Is Safari 4 a viable browser replacement? (Maybe?)
Wow, you should have read my original ‘”Safari 3 a viable replacement” or my “Will IE8 replace Chrome for me” post, which I never published. It sat in drafts as both of those browsers crashed and burned under the slightest hint of pressure. To sum it up: Safari 3 crashed after I opened 2 tabs, and IE8 never ‘suggested’ anything for me, let alone not remembering even 5% of my passwords. But the story is slightly different with Safari 4!
Let’s start with one feature which has been there for awhile
Top Sites!
It looks cool and all, and it’s very similar to the Chrome version of a similar feature, but for what it’s worth.. it looks fine and is editable to allow you to remove sites you don’t think are ‘top’ sites, like pictures of kittens in rainboots or something. Nonetheless, a ‘usable’ feature.
The next lovely feature is support for Tab-Preview that is available in Win7 (chrome doesn’t support Tab Preview :)) So you get a view similar to this below. Once you exceed 15 tabs though, it turns into the devil and looks like the second image.
But there is more to Safari than simply pretty looks and colors. It also has some functionality! (Similar to Chrome). One of those features is URL completion. Which translates into ‘I type part of the site I want to visit and it suggests it as the default one, so I can simply hit enter’ not the IE world of things by “Do you mean this, and scroll down to find it?” Which I say ‘hellz no!” I visit the same sites hundreds of times a day, and I don’t want to have to press down, that’s two key strokes too many!
The fact that it hasn’t crashed yet, is very pleasing considering I’ve switched to a full on ‘use it for everything’ model. And by everything I mean “Not for NetFlix because the bastards don’t support it even though they claim to”. I still need to check it for WebEx support as well as Oracle support so I can do the rest of my work using it…. :)
Memory and CPU usage have been kind of suckish, but considering I would have 3million chrome processes before, it’s not too bad.
Grammar/Spelling checking seems pretty cool!
One function which doesn’t work at the moment.. typing searches into the URL bar results in… not a search, but instead trying to open whatever ridiculous search term you had entered!
That results in me having to hit enter ‘twice’ in order to get my search term searched!
That’s all I’ll say about it for now! We’ll see how it lasts, considering I’ve used Chrome almost exclusively for the past… since it was released in early beta.. it will be an interesting trial and experience. One I won’t be shy to throw away if it’s not meeting my particular needs :) So, look forward to future ‘raving’ or ‘destroying’ of this particular browser, depending upon how it is seen fit. Oh, and it doesn’t let you view saved passwords like Chrome, which is a major negative in my book. It knows they’re there, so expose them to me, kthxbye!
