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Trever Fischer is a junior at The University of Akron
with a strong enthusiasm towards coding, writing, photography, and above all: oranges.
This is his site. Specifically, this is his "About" box. In addition to recently having finished his first year of college,
he is also a full-time hacker who tinkers with Amarok, Plasma, various KDE bits, and PHP.
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Safari, the Red-Headed Stepchild of Browsers
With the recent release of Safari on Windows, I thought it’d be nice for me to reiterate my ideas about the Browser Wars. For my everyday browsing, I use Konqueror on Linux and Opera on Windows. Right now, there are herds of firefox fans foaming at the mouth because of my previously vehement pro-firefox stance. Then I realized that it doesn’t really matter and people should be free to choose. When I set up my aunt’s new computer, the first thing I did was to install firefox and opera. I didn’t forage through the control panel to totally disallow access to IE. No, that would be stupid. Its her computer, so why should I care which one she uses? I only care that she knows there are others out there. No browser is perfect. No, not even Firefox, Safari, Opera, IE, or even Konqueror. They each have their own quirks and attitudes.
Why I don’t use Firefox (a lot)
The biggest reason for me, is the startup time. Its not because of the ‘massive memory usage’. Some folks may actually be shocked to know that I don’t have a memory usage problem, and thats because I disabled memory caching. I noticed no speed loss. But seriously, the startup time needs to be improved somehow. I’m afraid to look at the source code to even begin finding an answer, because I did it once before and didn’t like it. Mozilla developers are weird like that. On windows, my startup can take at most 25 seconds. On linux, it might take at least 2 minutes. For reasons totally unknown to me, Fedora’s firefox install randomly refuses to start. I type in the command and it quickly returns with no error except there is no firefox window. Usually takes a few tries but it starts up eventually.
Opera is faster
Since I am constantly logged into my linux machine and I usually have at least 2 konqueror windows open, I never experience starting a new process. Lets just explain Windows. Opera starts up almost instantly. On some occasions, IE beats it by a few fractions. But most of the time, Opera is quick. It also keeps downloads in a tab, which is handier than firefox’s window on my laptop.
Why people should stop tearing apart Safari
Have a look at this. Or even this. Ouch, thats harsh. The browser hasn’t even been around for a week and people are already saying how shitty it is. Never in my life have I ever seen such a critical reaction to anything. They act as though beta means the same thing as v1.0. If Safari had no bugs or flaws, it wouldn’t be called a beta. I am not a Mac fanboy, but I do know when idiots whine. Let’s discuss:
Spunlogic’s Response
Spunlogic’s blog lists 6 reasons why you shouldn’t use safari as your primary browser. I can think of only one, and that is ‘Beta’. Their first item is about the ctrl+enter shortcut found in firefox and IE. It doesn’t exist in Safari. But last I checked, ‘www’ was outdated and ‘.com’ is only 4 measly characters. Their second point is the whole window border issue. I can’t say much against it as I can’t stand windows that are not maximized. I just maximize them and let it be.
Like most anti-opera/anti-IE/anti-whatever fanboys, their next point is the lack of plugin support. Simply put, safari isn’t meant to be bloatware with an extensive framework for plugins. Moving on.
Their 4th point is a moot point. “Your website and application won’t look/work correctly.” Well last I checked, no two browsers handled HTML, CSS, and Javascript the same. Safari uses the KHTML rendering engine (dubbed webkit), which is what Konqueror uses. The one or two sites that KHTML couldn’t handle, I didn’t really want to be there anyways. Javascript is a different issue however, and thats the only valid point against Apple’s effort.
Finally, they whine that importing bookmarks is not automatic. Once again, there is this whole ‘beta’ thing. Their top priority was not to make Safari the biggest market share right out of the door. Their first priority was to get it out there so that folks can develop apps for the new iPhone.
The PCSpy’s Response
The PCSpy takes a few whacks at Safari as well. They start off with a very valid idea — don’t trust statistics. They say how Apple’s speed stats on Safari are misleading. This is true, because nobody cares about that extra second.
One of the other huge concerns from people is about Safari’s text rendering. They say it makes things all blurry and bold. I think it makes things look more like printed paper. Their reason for doing this is likely the fact that they chose to not use Microsoft’s ClearType rendering engine and instead wrote their own. But in either case, I can still read the text. More importantly, I don’t care what it looks like.
The largest concern from the security community was Safari’s security. Within hours (or maybe a day) some ‘researchers’ discovered a few security flaws in Safari. I’ve thought about that for a bit and wondered why these holes aren’t appearing on OS X. I then realized that Windows isn’t the most secure platform. It automatically assumes that the programmers know everything that can happen, so the OS doesn’t have to work as hard on their behalf. Thats one of the pitfalls of backwards compatability, so I can’t really pick at either Apple or Microsoft for that one.
Their final argument is against the apparent multitude of bugs and crashes. Are you ready for it? It’s bound to happen in any such debate against buggy software: It doesn’t crash for me. Nope, my Safari install doesn’t crash on my laptop, callisto. I’m not sure why but it Just Works.
Why I don’t complain
I don’t feel that Apple made a big mistake releasing Safari on an unsecure platform. I also don’t feel they made a big mistake by not performing extensive testing on Vista (which is where most of the bugs are).
3 Responses to “Safari, the Red-Headed Stepchild of Browsers”
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No not really… I’ve treated it as if it’s a real beta… The problem is, it’s far too premature to earn a beta label — in terms of bugs and things that fundamental browser features that are missing. The simple things should be in there before it hits alpha.
The rest of my criticism lies with Apple creating an application that looks like an OSX application inside Windows. You can get away with this on interfaces that only have a play and pause button but what they’ve done is just… Unintuitive and inconsistent for Windows users.
Additionally there are features that Apple has chosen to omit because OSX doesn’t use them. It’s those genres of inconsistency that make applications a complete pigdog to work with day-to-day.
And the speed of vulnerability discovery shows immaturity in Apple’s development process for cross-platform, critical, scriptable applications. They keep things hidden like children, even amongst their own developers until they’re ready to show mummy and daddy what they’ve made. That approach doesn’t cut it from a security aspect.
If Apple wants to play around on other platforms, they need to surrender some pride and do the work that other browser makers do to make sure it looks and works consistently and also takes the necessary steps to keep the user secure.
They could have forgone 50% of this criticism by holding onto the code for another month and doing some proper testing on the browser. The risk of the information leaking that they’re working on a Windows browser would have worked in their favour and they would have had a better response from people like us.
I have the same problems with firefox on windows and linux sometimes. It just does not start. Sometimes I run it, and sometimes it will launch fast, and other times it will not launch for a few minutes, and sometimes it will not launch at all.
I just wish opera has more extensive extension support so I could use it more often. It’d be really cool if they open sourced it too, but that would just be an added bonus.
Perhaps the most annoying thing about firefox is not the software itself, but the community that has formed around it. The original people that were using firefox were using it because it was a lightweight browser opposed to the mozilla suite and IE. Since it became popular, you get all these users which fanny around claiming that x browser is so much better than y and such. You only have to look at the petition @ dell ideastorm (http://www.dellideastorm.com/article/show/62245) to see how much the community has degraded. Ultimately, the decision should be given to the user. Sure, you can influence someone and provide reasons why x is better than y, but a lot of the time people who claim x is so much better than y actually have no solid proof behind it anyways.
As for safari.. i tried it out and personally did not like it. But I guess I’ll wait for the final release to ultimately judge it.
My counter point to your responses:
For reason #1, I was not aware of the [ENTER] keystroke until after my post. What’s interesting about this keystroke is that it is only available on the Mac version of Safari so Apple clearly recognizes that there’s a need for such a keystroke but decided to leave it out in the Windows version.
For reason #4, I find add-ons in FireFox very useful. For example, I religiously use IE view, Web Developer, Mouse Gestures and Better Search. I saw that Safari is suppose to handle plug-ins but searched high and low for some without luck.
From the above, you can see that these are two big disappointments for me. I stand by my blog that there’s no reason to switch. Don’t get me wrong – I am a Mac and Apple fan (I’ve even owned stock in Apple). I’m just hopeful that Apple gets it right sooner than later; they are fanatic about their designs so why not their software, including Beta?