Or rather will rock (more), once Leopard is released early in 2007. I’ve been using Safari almost exclusively on my Macs for several years. It is a testament of the quality of the WebCore (and KHTML) engine and Apple’s UI design prowess. Safari has been consistently overall the fastest and most well-designed browser on the Mac ever since it hit version 1.2.
Safari significantly outperforms Firefox or other Gecko based browsers (e.g. Camino). It has also been rock solid on my machines, with the only crashes coming from Adobe’s Flash plugin. Yet Safari is by no means perfect: I can identify two main areas that need further development: Javascript support (which has improved dramatically as of late, but is still lacking) and extensions (or rather lack thereof), that would enable developers to add features that power users might appreciate. There are very few cases where Safari’s performance disappoints, e.g. when faced with html pages with a high number of nested tables. Fortunately, in the era of CSS, this is not as common a problem; I have only experienced this a couple of times since 2003.
Apple has tied major Safari updates to its operating system releases. Safari 2.0 came out with Tiger, leaving Panther (10.3) users at 1.2. The next version of Safari, probably numbered 3.0, is expected to appear with Apple’s next version of its Operating System, Mac OS X Leopard, 10.5, in the first quarter of 2007. There is a large number of minor UI features that will appear in the next version of Safari, including the inline Firefox-like search, resizable form controls etc. But there is also a vast number of engine and core improvements that are usually not touted or noticed.
Well, for most of these you don’t have to wait for Leopard to experience them. In case you were not aware of it already, the bleeding edge version of Safari can be found on the WebKit website where nightlies can be downloaded and used on a machine without compromising the existing (stable) Safari installation.
The WebKit nightlies sport a number of noteworthy improvements, including SVG support, a Web Inspector (very useful for web developers), seemingly better Javascript support and significantly improved performance . The HTML input buttons are now styled according to CSS and not the standard Aqua buttons. I am inclined to use the nightly builds instead of Safari — I have found them very stable with few missing features (form autocompletion is reported to being one of them, although I never use it). For the geeks among you, Omniweb is also supposedly using a newer version of WebCore than Safari and includes some of the improvements found in the Nightly.
WebKit is perhaps the most well engineered HTML rendering engine in existence today. For the Mac it has been offering a vastly superior browsing experience to any of the alternatives. It has been adopted by many projects, both for OS X, Linux and Windows, with perhaps the most prominent of them being OmniGroup’s OmniWeb. As reported by the WebKit blog, Adobe recently adopted WebKit for its Apollo tool.
You can download and try the WebKit Nightlies from here. Give it a try!
