Hey guys, Jerry here for Iceberg Creativity, we’re going to be doing an application review today and the application in question is Apple’s Safari four Web browser, which was recently updated this past week at www.dc09. Sorry about the first take guys I was looking at my microphone which is hovering over my keyboard, rather than looking at my camera. Anyway, for those waiting for tutorials, because I know I’ve not been doing tutorials lately, I’ve been trying new things hereon Iceberg Creativity. You’ll be happy to know two new tutorials are ready and will be uploaded tomorrow evening, the first one is for Adobe’s Premier and the second one is for Adobe’s Photoshop. I hope you look forward to it.
So, without further ado let’s get started with the review of Safari 4. First we’ll discuss the UI changes within Safari. When we are introduced to the better version, the tabs have been redesign and placed on top of the browser much like Google’s Chrome. Also introduced was top sites and cover flow history. Now top sites is a nice feature, although, I’ll be honest that I don’t use it as much as I used to, I just stick with my bookmarks. It’s much more convenient and easier to manage. Now the tabs on top, many people say that Apple borrowed that from Google Chrome, but that’s okay, I didn’t really mind the change but it was a bit strange and it took away a feature that I really loved and that was the loading status bar that used to be in the address bar. That’s now gone and even the final version it’s still not back. We have a new variation of it but it’s still not as convenient as the loading bar at the status bar were the web address bar whatever you’d like to call it. Now, top sites are still there and it’s a bit more refined I’ve tested it and it works the same way but it seems a bit smother to me now.
The cover flow and history in the other hand, although that is a cool innovation feature I guess you can call it, I don’t use it I’m happy with the list view. Now we are going in to the speed test I’ve done with Safari four, the browser I chose to compare it to was of course no surprise, Mozilla firefox, I’ve tested a number of websites that I frequent daily to see fast they were in each browser and to see how truly what is the faster browser, The first website I tested was YouTube, Firefox slaughtered Safari. Safari struggled to load any video and don’t even talk to me about high quality And high definition videos Safari most of the time did nothing when I clicked those links. Firefox performed them fine but not much faster when they actually have got going.
The second website that I tested is a local website something like Facebook called blue café it has a journal system and a forum system. Firefox out performed Safari on the forum system but not the journal system. Safari 4 loaded that pretty quick actually.
And now finally we get the joy stick, Ngadgets and download squad. Download squad, I’ve always had an issue with because of a lot of ads on that website. Safari 4 did do better with download squad than Firefox did, but Ngadget and joystick loaded much faster within Firefox. Now, before anybody questions my connection, I have a very fast connection here. I download things pretty quick and I never had trouble with it. I’m actually just purely testing the browsers with the basics.
And the final test I did was Gmail. Gmail and Firefox run fantastic but in Safari 4, I’ve been getting nothing but errors, it’s telling me I need to be signed in to do certain things. It just gives me random Google errors every now and then and lot of features in the non basic version of Gmail do not work within Safari 4 such as adding labels and the mark is red button sometimes it’s just unclickable. I don’t know what’s wrong. I’ve tested it on two computers so far and I got the same result so in the end Safari four, although, It’s not much of an improvement over Firefox, it is a little bit faster but it is not a speed demon as Apple are claiming it to be.
In the end, I’m pretty dissatisfied with Safari 4. I was hoping Safari 4 will be huge improvement over Safari 3. I find Safari 3 superior to Safari 4. Safari 4 has a lot of new features that are great but terrible speeds make it just unbearable to use. Back when I first got my Mac, I’ve never even downloaded another browser, I just stuck with Safari and I was happy. But now I found myself downloading many different browsers and testing them across different fields. But one thing is for sure, I will never stick with Safari anymore not even on Windows.
If you had to ask me what I would prefer, Firefox or Safari, right now I have to tell you Firefox. Firefox is just faster and superior I guess. Hopefully, within Snow Leopard, after a few updates, Safari 4 will be a great browser, but until then I’ll stick with Firefox eagerly awaiting the release of Chrome for Mac.
Thanks for watching guys and have a great evening.
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