For those of you using “OS X” on Apple computers, even though Apple announced earlier in the week that the next version of the operating system is going to be released 4 months later than planned, you can still grab a new version of Safari.
Through the magic of open-source, you can download a version of Safari from Webkit.org. The nightly builds have much better java-script interpreters than the shipping version of Safari has, and better memory management as well. You can run the “nightly” version without messing up anything on your system. (The only downside is that some of the plugins might not work.)
The Nightly builds are created every night (ironic huh?). Some of them work better than others. If you’re looking for a decent one, I’ve been having good luck with the 4/12/07 build.
Oh, no! Please, I beg you: don’t encourage this behavior!
Please, sir: heed the plea of a poor forsaken web developer who has terrible nightmares about Safari. And at the same time let me share two words with you: Fire. Fox.
😉
(I admit it could be that these new versions would allow me to sleep through the night, though.)
Firefox on the Mac is dog-slow and it doesn’t integrate to the OS at all. It’s clearly a windows program that runs on the Mac. (And I say this having used it back in the days when it was called “Phoenix”.)
Camino is a decent alternative – it uses Gecko as the renderer but has a “carbon” wrapper that hooks into the OS. But it has some funky quirks that bug me (especially in the way it “aqua-izes” all the buttons on a web page whether the CSS calls for it or not.
Webkit on the other hand has a fully debugged java-script engine and the BEST standards compliance. It mostly hooks into the system with few errors.
The only issue I’ve had with it is when the “browser sniffer script” doesn’t recognize it properly – that’s more an issue for web-developers than it is for browsers. (Grin.)
Well, it was the early versions that were the problem. Terrible rendering issues and CSS/DHTML incompatibility problems. It would be great if these are worked out now, actually. Matter of fact, I think I’ll test it on Monday.
We put the new Firefox on Mac at work, and it seemed pretty good, though. I take your point about it not being designed for Mac, and I’d really like to make sure Mac users are getting the optimal experience. (The artists all have Macs, though, and they’re with me on this so far. I listen!)
Thanks for the update!
Except for crashing when downloading pdf (a seemingly known bug)- it seems great -the blogspot dashboard runs a lot better than on Safari.