Subscribe by EmailSafari 3.04 for Windows
November 15, 2007 by Kiltak |By Marco Jardim
Contributing writer, [GAS]
Being a blogger who doesn’t natively speak English sometimes has its downsides. The most recent repercussion came from the Windows version of Apple’s Safari browser which did not include spellchecking when it was released.
As if that problem wasn’t big enough for me, it also seemed to have out-of-this-world problems rendering pages on my friends’ computers, which didn’t help me much when I was trying to convince them how I enjoyed the browser.
Thankfully, most of those problems have been solved now, at least as far as I’ve heard, and the speed (or should I say lack of speed?) that the browser used to take in order to start has been greatly reduced.
The HTML forum buttons have received a small face-lift and now display more appropriately than before, and speaking of HTML forums, now you can apply text formating to some WYSIWYG text editors like Wordpress’ or Gmail’s. You can only put words in Bold, Italic and etc, but still, it’s a step forward compared to other browsers, and hopefully, in the near future, we will have even better features for Web 2.0 applications.
A couple of other small “problems” that only a few people might have noticed have also been fixed. Two which I quickly noticed was that now I can finally go “back” in the tab’s browser history using my Mighty Mouse’s squeeze buttons (ironically, I couldn’t do that before in Safari of all the browsers), and now we can open the Bookmark Bar link’s shortcuts in a new tab with a middle click, whilst in previous versions you had to open a new tab and then click it in order to achieve the same effect.
Safari is still a “memory hog” and I can’t really say if it’s lighter than before. Right now, both Firefox and Safari are consuming over 100 megs of RAM each in my system, but considering I’ve been using Firefox for a couple of hours and this new version of Safari for about an hour only, it’s safe to say that the orange fox is still the ideal browser to use if you have a low-specced, or older, computer.
One feature that still hasn’t reached Safari yet is the ability to customize the browser’s built-in search engines. I’m guessing that it’s only a matter of time before that happens, but until it does, that is my #1 gripe with with the software now. With that said, if you were one of those users who tried the earlier builds of Safari but were unhappy due to any of the reasons mentioned above, now is a great time to check up on it again and give it another chance.
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There’s a browser that’s a bigger memory hog than Firefox? Wow.
I haven’t actually tried Safari on any of my Windows boxes, but I may have to give it a chance now. I must say to Mackenzie that I agree… Firefox is definitely a mem hog. If it weren’t such a damn good browser I’d be tempted to chuck it.
Firefox’ “memory hogging” has been debated many times. In most cases, it isn’t really a flaw but instead an unappreciated feature which allows the browser to instantly render a previously visited page on any given tab.
If you visit a lot of YouTube videos on a row on the same tab the browser’s memory usage can quickly jump through the roof. My recommendation to deal with this issue is to try to open and close as many tabs as you can. Instead of continuously navigating in the same tab, try to switch to different ones while browsing and close the previous ones.