Filed under: Software, Beta Beat
Beta Beat: New to Safari 3
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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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 3)
Michael May said 12:04PM on 6-12-2007
I like the new search thing, i used to have to hunt around the screen for the light-blue highlighted text. this is much easier! The tab dragging is cool too. But why is it still brushed metal? I want unification, dammit!
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Metanaut said 12:16PM on 6-12-2007
New features, subtle as they are, are nice additions. However, after a few minutes Safari 3 Beta stopped displaying pages for me. They'd load but the window would stay completely white. Fortunately, the Uninstaller worked fine. This one needs more time in development.
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NitRam Den Gale said 12:22PM on 6-12-2007
I also like the new search function! Now it's much easier to find what you are looking for.
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trainwrecka said 12:20PM on 6-12-2007
safari has a few let-downs. i mention them here: http://twibe.com/?p=1054 ---- one i didn't mention: how do i get safari to remember my TUAW password for commenting? Firefox does it without a problem. not sure what is going on.
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Jim C. said 12:23PM on 6-12-2007
One subtle change I immediately noticed was that the new WebKit engine seems to open up more AJAX-y goodness. The most prominent example I noticed was with GMail. It used to be that if you wanted formatting controls when composing an e-mail (font face, color, etc.) you needed to open up Firefox... Safari wouldn't do it. Open up GMail in Safari 3 and *poof* the formatting controls are there! It'll be nice to see what other sites open up in functionality under Safari 3.
Also of minor note: there's more included User Agent options under the Debug menu.
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bookemdano said 12:24PM on 6-12-2007
Nothing here yet that will make me run back to safari. The funny thing is that, as a Mac user, I *want* to love safari.
Right now I just really like the new features in the Flock alpha. Sulfur or Cormorant or whatever they are calling it. I have to say its a pretty neat browser. It'll be sad if I have to give it up in order to get the most out of 10.5.
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Wouter said 12:25PM on 6-13-2007
S3 worked fine for me so far.
Liked the new find on page function, although I prefer the way the windows Google toolbar handles it.
I hate the tab closing warning. It gives S3 the wrong kind of MS windows-feel. Apple: Please drop this "are you sure" popup.
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Luigi193 said 12:26PM on 6-12-2007
I LOVE the knew search, i never ever could find that freaking blue highlight!!! Also, you forgot that all text boxes and most buttons look different, unless that is just here, but i thought i remember seeing it other places also!
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buzweaver said 12:29PM on 6-12-2007
It still baffles me that there isn't a sort feature for bookmarks, this should be necessary to qualify a browser as a browser.
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smqt said 12:30PM on 6-12-2007
New feature: Window > Merge All Windows
:)
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Chris Utopian said 12:32PM on 6-12-2007
The reordering of tabs isn't a new feature, you can do it in safari 2, just without the cool animation.
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PhyerFly said 12:38PM on 6-12-2007
For the love of God, Apple - please make Safari for windows behave like iTunes for windows and let me resize it from any edge and not just the bottom right.
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Kwahnoom said 12:38PM on 6-12-2007
I'm pretty sure this is a new feature: Safari 3 Beta will autocomplete top-level domains for your bookmarks. e.g. if you have http://www.tuaw.com/2007/06/12/beta-beat-new-to-safari-3/ in your bookmarks and only that URL for TUAW in your bookmarks, Safari will offer to complete http://www.tuaw.com/ in addition to the bookmarked URL once you start typing t-u-a...
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running said 12:42PM on 6-12-2007
Hey, you totally got me with that "days of our lives" page :) i am surprised nobody else noticed that!
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Daniel D said 12:43PM on 6-12-2007
One thing I am very grateful for.... when you have a flash video playing in a non active video (youtube) it would the half the frames per second that were playing so it was worse to watch (albeit still watchable) now when I have a youtube video playing i can drag it out to one side and itll be just like it was when it was in the active safari window!
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running said 12:49PM on 6-12-2007
#13: omg omg omg, Days on iTunes is TRUE! sorry I thought it is a JOKE! so... sorry :)
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Michael May said 12:51PM on 6-12-2007
@Kwahnoom:
yes!! that's brilliant, works for history too! The number of times I have gone to random subsubsub pages I was browsing earlier instead of the home page.... ahh.
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Ryan said 12:19AM on 6-13-2007
Metanaut: I was having the same issue with pages 'loading' but showing completely white windows. I was thinking this was pretty disappointing, until I removed the Safari Stand plugin that I had in the input managers folder, and I have not seen a blank page since (improved from seeing a blank page almost all of the time).
I also LOVE the new search - too often I end up having to scan through the whole page just to find the subtly-highlighted text the browser already found for me. This just grabs the eye and brings focus exactly where it should be.
Erica - If the rest of the page is too dim during the search, just click "done." Is there any reason you need to keep the word highlighted once you've already found it?
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Ian said 1:27PM on 6-12-2007
I think new search is the most important improve in this release. I don't know a person who likes the old search system, where you had to read all the text to find what Safari had find. Now there's no mistake: what is find it's find and clearly highlighted. I also love the way they integrate search in the browser window, instead of that ridiculous box of the pevious version.
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Joshua Ochs said 1:22PM on 6-12-2007
Apple screwed the pooch on this beta.
They have a perfectly good system for distributing self-contained nightlies of Safari. However, instead of using this, the Safari 3 Beta overwrites the system-level WebCore and JavaScriptCore, and requires a fragile "uninstaller" package to revert. Meanwhile, said beta not only has some minor issues, but it breaks all InputManager hacks, breaks many widgets, breaks some third-party applications.
Why were people subjected to this? Whoever is in charge of the Safari 3 Beta should be in serious hot water, as it's causing a lot of completely unneccessary end-user pain, and giving Safari 3 an undeserved reputation as a crashy, unstable browser. They had a better system and failed to use it when it would be most appropriate.
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