I saw from Engadget that Apple have released a new beta version of their browser, Safari, which will run on Windows. There are versions for Windows XP and Windows Vista.
I downloaded it and installed on an XP machine and it does appear to run quite quickly.
However, Apple still haven’t addressed Safari’s biggest bug - it is far too easy to close a window in accidentally Safari closing all its tabs. Both Firefox and Internet Explorer give you a warning if you try to close a window with multiple tabs open. How hard would it be for Safari to implement this feature?
Having said that, if you load the Acid2 test on IE7, Firefox and Safari for Windows, only Safari displays it correctly.
Opera also passes the Acid2 test (not displayed). However, Opera also allows you to close multi-tab windows without warning!
So as well as being fast, Safari for Windows is, along with Opera, the most standards compliant browser available. Just don’t close any multi-tab windows accidentally!
You can download the beta from the Safari download page.
Update 1: Apple’s official announcement is now up
Update 2:Â As Conall notes in the comments of this post, the multi-tab warning is working in the new Mac version of Safari.
Oh dear, Dr. Macenstein is reporting that Safari is a resource hog - using up to 76% more resources than Firefox.
According to Dr. Macenstien Safari grabs resources from the system even when idle in the background:
It seems to me that a background application, especially one that should not really be doing anything all that processor-intensive even when in the foreground, should not hog system resources the way Safari apparently does. If Firefox can play nice, why not Safari?
My default browser on the Mac is Flock and my next most used browser is Firefox (with typically 35+ tabs open). After that I use Camino and Safari in that order so this doesn’t affect me to much.
Anyone who is a heavy Safari user might want to look closely at this article and think about using an alternative browser.
Advertising any product to me is becoming more and more difficult. It is not just me, there is a growing number of people who are discovering ways to skip ads almost completely in their daily lives.
In my own case, I honestly can’t remember the last time I bought a newspaper but it would be years ago. I prefer to get all my news online.
I use the Firefox plugin Adblock to ensure I don’t see most ads online (see below)
This is the ENN site viewed without the Adblock plugin
This is the same ENN site viewed using the Adblock plugin
I used to listen to quite a bit of radio when I was on the road. Now however, I fill my iPod with podcasts before setting off on any journey and listen to those instead. This means that I am listening to content of my selection, relevant to my work, and I am not at the whim of whatever presenter happens to be on the radio.
I watch a decreasing amount of television. The TV I do watch tends to be DVDs or movie channels with no ads. I’d potentially watch a little more TV if I had Sky+ (similar to Tivo) but it is waaaaaaay too expensive.
And yes, before anyone says it, I do see the irony of posting this on a site who’s hosting is being paid for by Google ads!
So if you were an advertiser, trying to get your brand/message through to me (and people like me), how would you go about it?
Via Rob Burke, I saw a blog post on the IE blog listing add-ons which are available for IE7 and pointing out a site listing over 400 add-ons.
It is cool that there are now add-ons for IE7 which now give me functionality similar to that I already have in Firefox 2 (in many cases added with add-ons as well).
Unfortunately I couldn’t find an equivalent to my all-time favourite Firefox plugin, AdBlock and even more disconcerting is the fact that many of the IE plugins are commercial (i.e. not free!). Why would people pay for plugins for IE7 when similar plugins are available free for Firefox? Is it simply ignorance?
Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) has been released according to Dean Hachamovitch on the the IE7 blog. It is now available for download here.
IE7 will be rolled out via a critical Windows update in the coming weeks which, as I have mentioned previously, will become a support nightmare. For this version it would make a huge amount of sense to have an IE6 look and feel (skin) as the default look with an option to change.
via Scoble
I downloaded the latest Firefox rc2 this morning. Being based in Ireland I downloaded the English (British) version for my Mac because there is an inbuilt spell checker and I didn’t want all my spelling flagged as incorrect by a US spell checker!
Why is spell checking important in a browser? Well, I write all my blog posts and comments in the browser so having an inbuilt spell checker is, to my mind, invaluable.
However, when I fired it up, it froze on startup! I restarted it and it got going this time. However, it froze twice more, necessitating a force quit and a re-start of the browser. To add insult to injury, the spell checker isn’t available in the English (British) version of Firefox!
I have now downloaded the US version and it appears, so far, to be more stable. Oh, and the spell checker works in this version but it marks colour as a mis-spelling 
Yes, I know I can teach it the spellings but I was hoping to avoid having to do this.
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