Archive for: safari
We’ve been using OS X Lion on our new MacBook Air for a little over a week now. During that time we’ve reverted back to Safari for our internet conquests solely because Google Chrome doesn’t yet support all of Lion’s baked-in gesture functionality. But things are beginning to change with the current Chrome Dev version 14. Besides new two-finger swipe for forward/backward navigation between tabs, speed is once again a focus. But is it the fastest? Along with Chrome and Safari 5.1 we’ve been using the latest version of Opera as well (a grossly underrated browser) and find all to be very close in terms of pure speed.
With that said, which browser (out of the three) do you find the fastest on OS X Lion? Leave your thoughts in the comments after the break…
Yay! Browser market share numbers. This rather unexciting topic is oddly enough one of our favorite topics. On that note, Zdnet has released a new chart (above) that shows browser market share over the last year. Specifically, Chrome is up 6% along with Safari’s ~2.25%. Meanwhile Mozilla’s Firefox and Microsoft’s IE browsers continue to bleed users with the latter now falling to 53.7% overall. While IE still holds over half of the world’s browser share, we’ve seen it tank in the last couple of years thanks to faster updates from the likes of Chrome, Firefox and Opera as well as a continuing sub-par support of modern and upcoming web technologies. With that said, IE 9 has actually been rather relevant concerning new web technologies. Though Microsoft has always been extremely slow at updating IE, and unless things change, we’ll see competitors update their own browsers many times over before Microsoft can push out another worthwhile update.
Anyone care to share their browser of choice?
If the OS X 10.7 (Lion) UI tweaks we showed you earlier weren’t efficiently wetting your whistle, how about some Safari 5.1 action? The above screenshot (compliments of AppleInsider) shows us yet another iOS-esque feature making its way to the desktop, specifically Safari.
When a download is in progress within Apple’s latest upcoming browser, a new icon appears next to the web address/search bar. Clicking on it opens up an iPad-esque downloads box that lists ongoing downloads and allows you to mount/unmount, click to launch, and ignore them. There is also a “find” option that will open up Finder and highlight the selected download for easy retrieval.
Who’s getting excited for Lion?
- December 22, 2010 7:52 am
While some of the bigger features of iOS 4.2 such as AirPrint and AirPlay dominated the limelight, Apple snuck in a few other gems. As it just so happens, a development company by the name of Occipital happened to stumble upon one of these so called secret features: Augmented Reality.
You can check out the AR capabilities within Mobile Safari by pointing your browser to the live demo the developers at Occipital set up here. With all the talk of the web being the future of “apps”, it’s certainly cool to see a traditionally local feature move to the browser.
For Windows users, Apple’s Safari browser is borderline garbage. It seems they ported it to Windows simply because they felt “they had to”. Mac users on the other hand enjoy a much more polished and refined browser that among other things, doesn’t crash every five minutes. Speaking more-so to the latter, if you’ve managed to keep laser focused on Apple’s in-house browser in the age of Chrome 6, Chrome 10.5, and Firefox 4 beta 2, the new Extensions Gallery which just went live will make your browsing experience much, much better.
Much like Firefox and Chrome’s extensions portfolios, Safari’s will seek to bring untold amounts of added productivity, connectivity, and entertainment to the browser. After taking a brief spin through it myself, I must say that there are some pretty notable players already jumping in. For myself, I’m finding the Twitter extensions to be pretty handy, displaying relevant/trending tweets alongside the page I’m currently in — nice!
The Bing extension is another nifty one that incorporates robust search, mapping, social information, and statuses (read: flight updates) right within the page by simply highlighting text.
Clearly, Safari just became a much more useful browser. Go on ahead and give it try. Just make sure to come back and let us know what you think?
Safari Extensions Gallery
One of Apple’s routine talking points of their mobile Safari browser is just how fast it is, often citing Javascript performance as a good indicator. Yesterday however, several sites started running with a story showing that Android 2.2 (Froyo) and the Nexus One in particular downright stomp on iOS 4 when it comes to Javascript.
But more than two can tango at this game. MeeGo may not be widely available (hell, a lot of people probably haven’t the slightest idea what it is), but that doesn’t mean it can’t throw down a beating of its own.
Granted, the MeeGo phone in question is a prototype Moorestown device running mobile Firefox. So the “stock” nature of this claim is somewhat iffy. But either way, it’s nice to see the competition going at it hard and fast, no?
The days leading up to WWDC were just as stress-filled as ever, with nerds around the world constantly bickering back and forth as to what Apple was going to reveal. Now that the dust has settled and everything has been ‘splayed before our eyes, it’s time to get into the nitty gritty of Apple’s latest portfolio. So without further fan fare, jump inside for the full rundown of WWDC 2010…
I’m not trying to beat a dead horse or kick a man while they’re down, but what else can I do to voice my displeasure with Apple’s handling of their “HTML 5″ demos?
The first clue was when navigating to the demos page with Chrome 5.x. I was promptly met with a dialog box saying that I needed to download Safari to take advantage of these new fangled tricks. But as OS News points out, Chrome in particular actually has better HTML 5 standards support than Safari.
The whole grand show about CSS3 isn’t spot on either. Apple is making use of “-webkit-border-radius” when the real CSS3 code is “-border-radius”. That little difference means only Webkit browsers will understand the round border idea while others such as Firefox and Opera do not. Ya, that’s pretty shitty. Guess Apple’s definition of “open” and “HTML5″ aren’t quite what the rest of the world has set forward. Apple really is turning into the Microsoft of the decade with their forceful “it’s my way or the highway” ways. Funny how history repeats itself…
The rest of OS’s article is worth giving a look over, so go on ahead and stop by.
Oh the irony. Apple today took the wraps off of a new HTML 5 & Web Standards page, showing off to devs and end users alike what HTML 5 and other bleeding edge web standards are capable of. Only problem — this “openness” is limited (artificially) to only Apple’s Safari browser.
Now I know for a fact the latest betas of Chrome and Firefox can do at least half the stuff in the demos. But I digress. For Safari users, head on over to the HTML 5 Demo Page and have fun.
For the rest of us…you can skip Apple’s artificial limitations by pointing your seemingly incompetent browsers here — (developer.apple.com/safaridemos/).
Whiz banged or is Flash still relevant?
