Safari 2.0

june 20, 2005

I am surprised at how much Safari 2.0 has stayed the same, yet how many little things have been changed. I have stopped using Camino for the time being because the nightly builds are still unusable (the slowness in the text box is enough to kill anyone) and the stable build is not as great (mostly because of the crappy tabs that start in the middle instead of the left on the stable build). Firefox for OS X continues to be the redheaded stepchild of the Mozilla Foundation. It looks crappy, feels crappy and is slow -- it looks like what it is, a Unix port of Firefox onto OS X. Everything about Firefox screams port. I know, aquafication of Firefox is coming soon (release 1.1 they say). Until then, I don't see myself using Firefox on my PowerBook G4 anytime soon. I really want to use a Mozilla Foundation browser on OS X, but there still is no good one yet. So for now, Apple continues to improve their Safari and it is making the browser a very nice tool. They finally added import and export functionality for bookmarks. They finally added the functionality to import security certificates. The private browsing feature is also a very handy feature. The RSS reader I am starting to use and get used to, the RSS reader will probably be the death of Newsfire usage -- since it is very nice to have the RSS reader and browser as one. NetNewsWire has the RSS reader and browser combination, but it does not take advantage of my favorite Safari add-on: Pith Helmet. Pith Helmet is Safari's answer to Firefox's AdBlock, it works great, it has all sorts of options, and it is fast. Overall, I think Safari 2.0 is a great release for Apple and I look forward to seeing what else they will be adding to the browser. Hopefully the browser will continue to be on the light-side and not get bloated. It still remains a damned fast browser.


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