Friday, 26 June 2009
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Schindler's List (Widescreen Edition)
By Liam Neeson, Ralph Fiennes, Ben Kingsley, Caroline Goodall, Jonathan Sagall
see relatedApple Safari 4 vs Mozilla Firefox 3.0.11
So, after talking with my good Xangan, Professor Tom, I decided to give Safari 4 a whirl.
Straight out of the box... err, download, the first thing that is immediately noticeable is that Safari 4 is fast. Blisteringly fast. This makes getting on and off to check facebook, email, xanga a less time consuming process. However, one thing that I did notice as I continued my browsing was that this speed came at the cost of not displaying the full page immediately. The page appeared in bits and pieces, and wasn't fully accessible immediately but after a few moments. This may sound like griping, but when compared with other browsers such as Mozilla Firefox 3.0.11 there really isn't much difference in the time it takes a "normal" page to fully download.
COntinuing my browsing, I also noticed that some pages do not fully display properly when using Safari 4: for example, bringing up the "blog now" screen of Xanga in Safari does not display all the tools needed for editing entries - bold, italic, underline and so forth. SOme other features - such as hyperlinking - are also not working. This may be a coding issue with Xanga, or something inherent in Safari 4 (which, after all, is designed primarily for Mac platforms) but it makes the browsing experience a bigger pain than it ought to be.
Another feature of Safari 4 that I like, and am interested in seeing developed further is the "home page", which displays a 3x4 screen of previews of your most popular websites visited recently as part of your history. Click the thumbnail, and you're back to that screen. This certainly makes browsing again, a little quicker, but this comes at the expense of a "drop-down" bar to click your most recently visited pages. Right now, I'm undecided as to whether this is something I can live with or something that could be addressed. It certainly is an interesting feature, for sure.
Safari 4 also makes you choose which menu and status bars you would like to display at the top of your screen, and for the less technologically capable of us this could prove disconcerting, although restoring the classical look is a simple process when you know where to go.
SOmething that I would like to see, and what would probably bring me over to Safari 4 should it be implemented, are applications or add-ons that enhance the base product. With Firefox, they are integrated seamlessly and really improve the browsing experience in an unobtrusive way - I've gotten so used to running the adblocker add-on that it's a surprise to me when I actually come across ads using other browsers, or Firefox without the add-on installed. The customability of Firefox is a big winner with me, and something that would need to be present in another browser in order to entice me to switch.
Clearing your history is much simpler in Safari 4, which for those of you with something to hide certainly makes it much more straightforward than Firefox's version.
Username and password control is a much easier to use in Firefox, witn an unobtrusive drop down bar displaying at the top of the screen for the duration of the time spent on the initial page you log into. I like this feature, particularly when on a personal computer. I've yet to discover Safari's equivalent.
In conclusion, if you're looking for purely blistering speed and basic page functions then Safari is your browser. For a more well-rounded and developed browsing experience, then Firefox is for you. As for me, I think I will perserve with Safari a bit more but right now my browser of choice will still remain with Mozilla Firefox 3.0.11
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Comments (5)
You don't know how good it feels to be tagged in a blog where I'm actually mentioned and the author actually knows me. Thanks for the shout out!
I'll first start out by saying that you're currently using the slowest operating system on the planet which is why you made this observation: "when compared with other browsers such as Mozilla Firefox 3.0.11 there really isn't much difference in the time it takes a "normal" page to fully download." I use the most advanced operating system on earth: OS X Leopard, and I can tell you that I have never seen Safari 4 load just part of the page. I have been annoyed that the page doesn't load until it's rendered the whole thing, but about the time I start to think about griping about it, the page is loaded. I have seen much better load times in Safari 4 than I have in Firefox 3.0.11, but I am using Firefox on a Mac and the site that I predominately use is slow as hell. (It's our internal support ticket system that our crack staff programmers wrote in a day. Quite impressed actually.)
I never really have been one for full screen browsing. I've done it a few times, but that bastard child Wind0ze had cemented in my brain browsing in a window. I also write my own HTML and eschew RTF editors. Xanga's editor has always been fucked up. For instance, when I pasted that quote of yours a couple of paragraphs up, it pasted it in the size and color of your text. That's just retarded.
As for sites with ads, I never see them. Opera is still my primary browser (though I am finding myself using Safari 4 more and more. I will continue to use Opera as my default browser because of its features, even though it's slower than Safari 4.) all I need is a pop-up blocker and I'm through. Safari blocks pop-ups very well too. Now, if you're telling me that you're completely blocking ads when you use Firefox, I think you're doing everyone a disservice. It costs money to run a website and you're robbing that webmaster of hard-earned revenue.
I've said this before and I'll say it again: if you need plugins for your web browser to work "properly" you need a better web browser. As much as I am against huge monolithic programs in general, I think that the browser should have everything you need to navigate the web. Why do I say this? Because the browser is the only supported piece of software that the browser manufacturer can support. So if you download some plugin that rapes your kids, the browser maker isn't responsible. The other thing that putting all tools in the browser does is forces the manufacturer to optimize the code that makes up the monolithic product. So in order for Opera to give you a better experience, they have to optimize each individual feature of the browser as well as overall integration. That is best done all under one roof.
I like the concept of plugins, but I think Firefox takes it too far. Firefox needs to concentrate on optimizing their render engine, making a lighter memory footprint and overall increase in responsiveness. Also, it wouldn't hurt if they would give it a makeover. It's ugly as shit.
I remember clearing history being easy in Safari 3, but I think it changed menus in 4. Didn't use 3 that much and when I did, I turned private browsing on, so I had nothing to erase anyway.
I use so many websites and have relied on Wand in Opera to store passwords for me that I have forced myself to not let browsers remember passwords. In this way, when I go to login to eBay or pay a bill, I now have to remember the password. Doing this is more secure and makes me have to review that information periodically so that if I'm not on my machine, I don't have to go through hoops to change my password. So I can't comment on password storage and retrieval.
I can, however, comment on forms. I got to a webpage where I was having to fill out pedigree information the other day. I typed one character and Safari populated all the fields in less than half a second. It was so fast and so unexpected that I had to pick my jaw up off the floor. I've been doing that a lot lately with Safari's overall general speed.
Lastly, the Top Pages screen...I have to say that I didn't like it at first, but it's growing on me. I wished it was like Opera's Speed Dial, which is where Firefox stole the idea from, much like they stole the "awesome bar" from Opera. I don't like that there aren't keyboard shortcuts to get to individual Top Pages entries. I also don't like how if you don't have your Top Pages pinned down, everything moves on you. You have to remember that Apple's UI mantra is "do it the easiest way possible" and what could be more easier than automatically having your most visited sites greet you when you open the browser and you click on the one you want? Still, I didn't like how Apple implemented Top Pages at first, but I'm starting to like it a bit more.
Overall, I've enjoyed Safari 4 a lot even though there are a few pages that don't render in it because it's new and quarky. I'm still not ready to make it my default browser, but I am finding myself using it more and more. If Opera doesn't come out with 10 soon and the new render engine be as fast as if not faster than Safari 4, it's going to be features and not speed that keep me on Opera.
Apple continues to impress, even if it takes forever for me to come around to their way of thinking.
I hate Xanga's comment box and the fucked up way they implement HTML.
I've never bothered to look at Safari or Opera, but I enjoy using Firefox (and occasionally Iceweasel on school comps) especially after using Internet Explorer.
It loads fast enough for me (the only way anything is going to load faster is if I get high-speed Internet instead of dial-up), but I do gripe about its memory usage. Because it slows itself down with that huge memory footprint, preventing everything else from processing.
Also, the thing that I like about FF, is that basically everything displays fine. If a page looks bad in FF, it's because it was designed/coded terribly, or it was meant to be viewed in IE (who does that anymore, anyway?). I don't like the idea of pages not loading well, so until that is fixed for other browsers, I am going to be sitting comfortably with FF.
@ProfessorTom - I disagree with you, I like that FF is known for its addons/plug-ins. Agreed, FF coders should focus on making the whole browser better, but I like that so many different addons are compatible with the browser. Obviously, with so many different addons, the coders have to put in a lot of work, but I think it is what makes FF great. The addons I think are necessary aren't what others want.
As it stands, I have 10 addons, some of them small that are used rarely, but some I use all the time. I'm glad FF works hard to allow other developers to create this addons.
Congrats to both of you for such an informative comparison.
-- Soledad
Websites that code for IE only suck greasy monkey balls. Interestingly enough, there was a discussion on this week's edition of Cranky Geeks that the latest numbers for browser share indicated that Firefox had surpassed IE, but it was a sudden spike. No one wants to to officially release just yet because they aren't sure why the Firefox numbers were up. Some speculate this was due to the 3.5 release, i.e. people testing but that people are creatures of habit and would return to IE. I tried googling this for you, but I couldn't find any of these news stories. Cranky Geeks didn't have a link either.
The problem I have with Firefox and all the plugins is that if you need that many plugins, it points to a fundamental lack of features in the browser itself. By the time you load all those plugins into memory, you've slowed the machine down to the point where it's unusable. Don't like ads? Fine. Try ignoring them if you don't like them. Not having them display will only save you on render time anyway. Yes, it's great that you can extend the browser, but with as much extension as is going on, you have to wonder if there isn't some trade off.