Comments on: Safari 4 Beta Browser: Why Is Everyone Hating It?

By: Doug

Doug — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 10:49:27 +0000

If lots of people are saying “Opera can’t do this or that” when in fact it can, it sounds to me like the UI needs a bit of a rethink. If it has features that lots of users can’t find, that’s almost as bad as not having the features…

Overall I quite like Opera, but for me it’s competing with Safari for title of “slowest browser I’ve ever seen”. Maybe it’s just me, but the ones that claim to be mind-abusingly fast are always the ones that take 2 minutes to load a mainstream homepage like http://www.apple.com. It was the same as far back as Netscape 2 if I remember rightly.

By: Doug

Doug — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 10:41:02 +0000

Having a global “allow popups” option is no bad thing per se. More options is always good IMHO. But yes, ONLY having a global option, and failing to provide a site-by-site option to complement it, is pretty slack in this day and age.

And by the way, do any other Windows users notice that it’s now using the standard Windows UI for the window borders (a.k.a. the “chrome”, thanks Google for pinching that term)? My Safari 3 was using a Mac-based chrome and I happened to like it! (And please don’t tell me “start using a Mac then”, I can’t afford one!)

By: pavlo

pavlo — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 09:09:32 +0000

I tried Safari 4 yesterday and I was not impressed. They’ve done away with the blue progress bar! That’s a backwards step. There’s no way of knowing whether your page is actually progressing in its download -and if it is – how fast it’s loading. That alone was enough to send me back to Safari 3. My perception was that it was very slow to load pages.

By: Ashok

Ashok — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 08:37:26 +0000

compare with firefox safari beta taking too much of memory.

By: Chowder

Chowder — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 20:57:38 +0000

I heard that it wasn’t secure as other browsers.

By: Rarst

Rarst — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 16:42:57 +0000

>thereâ€™s no way to â€œOpen in a New Tab in the backgroundâ€ in Opera. This seems like a no-brainer for a configuration option.

Middle click. Don’t remember if it is default, Shift+Middle click to configure.

I am so tired of people saying Opera can’t do this, that… Opera can.

By: Derek

Derek — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 14:38:20 +0000

I’ve been having a lot of problems with Firefox crashing daily on my Macbook Pro, so I’ve started using Safari 4 beta instead. Firefox started using way too much CPU while sitting idle, and its CPU usage would skyrocket to 99% indefinitely; I would have to kill it and restart it once a day.

With the SafariBlock (ad blocking) and SafariStand (I use it for keyword searches right now), there’s nothing I miss from Firefox yet. It’s a little heartbreaking, personally, since I’ve used Firefox since it was called Phoenix several years ago. Recently, it’s just become too unstable for me to use.

For the record, I tried Opera for some time before Safari4, but a couple things annoyed me: I really like 1Password (no Opera support) and that there’s no way to “Open in a New Tab in the background” in Opera. This seems like a no-brainer for a configuration option.

Also for the record, I believe Opera’s Speed Dial predates Google Chrome’s “top sites” by some time. I prefer their Opera’s to it a bit better: you add your own sites instead of showing the sites you visit the most.

I’m looking forward to trying out Google Chrome on OS X when it’s released.

By: Michele

Michele — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 11:35:16 +0000

It’s very shameful that Safari has a “popup allowed” ON/OFF.
Real browsers have an allow/block list for this purpose.

By: Stefan Neagu

Stefan Neagu — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 05:51:54 +0000

RAM memory has consistently cheapened over time. Earlier versions of Safari used more memory than Safari beta 4 and I’ve got the screenshots to prove it. From the Safari perspective, it’s an improvement. It’s like saying that a VW Beetle is faster than the previous version but not faster than Mercedes SLK. If you’re looking for extreme performance, you should use WebKit or Chrome.

By: Mackenzie

Mackenzie — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 02:49:32 +0000

Holy crud! “Uses slightly more memory than Firefox” is a performance improvement??? I thought Firefox was the most bloated, most memory-leaking browser out there. Now you’re telling me that Firefox-levels of memory use are an improvement for another browser? O_O And you’re pointing to 150+mb of memory usage as good.

With Firefox 2, wasn’t it 80mb of usage and everybody up in arms? And now the memory usage doubles and it’s considered low? What?