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All's Well That Ends (Mostly) Well

Safari 3.1 brings improvements. Really.


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Safari 3.1 is now available. Someone's been listening. Someone's seen something. They have more work to do - a lot more work - but progress is progress. This is a quick look at some of the more embarrassing errors up to now in Safari and what version 3.1 does about them.

Inspect Element

Safari used to crash reliably before even leaving the starting gates. Just fire it up, make sure JavaScript is turned off, ctrl-click on an empty window, and choose 'Inspect Element' - crash and burn first time every time.

No more: Safari 3.1 seems to fix that blooper.

Defacing Web Pages

The Safari team seem to be having a tough time understanding the space age NeXTSTEP code running the underbody of their rendering machine. It's been possible for the longest time to deface any web page at all - despite web pages being read-only.

Safari 3.1 changes nothing. Unfortunately. This is still a really embarrassing blooper for Apple - especially when it starts turning up in Apple stores on all available computer screens. How are the Apple geniuses going to explain it? Deal with it?

Handling Services

Safari's ability to handle Cocoa services was great for years; then the Uncle Bertie team took over in 2005 and ruined things completely. Performance is getting back up there but it's still not right.

Here's a typically crappy web form. On the web and on Microsoft computers both people don't seem to yet have understood text can wrap.

So give it the old 'one two' with the ACP text services and 'tidy up the quotes'.

So far so good. But do it again when there's nothing to improve and POOF! All gone.

Not so good.

Untrimmed Packaging, Too Many NIBs

Several TIFFs aren't optimised; 48 junk NIB files for about 90 KB aren't cleaned out.

So far it's an encouraging update.

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