Safari Web Browser

First Impressions

Safari is, by far, the fastest graphical web browser I've ever encountered, at least on the Mac. The initial impression is of a magically boosted connection speed; then it becomes clear that the some of the lags under Internet Explorer and other browsers that I attributed to server or network congestion were actually due to slow page drawing. The back button is far more useful, as the previous page is there instantly, instead of after a rendering delay, as in IE.

The appearance of pages is also more pleasing in this browser than even Omniweb, although I'm not sure why. The text is attractive, and forms look very handsome, as buttons look like aqua widgets (which turns out to be a headache for Safari's developers).

I've tried just about every browser available for Jaguar, and this is the first that has stolen the the default position from IE.

Text Encoding Problem

There is one little problem that caused me to submit a bug report, although I'm not sure this is an actual bug. Every browser has its own list of style sheet deficiencies, and this one is no exception, as has been dealt with exhaustively elsewhere. However, I've not been able to find any mention of a problem I discovered with Safari's text encoding. (Build 60 of Safari, released February 2003, does not fix this problem. Here is an extensive collation of bugs that it does fix, and bugs that remain.)

There is a trick used programs that try to mark up mathematics for HTML, such as tth, where the symbol font is used with tables to build up displayed equations. To see the equations in IE, for instance, you just choose the MacRoman encoding. As pointed out here this is really a kludge; however, it is a useful kludge, at least until MathML or something becomes widespread, when you have a short bit of text that uses some math that you don't want to offer only as a PDF or a GIF. The problem is that Safari does not seem to handle this correctly; the wrong symbols are used.

Here is an example, from the tth site: on the right is what the equation is supposed to look like (more or less), rendered in IE, with "Western (Mac)" chosen as the character set. In Safari 1.0 Beta (v48) it looks like this on the left, using the MacRoman encoding.

If anyone can shed any light on this, please send mail; I'd like to include any informative comments below.

Other Notes