Stable Speedsters — Safari 5 and Opera 10.60 Alpha 1
Wednesday, June 8, 2010
by Charles W. Moore
Mac OS X users have an embarrassment of choice in really great Web browsers these days. The intense competition among developers is keeping product development at full boil. Some folks are loyalists to one browser application, but my inclination is to go with whatever is offering the best combination of features and speed, and I usually have at least three browsers up and running at any given time. Lately, that’s been Opera, Chrome, and Firefox on my Intel MacBook, and Opera, Sea Monkey, and Shiira on my G4 Pismo PowerBooks. However, with Monday’s release of Safari 5, Firefox may have been bumped out of the leader pack for now. It’s early days yet, but so far, I’m being blown away by Safari 5’s newfound speed.
Unfortunately, but as anticipated by many of us who still use older Macs running OS 10.4 Tiger, there is no Tiger version of Safari 5, but as a consolation Apple has concurrently released Safari 4.1 for Mac OS X 10.4 — a refinement and bugfix update with a few of Safari 5’s features added, such as juiced JavaScript, DNS prefetching and improved page caching. Safari version 4.1 will almost certainly be the definitive last Safari browser for the Tiger OS, save perhaps for the odd security update.
Close Integration With OS X = Fast Startup
One downside of Safari is that you have to run an installer and then restart the computer. I’m inclined to go two or three weeks between reboots, so I find this a pain. However, the installer and reboot are necessary because of Safari’s close integration with OS XS, and you notice the payoff from this configuration immediately in the relative eyeblink Safari 5 takes to start up compared with other browsers.
However, I’m cautious. I’ve been down this road before with new Safari releases, and after an initial burst of enthusiasm drift away to other browsers. It’s not anything major — just an accretion of minor irritants. I’m not a big fan of Safari’s user interface appearance, and then there are things like having to root around in the History menu in order to reload all open tabs from a previous session. The progress bar in the address field doesn’t enchant me either.
30 Percent Speed Improvement
But it’s really fast! Apple claims that the new Nitro JavaScript engine, on the Mac version of Safari 5 provides a 30 percent performance increase over Safari 4, and my seat-of-the-pants impression gives me no reason to doubt it. The also maintain that Safari’s JavaScript performance is three percent faster than Chrome 5.0, and over twice as fast as Firefox 3.6. Safari 5 also loads new webpages faster thanks to Domain Name System (DNS) prefetching and include improved caching of previously viewed pages returns them more quickly.
New Reader View
There’s other pretty cool stuff in Safari 5 besides its speediness, for example the new Safari Reader feature that lets you display just the text of a Web page in a, scrollable view and eliminate all the distractions with just a menu selection, a keyboard shortcut, or just click the handy “Reader” icon in the address field which shows up when Safari 5 detects an article.
In addition, Safari 5 supports over a dozen powerful HTML5 features including full screen playback and closed captions for HTML5 video, Geolocation, HTML5 sectioning elements, HTML5 draggable attribute, HTML5 forms validation, HTML5 Ruby, HTML5 AJAX History, EventSource and WebSocket. The Smart Address Field can now match text against the titles of webpages in History and Bookmarks, as well as any part of their URL.
Also new - Safari 5 has more user-friendly support for plug-ins.... er, sorry; extensions, it they’re something you’re into. I use a couple of plug-ins with Firefox, but there’re neither a deal-maker or breaker for me. Extensions are programmed using Web-oriented languages like using HTML, CSS and JavaScript, rather than the C, C++ or Objective-C required for utilizing earlier Safari versions’ plug-in support. You can find a selection of Safari 5 extensions here.
System requirements for Safari 5 for Mac OS X are Mac OS X Leopard 10.5.8 (PPC and Intel )or Mac OS X Snow Leopard 10.6.2 or later. Safari 5 for Windows requires Windows XP SP2, Windows VistaWindows Vista or Windows 7, a minimum 256MB of memory and a system with at least a 500 MHz Intel Pentium processor. On Macs, both PPC and lIntel are supported.
More information and download links for Safari 5 can be found at:
http://www.apple.com/safari
Safari 5 Not The Only New Kid On The Block
However, Safari 5 isn’t the only lightning-fast new Web browser version released over the past week. Opera claims its version 10.60.8362 alpha Web browser build offers a more than 75% JavaScript engine speed improvement in some benchmark tests. Usually an alpha release wouldn’t warrant a full review, but After using Opera 10.60 for just over a week at this writing, I’m duly impressed with the substantial speed boost and the “fine tuning” it’s received. Not only that this version is noticeably zippier (and the current Opera 10.5x final is no slouch), but also with its so-far rock-solid stability, notwithstanding its official status an alpha quality release.
Also addressed in Opera 10.60 are several bugs, including, evidently, the one that caused Opera 10.53 to crash on startup on my 2.0 GHz aluminum MacBook running either OS 10.5 Leopard or OS 10.6 Snow Leopard (10.5 started fine on my G4 Pismo PowerBook, although didn’t run very well)). I contacted Opera about that, was asked to send the crash logs, which I did, but heard nothing back. Anyway, the version 10.60 starts up fine on the MacBook, so hopefully that’s water under the bridge.
Interface Tweaks
Other tweaks in the Opera10.60a Mac version include improved tab previews, with the visual “peek” effect when mousing over tabs more refined in appearance, with smoothly rounded corners and clearer display of page titles, a Speed Dial window facelift, and some little things like the “O” menu button now says “Menu” and instead of hard-to read-thumbnails for internal tabs, they’ve been replaced with icons.
Carried over good stuff from previous versions includes a handy zoom slider on the window margin, built-in email and chat clients, the Opera Unite built-in Web server function, the free Opera Link service that enables data sharing between all your computers and devices, Opera Turbo compression that speeds up performance on slow networks, and more in Opera’s deep feature set.
There are also a few known user interface issues with version 10.60a1, but nothing fatal or even inconvenient that I’ve encountered so far, at least on the Intel Mac, although not so much on the old 550 MHz Power PC Pismo running OS 10.4 Tiger. Indeed, as with version 10.53, performance on that machine is so bad, with lengthy intervals of the spinning beach ball and some pages refusing to load at all, that it’s rendered essentially unusable., I’ve determined through trial and error that Opera 10.51 is the last decent-performing version on that old and slow machine.
Major Rewrite And Carbon Code Purge
While Mac OS 10.4 is nominally supported by Opera 10.60, the developers have, after major rewrite of the Opera Framework for version 10.50 that replaced Carbon with Cocoa, now gone back and further removed as much Carbon code as they could, which perhaps helps explain issues I’ve encountered running on the PPC machine, along with the fact that there is no Java support for Mac OS 10.4 at all in version 10.60. My advice: if you’re still running Tiger, stick with version 10.53 (the current Opera final) or earlier builds if you find 10.53 crash and/or stall prone.
Elixir de Lapin
But for Intel Macs running Leopard or Snow Leopard (with the caveat that Java only works if you’ve installed the very latest Java update on Mac OS 10.5 and 10.6) version 10.60 has received a shot of rabbit elixir. I’m hooked, and will stick with version 10.60 on the MacBook. Is it as fast as Safari 5? I haven’t conducted any benchmark tests, but based on feel, I think Safari now has the speed edge, with Opera 10.60 and the current Chrome builds abut neck and neck.
Also cool, on MacBooks with the Multi-Touch trackpad, gestures like pinch to zoom in and out, swiping two fingers to scroll, and three finger swipes left and right to navigate backward and forward are now supported.
You can download the Opera 10.60 alpha from:
http://www.opera.com/browser/next/
New Chrome Beta Too
And while I’m at it.....
Also last week Google released another Chrome 5.0.375.70 public beta, which has likewise proved fast and stable (but alas doesn’t support PowerPC and requires OS 10.5, so it’s officially out of the picture for my Pismos.
According to Google, version 5.0.375.70 fixes some crash and stability issues, although I hadn’t encountered either with the Google Chrome for Mac Final (aka build 5.0.375.55).
Opera and Chrome were accounting for about 90 percent of my browsing on the MacBook prior to Safari 5 showing up, with Firefox, or occasionally Camino or Sea Monkey, taking up the remaining roughly 10 percent for tasks that Mozilla.org’s Gecko browser engine handles particularly well. We’ll see how things shake out with Safari 5 in the mix, and presumably a new Firefox can’t be too far off.
You can find a download link for the latest Chrome public beta here:
http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/32956/google-chrome
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