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Upgrades Businesses Apple

Safari Beta Updated 95

Jack Kennedy writes "Apple has released Safari 1.0 Beta v51. Unfortunately, Apple don't list what the update addresses; according to Apple, 'this Safari Update is recommended for all Safari users.' Dave Hyatt's Weblog provides a more detailed account of what issues Apple have addressed over the past few days."
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Safari Beta Updated

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  • Much more stable. (Score:2, Informative)

    by iAryeh ( 559460 )
    I noticed that the new Safari is much more stable. But it still does not allow me to log into my hotmail account. What's up with that?
  • Hrm. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by twiztidlojik ( 522383 ) <dapplemac@NOSPaM.mac.com> on Saturday January 11, 2003 @11:45AM (#5062376) Homepage
    I noticed it b0rks some shopping carts with a lot of java, namely crystalfontz's cart. Maybe this new build will solve that. [crystalfontz.com]
    • Re:Hrm. (Score:2, Interesting)

      I just had problems updating my comparison cart a short while ago with a fresh downloaded version on dvdpricesarch.com and have just filed a bug on this. It would appear that Safari is not currently letting you replace older persistent cookie values with newer ones which is probably messing your cart as well.
  • hmmm... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Dr. Awktagon ( 233360 ) on Saturday January 11, 2003 @12:54PM (#5062704) Homepage
    The bugs I reported haven't been fixed:

    * HTTPS doesn't work at all for me over a proxy. I think it is using SSL to talk to the proxy which isn't right. It should connect to the proxy in the clear and then issue a CONNECT and then use SSL. Anybody seen this one?

    * "don't use proxy for these hosts/domains" setting is treated as hosts only (so if you put in "foo.com" then you visit "www2.ecommerce.foo.com" the proxy gets used anyway).

    * keychain entries of the form "http://host.com:80" are ignored, and it adds its own "http://host.com" entry.

    Anybody notice any concrete differences?
    • Re:hmmm... (Score:4, Informative)

      by fault0 ( 514452 ) on Saturday January 11, 2003 @01:19PM (#5062825) Homepage Journal
      > Anybody notice any concrete differences?

      Hmm, it does seem to run the CSS tests now (and does pretty well)
    • Hmm, I wondered why I couldn't connect to any secure pages in Safari; now I know why. For a work around I just disabled the secure proxy temporarily.

      I still can't login to phpnuke sites correctly. Also for some reason my university's scheduling system reports that I don't have cookies enabled, even though I do (and the cookie is actually showing up in Safari's manager) -- not sure how I could report that bug easily though.

      It looks like this update mainly addresses the home directory and printing issues. Overall though I'm really impressed by the browser and have been using it since 24-7 since its release.
    • Keychain??!! How do I get Safari to use passwords in my keychain? This was a wonderful feature of Chimera and pretty much the only Chimera feature I miss.

      Now if I could get two new features in keychain:

      1. Links so two entries can have exactly the same password.
      2. HTTP password updater so I can update all of my passwords with a click of a button.
  • Repeat after me

    Apple is

    Apple was

    Apple will

    Apple did not (or didn't)

    Apple has

    learn it
    • learn what language you use first, it's called English.
  • It's nice to see apple updating their beta software - We can only hope to continue (we all must have experienced that long long wait for new features/pest control)

    Is this a trend that will continue? - Or is this simply an update that stops Safari eating your first-born or whatever all those bugs did
  • by frankie ( 91710 ) on Saturday January 11, 2003 @01:40PM (#5062911) Journal
    Blatantly cribbed from MacOSXHints.com [macosxhints.com]. Edit the file ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.Safari.plist and add two new siblings to the XML tree:
    • WebKitMinimumFixedFontSize
    • WebKitMinimumFontSize
    Follow the same format as WebKitDefaultFontSize and it will work exactly as you'd expect.
  • by Maïdjeurtam ( 101190 ) on Saturday January 11, 2003 @02:19PM (#5063067) Homepage Journal
    OK, I'm not trolling here, it would have been really amazing if Apple had added supports for tabbed browsing in only two days. And I understand they haven't.

    I've read somewhere that David Hyatt himself told that the tabs were planned for the final release and that the lack of tabs in current beta's is only due to their deadline. Allegedly, they wouldn't have had time to program tabs support (which is strange since they are working on it for one year now and that Cocoa should make things like adding tabs support quite easy to implement).

    Does anyone have real information about that?
    • by stux ( 1934 ) on Saturday January 11, 2003 @03:33PM (#5063325) Homepage
      That's funny...

      I heard that he categorically said "no tabs" ;)
    • by babbage ( 61057 ) <cdevers@cis . u s o u t hal.edu> on Saturday January 11, 2003 @10:17PM (#5064994) Homepage Journal
      Here's an idea: let's re-evaluate what you *really* want the software to do here. Is it really the case that you need tabs, or can it more accurately be said that you just want some form of a multiple document interface [MDI]. If the latter is correct -- and for me, it is -- then are tabs (as implemented in the Gecko family of browsers) the best or only way to do this? Or are there other, possibly better ways to get to the same goal?

      It occurs to me that a better -- and arguably more "Cocoa-ish" -- way to present this would be a tray interface, like what you see in Mail.app. Seen this way, you could have a hierarchy of widgets in the tray, including:

      • currently open pages (the tabs, as available in Mozilla etc)
      • bookmarked links & folders of links
      • history links
      • "scrapbook" page[s]?

      If presented this way, you could browse open documents and bookmarks much as you can browse mail folders in Mail.app. If items in the tray could be browsed with "flippy triangles" (like in the Finder's list view), then you could zoom in on different kinds of URLs quickly. Plus, having a tray interface might even buy you enough screen real estate that you could even have thumbnail versions of some or all pages in the collection. Neat, huh?

      Personally, I agree with everyone that's asking for tabbed browsing, but only to the extent that I think that the web is easier to browse in a MDI style. But the more I think about this tray idea, the less I think that simple tabs is the best way to present this information. Trays. They're IMO the coolest & most innovative part of the Aqua interface, and they really aren't implemented all that often. This seems to me like a perfect place to introduce a tray interface, and if Apple decides to add a MDI option to Safari, my hope is that this is how they'll implement it.

      If you agree that this is a good idea, please do as I've done and submit the idea as feedback to Apple with Safari's bug reporter widget, or by using the bug reporter on Apple's site (sorry, I forget the url offhand). Now is the time to let them know what features you would hope for... :)

      • It occurs to me that a better -- and arguably more "Cocoa-ish" -- way to present this would be a tray interface, like what you see in Mail.app.

        I think you're suggesting the same thing I was trying to get at in a post on a previous Safari thread. [slashdot.org] Unfortunately, I have never used Mail.app since I don't dare try to read and file mail that way since I need to read mail from way too many different places and systems. By "tray" do you mean the same way that "bookmark view" (what you get by clicking the book icon or typing option-cmd-B) does stuff? If so, that's what I hit on (although I also want navigation improvement which should be easy).

        If you agree that this is a good idea, please do as I've done and submit the idea as feedback to Apple with Safari's bug reporter widget, or by using the bug reporter on Apple's site (sorry, I forget the url offhand). Now is the time to let them know what features you would hope for... :)

        I would do this except that I'm pretty sure that if I were triaging bugs from these sources and saw *anything* with the word "tab" or "tabbed" in it, I'd file it in the bitbucket these days. :-) Plus, you'd expect somebody who knows somebody at Apple is reading these posts, so posting about it here (or I guess there's a discussion at apple.com) might have some effect as well.

        • by babbage ( 61057 ) <cdevers@cis . u s o u t hal.edu> on Sunday January 12, 2003 @12:59PM (#5067277) Homepage Journal
          Skimming your linked post (sorry, will read it in more detail after this), I don't think we're describing quite the same thing here. What I'm referring to as trays should more accurately have been referred to as drawers, as that's the term that the Apple documentation seems to use. Out of habit, I use the terms 'tray' and 'drawer' more or less interchangeably, but I'm realizing now that searching for 'tray' interface elements isn't turning up many hits, so maybe this usage isn't as standard or common as I thought.

          In any case, in the Aqua interface, trays are a specific & unambiguous interface style that for whatever reason hasn't been used very often so far. The best example I can think of from one of the "core" applications is Mail.app [slashdot.org], for which there is a screenshot at Apple's site. The other big application I can think of right now is Omniweb [omnigroup.com], which uses a drawer to organize bookmarks [omnigroup.com]. (I'm not an Omniweb user, so I wasn't aware of that until searching for this post :). Of freeware apps that I use regularly, the best example I can think of is (the very slick) MacJournal [mac.com], which uses two trays [mac.com] -- one to present a list of journals, the other to present entries within a particular journal (for example).

          Now that I poke around a bit, the best critical reviews of the tray interface I can find so far are this MacEdition review [macedition.com] and this Oreillynet tutorial [macdevcenter.com]. (John Siracusa also wrote some excellent OSX reviews for Ars Technica, but I can't find a section that focuses on drawers in particular.)

          But the authoritative reference -- which unfortunately doesn't seem to have screenshots to go along with the prose -- is the Apple MacOS X Human Interface Guidelines [apple.com]:

          Drawers are a special window type, found only in Mac OS X. They are child windows--which slide out from a parent window--that users can open or close (show or hide) while the parent window is open. These windows should be used for tools or controls that are closely associated with the parent window and frequently accessed, but do not need to be visible all the time. For example, Mail uses a drawer to provide access to the user's mailboxes.

          So while this isn't incompatible with what you're asking for, it looks to me like it's not quite the same thing. This is an existing toolkit that could be called on by any Cocoa or Carbon application, and it seems to me like this is a perfect example of where best to apply it.

          • Go check out Acquisition [xlife.org] . It's a Gnutella client that uses the LimeWire P2P core with a Cocoa front-end. The latest beta release is looking very impressive, and it uses Drawers in the most fantastic way. There are screenshots on the site.

            Essentially all your search query strings become an item in the drawer on the side (whichever you like; Cocoa drawers are ambidextrous. Try collapsing the drawer in mail, and then drag a message to the right, and then to the left... you'll see what I mean.) This approach is comparable to Tabs in functionality, but appearance-wise takes advantage of the fact that tabs work better vertically for most situations, displaying additional information about the query, and offering controls over that query.

            A drawer approach in a browser would offer some interesting advantages over the tabs; one could arrange ad-hoc or dynamic collections within one such drawer entry, much in the way iTunes Smart Bookmarks work. For example a 'News' item, 'Blogs' item, etc.

            Similar functionality exists using the folder structures in the Safari Bookmark Bar, but the horizontal arrangement does sacrifice some real estate in the UI, as you want as much vertical room as you can get for your browser window, generally speaking. I wouldn't be surprised to see Apple implement a whole history in a drawer though, complete with scaling thumbnails of the pages themselves. (mostly cosmetic, and useless, that last bit - but it'll look damn cool).

          • Skimming your linked post (sorry, will read it in more detail after this), I don't think we're describing quite the same thing here. What I'm referring to as trays should more accurately have been referred to as drawers, as that's the term that the Apple documentation seems to use.

            OK, so I checked out some of the drawer stuff you posted about, and remembered that there is a drawer in the silly Help Viewer program. That is a pretty interesting idea, except for one problem. It appears that for a window to have a drawer, you need to have enough "space" to open the drawer, since the drawer "pulls out" from the window. I'm not sure how well this would work in a web browser, given how many people have small screens or (for whatever reason) like to surf from a maximized window.

            So, I think Safari *could* have implemented the "Bookmarks View" as a drawer, but chose to use a completely different view. I think that view has some big problems in terms of keyboard navigation (How do you get from the left column to right without using the mouse? Why doesn't hitting return when a book mark is selected let you go to that page?), but if those are fixed, it's a very interesting kind of idea. And it's easy to imagine a full-featured "current windows" view that would give all of the advantages of tabs and more without the UI cruft.

            So to summarize, drawers might be interesting, but I'm not sure they are the right choice when you expect the window that needs a drawer to be maximized on the screen.

      • As an iBook user (though I can only speak for myself) screen real estate is very limited and therefore a very precious resource. The iBook screen is only 1024x768, and though I try to target any web-pages I build to an 800x600 screen (because I like to have the extra space for other things), many people don't. So, web-browsing often requires a pretty big window.

        IMHO, there is simply no room for a tray on the side of that window, especially if I want to interact with other programs. I feel that tabs, even though they take up precious vertical space, are a much better MDI (oh how happy I would be if the tab bar could be vertical, running down the left-side of the window...but I feel that the horizontal tab bar is more intuitive to use).

        So, while a tray might seem like a great idea for users with high resolution screens, right now it seems like a huge part of Apple's market is laptop users, and unfortunately, our screens just don't have many pixels.

        As far as tabs go, I wish Mozilla's tabs were a bit narrower and I wish I could shrink the font of the page titles to gain a few more precious lines back. Currently, I have found (for my browsing style) using the PinBall theme with icon only buttons gives me the most real-estate to work with.

        But this is all just my own humble opinion, and I cannot speak for all iBook users. Cheers. :-)

        • Your position seems inconsistent to me - you don't want to use screen width, but you want vertical tabs (which, for any decent amount of text to be visible, would need to be fairly wide).

          I reckon that all we need is variable-width drawers; then you can decide just how much width you want to use. You can pretty much do that anyway with fixed-width windows (I used to position my Mail.app window so that most of the drawer was off the screen), but it would be nice if you could make your thumbnails as small as you want to.
        • Everyone's mileage varies :)

          As time has gone on, I've come to feel that, regardless of the screen resolution, my most "comfortable" browser window geometry is more tall than wide, like a sheet of notebook paper. Since nearly all computer monitors have the opposite geometry -- wider than they are tall -- this means that for nearly all common screen resolutions (anything bigger than 640x480) I tend to have one or more windows open, partially overlapping vertically. Arranged this way, I personally would feel comfortable giving some of that un-used (or at least, less-used) horizontal space to something like a tab / bookmark / history drawer; at the same time, on a low resolution display it would annoy me to have to sacrifice the little bit of vertical height I have available to a row of tabs, when a more rich interface could present the same information & more if moved to one side.

          In any case though, this doesn't have to be an either/or situation. For every application I've seen that uses them, drawers are toggleable & can be resized as needed, and some even let you move them to the left, right, or maybe even bottom of the window (though putting it on the bottom seems messy for this situation). So if Apple were to put this functionality into Safari, I don't see any reason that they couldn't also make it flexible as well...

      • A QuickTime-type tray might work, as long as I could open documents directly to the tray. That's how I use the tabs: to open tangential pages so that I don't lose my place in whatever I'm currently reading.
      • Are you referring to drawers here?
    • by King Babar ( 19862 ) on Sunday January 12, 2003 @12:37AM (#5065391) Homepage
      OK, I'm not trolling here, it would have been really amazing if Apple had added supports for tabbed browsing in only two days. And I understand they haven't.

      I used to think exactly what you think about this. Then after seeing (again) some of the objections to them, I came up with an idea to gain tab-like functionality using ideas already implemented in what you might call "bookmark view" and the (key) idea that the information about existing windows that exists in the "Window" menu really wants to be treated like a collection as well. Check out: my previous post on a different safari thread, [slashdot.org] and then maybe also a slight tweak designed to bring up the "tab list" separately from other bookmark stuff. [slashdot.org] In both proposals, you would not have tabs listed across the top of the browser by default, and you would have to hit one keyboard combo (either option-cmd-B or option-cmd-w) to see the "tabs" at all. But after that, this view is *better* than what you get from tabs or the Window menu since it would essentially never have to truncate page titles and would obviously give you space to display URLs.

      Again, the basic idea is that the "window list" information could be made more navigable in a form very similar to that for bookmarks or the late, great file selector dialogs that allowed type-ahead on filenames. (I think Safari needs type ahead for links in normal webpages, too. Since type ahead is intuitive when the focus is in the location bar, I don't think it's a big stretch to make the Mozilla-like leap to allowing it when the focus is not on a text entry box of some kind.

      The functionality of tabs (rapid navigation to one of the several pages you have open) is preserved, while UI cruft is not required. Please tell me what you think. :-)

  • The biggest change (Score:5, Informative)

    by andfarm ( 534655 ) on Saturday January 11, 2003 @03:58PM (#5063459)
    Apple claims to have fixed that nasty bug [slashdot.org] with wiped $HOME directories and deleted /tmp->/private/tmp links. Reason enough for me to download it.

    (This comment posted with Safari)

    • by Lars T. ( 470328 ) <Lars...Traeger@@@googlemail...com> on Saturday January 11, 2003 @07:01PM (#5064378) Journal
      Well, just don't use Safari to download it ;-)
    • Where did Apple claim to correct that issue? I did not see a changelog or any information on what was in the update, and spent some time looking for one right when the new version came out. Please provide a link.

      (I am using Safari, working with the suspicion that Apple did in fact fix the problem, and didn't provide a changelog because they didn't want to admit to having had that problem. There's not even very much of an indication that the version on the site is even a new one, most regular users who decided to check out Safari after it had been out for a couple days wouldn't have noticed it was a different version than the original public Beta release.)
      • An Apple representative on Apple's discussion board posted, in a thread discussing the $HOME and /tmp bugs, that "Safari Update 1-10-03 addresses the issue or issues being discussed in this and other forums."

        The post's here [apple.com].

  • Excellent feature (Score:4, Informative)

    by yomegaman ( 516565 ) on Saturday January 11, 2003 @10:15PM (#5064984)
    I just noticed something totally cool about Safari. I was browsing espn.com and wanted to hear what Bill Cowher had to say about the penalty at the end of today's game. I clicked on the link for the video stream, and it asked if I wanted Real or Windows Media. First I tried Real, the window it created was a little too big but the plugin came up and worked just fine. Next I thought, what the heck, let's try Windows Media. Note that this plugin has NEVER worked for me in any browser other than IE, for who knows what reason. Anyway, I clicked the stream again and selected Windows Media. Up comes the window, and a sheet drops down that says something like "Safari doesn't know how to use this plugin. However, the program Windows Media Player may be able to handle this file. Wanna give it a try?" I say sure, and *bang* WMP starts up and plays the clip! No more digging through the source and cutting and pasting .asf URLs! Oh happy day!
    • Windows Media Player has worked within IE 5.x for OS X since WMP came out 1 1/2 years ago! Anyway, yes it's a nice touch, but I'd much rather have the movie content show in the browser itself...
      • Yeah, I know, but somehow Microsoft made it so it doesn't work in any other browser. You're right that it would be better if Safari could frame the plugin, but it beats the 'view source, find stream URL, copy, start WMP, paste' rigamarole you have to go through with anything else.
      • Windows Media Player doesn't work in any OSX browser except IE because it doesn't correctly and fully implement the Netscape Plugin API. (there are bugs filed against this at bugzilla.mozilla.org, do a query to see the details) IE interfaces directly with this incorrect implementation of the API, which is how it works. Other browsers don't have that luxury.
  • you can read about tabs all you want, but I'll think i'll switch back to IE or Navigator if can't grab text with Safari soon. Don't you gusy do that? I mean drag en drop, that's what it's all about, no? It looks to me that Apple isn't as focused any more on the ease of use (issues with dock, changing the shortcuts from 10.1 to Jaguar). Don't get me wrong, I love X but Apple needs more consistency.
  • One bug (Score:2, Interesting)

    by inertia187 ( 156602 )
    One bug I submitted that has not been address is when clicking on an HREF with a hash, JavaScript doesn't have access to the value, like in this example (shown source intended):

    Example [localhost]

    Safari yields an alert that just contains a single "#" character. Other browsers will say "#hash" instead.
    • Great. Preview didn't work correctly because I could see the source until it was submitted. Then you'd see the onclick="alert(this.hash) ;" that was removed.

      Anyway...
  • Users of build 48 (one of them - there were evidently two) got nuked on two issues:

    1. /tmp disappeared; and

    2. all of one's own files disappeared, along with one's home directory. Immense data loss, and not being able to even log in - a major tragedy.

    Neither Apple nor Hyatt have dared mention the second issue. That is weak.
  • Throughout the Chimera nightly builds, I've been comparing its speed with IE by running non-scientific side-by-side browser tests. Chimera could only occasionally beat IE for loading sites like CNN, MSNBC, or Salon. Safari, on the other hand, beats IE all of the time. My test machines: PowerBook G4/500 and PC with a Celeron 400. It's sad that the Celeron used to beat the G4. It certainly isn't beating it anymore.
  • crash and burn... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by mojoNYC ( 595906 )
    i dl'ed safari and it worked slick...until it crashed--now, everytime i try to launch it, it starts up and then eventually crashes...(i'm using osx 10.2, btw) i dl'ed the supposedly upgraded beta (v51), but same results--also, it looks identical to the first beta (get info on both just says '1.0 beta'). i'd like to report this to apple using their nifty little bug button, but it's kinda hard when the app won't even open up;>
  • Have I missed something? Safari is the first browser I've encountered in which you can't hover your mouse over a URL and have its address displayed somewhere.

    Not only is that an irritation, it has security implications, too.

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