Anyone else using Safari 4?

I gave its new tabs a try for about a week but then used the hidden pref to restore the traditional tabs. Apple unfortunately goofed big time with tabs in the titlebar. It looks like they were trying too hard to improve what Google had created with Chrome in this respect. But failed. Windows need a title bar and Chrome has one that sits above its tabs.

I also restored the original page-load progress display (coloured background in address field).

Installing Glims gives me type-ahead (ability to search on the page by just typing, without first invoking a find command), dated download folders and search shortcuts in the address bar among other things.

I've noticed one PITA problem with Safari's new Top Sites view. It accesses the sites within it to check whether they have new content and to refresh their images. In doing this it's using the cookies stored locally for those sites. For EmpegBBS (and I suppose other forums) this means that when you go to the actual site you may not see any unread threads. It's as if you've visited twice, so everything might be considered read.

I first noticed this a couple of days ago and then realized it was because I was using the Top SItes page.

Other than that, this release seems only about as stable as version 3. As you open pages it takes up more and more real memory and doesn't release it when you close sites/tabs/windows. It will suck up to about 250MB where it will then stay pegged. Safari 3 seemed to have issues where memory use would possibly climb a LOT higher than this. I'd still like to see memory released as pages are closed if they're not going to use that memory to quickly restore the view of a previously viewed site (it doesn't seem like this is being done anyway).

I've been using it as my main browser for a bit now, and for the most part like it. The top sites is now my main page for any new window or tab, and I'm using it as my bookmarks to some extent. The one complaint I have about it though is that it allows some basic editing and rearranging, but no way to manually add a site.

As for the issue with marking threads read, I haven't had that come up yet, though it is only showing the main page for me on the top sites. I could see this being an issue if it moved a sub forum onto the top sites as well.

There actually is. It's both obvious and non-obvious at the same time. It's obvious because it can be done with drag-and-drop, but it's non-obvious because you must drag URLs from another window (you can't drag a tab to the Top Sites list). There's a little bugginess with the initial display of controls, but once you stop editing and re-open the Top Sites, everything is fine.

So here's the whole thing: view your Top Sites and open another window. Navigate by whatever means you want to your desired site in the new window. Press the Edit button on the Top Sites view. Drag the URL from the new window by the icon in the address bar into your Top Sites list. When you release, that site will be inserted into your list.

Here's the display issue. You won't see an "X" to remove that site nor a pin to fix it in place. If you press the Edit button to stop editing, navigate to a different site and then re-open Top-Sites and Edit, you will see that the remove button appears and that the site you dragged in is pinned.



Yeah, I have a Top Site item specifically for the Off-Topic forum, since it's the way I always come to the BBS. In fact I checked out some of the other sub-forums today for the first time in months.

Given the expanse of extensions for Firefox, and the amount of them that I actively use, I see absolutely no reason to change in order to get fewer features. FF does seem to have a problem with memory consumption, especially on lower-end machines, but Safari is going to be no better.

(I wrote this like two hours ago and forgot to press "Submit", so sorry if this is redundant.)

Is this new Top Sites basically the same as Opera's Speed Dial?

Top Sites

Yeah, except it keeps the thumbnails updated and tells you if there have been changes since the last time you visited. Nice feature, I suppose.

I have been on the "verge" of switching to Firefox for a few months. I ran Firefox for quite a while. Since before version 1 final up to just before 1.5 I believe. The frustration with it just kept building and building. It had memory leaks gallore and just got to be very very slow.

Then I switched to Camino which I ran for quite some time.

I only started using Safari after that, with the version 3 betas. The release version of 3 wasn't as good as the betas. The beta never crashed on me. The release version crashed at least once every two weeks for a long time and ate memory like crazy.

Version 4 improves on 3 in terms of speed and sustainability (maintaining that speed after having the app up for a day or more). So far so good.

It lacks plugins. But at the same time, with Firefox, I have to install a bunch of plugins and themes just to get it to be as basic as Safari. The one big thing I'm missing in Safari right now is a nice Ad Blocker. SafariBlock and Adblock are nowhere near as nice as AdBlock+ for Firefox. Adblock especially really has no controls and has no ability to reformat the pages - you just get huge empty spaces where there should be an ad.

Some features that are built-into Firefox which I dearly miss: Pop-up blocker with exceptions and notifications, ability to disable specific javascript actions (like window moving and resizing).

I'll probably give Chrome a try once it's available in a stable public beta. I'm hoping Apple will see fit to implement tabs as unique processes at some point. Safari still seems very single-threaded from a user-interaction standpoint.

If anyone else running Safari 4 can withstand a browser hang, try this link:

http://www.joeyl.com/blog/index.php

I'm about to try it again, but last night it would hang my Safari 4 installation every single time. Worked fine in Firefox3.