Safari 3 Public Beta

When Apple recently at WWDC announced that they will be releasing their web browser Safari for Windows, I think most of us were surprised. Safari for Windows was not among the typical rumors. In fact, I don’t think I had read about it before. Anyway, the beta is out for Mac and Windows, and I thought we’d take a look at some of what’s new in Safari 3 beta. A major revision of Safari doesn’t happen very often so this is big news in the Mac world. Now that Safari has been so intimately linked to development of web applications for the iPhone, it’s even bigger news. Apple announced that the iPhone would not have applications in a traditional sense, and that anyone wanting to write applications would basically write web applications and they would be tested in Safari. Besides that, obviously the big news is that Safari now also runs on Windows. Apple has ventured into Windows before with iTunes, AppleWorks, and more, so they have some experience. his is arguably so they can widen the development support for iPhone and it’ll be interesting to see how it develops from here. One of the more visible news is searching on web pages, which highlights all occurrences it finds and shows the current one in a very nice way. his is something FireFox has done for a while in a similar way. The other thing Steve Jobs touted was the speed, saying it’s the fastest browser available. A graphic on Apple’s site even shows how much faster Safari is than all the other major browsers. hat may be true and it feels really fast, but it’s perhaps nothing that most users will think about all the time. But it’s welcome that Apple addresses this issue which is important to everyone using a web browser. In the brief time I’ve used the new beta, I’ve found resizable form ields very useful. If a ield is too small for what you’re typing, drag its corner and make it larger. Or make a large box smaller to show more of a web page. You can now reorder tabs by dragging them to a new position and if you drag a tab onto a web page space, it’ll open up in a new window. FireFox has a function which automatically saves the session you’re in so if the browser crashes you can get back to the pages you were looking at. Safari 3 introduces something similar even though it’s much more limited. Apple would do well to expand this functionality. In terms of bookmark- ing there’s not much new. You can now easily bookmark all open tabs in one bookmark. So you could, for example, open up in tabs all your favorite sites, then save them as one bookmark. Opening that bookmark will open all your sites in their individual tabs. here’s also now a very welcome option for resetting the size of the text on a web page back to normal. Before you could only make it larger or smaller. Personally I really welcome this. Finally, you can select how long Safari should keep your browsing history. Safari 3 Public Beta is a free download from www.apple.com/safari/download/.

by Magnus Nystedt