mention the battery is draining extremely fast). It’s been doing this all day, and luckily, I’ve been close to a power source. This in itself will make me ditch Safari 4 and go back to Safari 3! I mean, come on – I have about 5,000 bookmarks. This is ridiculous - I don’t need or want all of them cached or fetched, using precious system resources and capped bandwidth to do it!!! Bottom Line: Fix it! Allow us to turn it off! I don’t want this running all the time, fetching my bookmarks even if it doesn’t use resources like this.

• No top bar for window management: On my Mac, there’s no top bar to grab an inactive window. If I click a tab at the top, Safari changes to that tab. I’m hesitant about clicking the top to move the window around as well. This hurts usability, and clashes with the Mac user interface guidelines. Bottom Line: Either there needs to be a little top bar (which even Chrome has a little of), or tabs shouldn’t change if the Safari window is in the background.

• Grabbing a tab: With Safari 3 (and Chrome), you can grab a tab anywhere on the tab, and rearrange it or drag it to a new window. With Safari 4, there is a specific spot you have to click to drag it. This is a step backward. Bottom Line: Bring back the old behavior!

• Top Sites: I like the idea, but I have mixed thoughts on the implementation. Off the bat, it’s a lot slower than Chrome’s version, no doubt due to the 3D UI. It looks cool, I guess, but I don’t think it works better. In fact, I feel it’s slightly more difficult to find the “Top Site” I’m looking for than with Chrome’s version (perhaps due to the roundedness?). I also like how Chrome integrates recent searches into this page. “Top Sites” also doesn’t seem to be refreshing the site thumbnails to the last loaded version – it’s still showing a log-in prompt from earlier on one site, and CNN from this morning which makes it even more difficult to tell what it is, and thus, less useful. It’s also slow to load the site after clicking a thumbnail – there’s a little zoom animation, where the thumbnail enlarges but remains dimmed for a few seconds until the page loads. Bottom Line: Fix the thumbnail, speed, & usability issues.

• No way to turn off or hide the CoverFlow view: I’ve never found CoverFlow particularly useful in any of its various implementations (iTunes, my iPhone, in the Finder), and I don’t think I’ll find it useful in Safari. Instead, my initial experiences confirm my 1st thoughts – it draws a lot of resources to cache and display the web page previews. Additionally, and here’s my biggest gripe – it takes up a lot of room in the bookmark/history window, and there is no way to turn it off or hide it!!! Bottom Line: There must be a way to turn off or completely hide the CoverFlow view in Bookmarks (either by a “Show CoverFlow” menu item or a preference option).

• Smart Address Bar, not so smart?: I’ve tried typing in both the names and addresses of some bookmarks and frequently visited sites into Safari’s version of FireFox’s ”Awesome Bar,” and it doesn’t show the expected sites. So, it doesn’t seem so smart or awesome, and it certainly isn’t very useful! I’ll keep testing, and report back, but the bottom line here is that it should work. If I type in Mint, it should return one of my bookmarks and frequently visited sites – mint.com (it didn’t). Another example, if I type “Wordpress” or “Blog Admin,” Safari doesn’t return my blog admin site (called in my bookmarks, “Jeff’s Blog Admin – Wordpress”). Useless!

Feature Wish List:

• Bookmark Tagging/Starring: One of the features I love from FireFox 3 is it’s bookmarking system. I can easily star a page, which I use to mark temporary sites I want to go back to – the star amounts to a bookmark in an ”unsorted” folder, which I can later delete or file away. I can also easily add tags to a bookmark when adding, making it easier to find or sort later. One other nice feature of FireFox & Chrome is the pop-down bookmarking interface from the toolbar, accessed by clicking the star, which is a lot better than Safari on OS X’s roll down sheet or Safari on Window’s pop-up menu.

• Bookmark Separators: Come on Apple, I’ve been wishing for this for years. Those little lines that make it easy to organize and divide your  bookmarks. Please? Pretty Please?

• Extensions: I’m sure I’m wishing for pie in the sky here, considering Apple’s legendary reluctance to allow outsiders to add or alter their meticulously designed user interfaces. Not to mention the fact that extensions could slowdown performance and/or stability and degrade the overall Safari experience. However, extensions are the one and only reason I come back to FireFox. When Chrome gets extensions (apparently by May), I may no longer have a need for FireFox at all. Bottom line: Safari’s lack of extensions only puts it farther behind the competition!

• Custom Search Provider Plug-ins: Firefox and IE do it, so should Safari. By the way, why do Window’s Safari users get an option to choose Yahoo for the search box, but Mac users don’t? Strange!

• Multi-process Windows/Tabs: For speed and stability, I’d like to see Safari use individual processes for each window or tab. This would help keep the entire app from slowing down when a single site is running slow due to a flash or a script (and I’ve experienced this more than I care to admit), crashing, and allow the app to release memory as a window is closed (and we all know how much of a memory hog Safari is).

• Visual Indication of Private Browsing: I like how Chrome darkens the app UI to indicate a window or tab is in “Incognito” mode. Safari should offer something similar. There have been many times where I have forgot I had private browsing enabled, and wondered why site’s were complaining about cookies not working!

One Comment to “My thoughts on Safari 4”

1. 

   Tone Franklin 27 March 2009 at 11:35 am #

   I agree with everything you say about Safari 4 and: The web page previews could be used to track internet usage by any 3rd party who can access that folder (why is it in a Hidden folder in Windows?). This feature can be temporarily disabled by deleting the “WebPage Previews” folder once Safari has loaded your home page – one has to do it every time though.

   There is also one glaring omission from Safari 4 – no Stop button! (Not a separate one anyway.)

   Reply

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