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Beta Beat: New to Safari 3

by Erica Sadun Jun 12th 2007 at 12:00PM

A big thank you to everyone who has sent in tips and comments about their experiences both good and bad with the new Safari 3 beta. I'm surprised by what an amazingly mixed bag this new beta seems to be. It has tons of new great features as well as the cursed instability issues, security concerns, and problems with de-installation. In this post, I'm going to round up some of the cooler features reported by readers. I'll leave the security worries and the installation issues aside for the moment.

Search has a new look. I'll be honest. I really don't like the new Safari search look. The screen dims and keywords highlight. I find the dim display hard to read and I keep wanting to adjust my screen brightness. I wish there were a way to search using the new highlights without the dimming feature.

Text Fields resize. The diagonally-striped resize handle now appears in the corner of text fields, allowing you to resize them as needed. The resizing happens live on the Safari page and the rest of the web page adjusts to accommodate the new size. It's a nice touch--albeit one that I'm not sure I'll use much.

You can drag tabs. Safari now allows you to reorder your tabs by simply dragging them to a new spot. I'm not entirely sure how I'll use this, but again it's a nice feature to have.

Tab closing warning. I don't remember seeing this before outside of Firefox: Safari will warn you when you attempt to close several tabs at once by clicking the window close button. Forgive me if its not new to Safari 3, it was new to me.

Google server search. If Safari cannot find a server when you enter a URL, it now offers a Google search box on the error page.

You can drag tabs out as new windows. Safari 3 lets you grab a tab and drag it out of the tab bar or onto the desktop where it morphs into a new window.

Spellcheck is improved. Safari's built-in OS X spell check features seem to be working a lot better and more consistently than they used to.

Add bookmarks for N tabs. A nice new bookmarking feature that lets you add more than one new bookmark at a time based on the number of open tabs in the currently displayed Safari window.



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Software Beta Beat

A big thank you to everyone who has sent in tips and comments about their experiences both good and bad with the new Safari 3 beta. I'm...
 

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nick p


I am using OS 10.4.10 and the new Safari 3.0.2.

Every time I try to open a pdf link, Safari crashes. Anyone else have this problem? Never happened before. Other browsers I use are fine. Other than uninstall, is there a fix?

June 25 2007 at 9:35 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Dan

"40 said: Safari 3, like Safari 2, just can't open the site http://www.cfsl.net/, unlike Camino & Firefox."

Actually like many sites that don't work with Safari, it is the sites faulty not Safari. If you have the Debug menu enabled. Set your user agent to anything but Safari and that site will work.

I see this allot, especially with sites using .net or ASP. There are allot of sites that check your User Agent and if it is not Internet explorer for windows. The sites just not generate the HTML for the page to display or display properly.

Almost all of these sites will render properly if you fool it into thinking that you are user IE for windows.

June 17 2007 at 1:51 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Scott Reeves

Nevermind, looks like I'm too late :)

June 13 2007 at 12:06 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Scott Reeves

zsombor: Try looking in /Library/Application Support/SIMBL/Plugins

June 13 2007 at 12:05 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
zsombor

OK, I found a SIMBL directory in /Library/InputManagers which I did not see until now (seems i have problems with my eyes :) and now it works perfectly, i can close any window :))

June 13 2007 at 12:02 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
zsombor

I removed all InputManagers and reinstall Safari3, then uninstall, and reinstall, and still cannot close the window. and i got no error message.
where could there still be plugins which i installed but forgot?

June 13 2007 at 10:15 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
stefan K

Gil - http://www.cfsl.net/ works fine on my Safari 2, unless I am missing something. I run it with Saft and Inquisitor 3. 2 things I really like that's why I am still not sure if I should take the risk and try Safari3...

June 13 2007 at 5:27 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Scott K

@37: I also had the problem of not being able to close any of the windows. Turned out it was a problem with one of the plugins I had installed (I would get an error message on application start). I removed the plugin and now it works great.

Initially Safari 2 would work great and run fast and then over time it would get slower (even with cache turned off) and display the beach ball a lot. Safari 3 has not yet had this behavior. I'm hoping that Apple fixed whatever the problem.

June 13 2007 at 12:39 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Gil

40 said: Safari 3, like Safari 2, just can't open the site http://www.cfsl.net/, unlike Camino & Firefox.

Oh yay, another wanker using javascript to either redirect Safari 3 or hide the css from the browser.

How desperate can they be?

June 12 2007 at 9:32 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Peter Payne

#3, this is a BIG problem with TUAW, Engadget and other pages. Safari refuses to remember the password even if you have "remember me" checked. And TUAW refuses to do anything about it, I've agitated enough in the past. Nothing is more fun than posting a comment and going to bed, only to find my comment has not gone up because I need to click the stupid web link.

TUAW guys, yes I am talking to you. Do something about your page, please.

Also, what about Saft? I presume it breaks, but is Apple putting Saft features into the browser?

June 12 2007 at 9:13 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
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