In Safari, it seems onload fires before the page has been displayed, before layout has been calculated, before any costly reflows have taken place. It fires before images have completed loading (this can also happen in rare cases in Opera, but Safari seems to do it everywhere), meaning that a substantial part of the load time is not included. So basically, onload is not trustworthy in Safari for checking page loading times.
It is possible to force Safari to layout the page before checking for the time. To do this, check for the offset values of any element, such as the offsetWidth of the body:
window.onload = function () {
var ignoreMe = document.body.offsetWidth;
var endTime = new Date();
};
Note, however, that this still does not include actually displaying the page, only calculating what will be displayed, so it is not perfect, but it does make it slightly closer to the behaviour of other browsers.
To a degree I do agree that Apples' marketing department go a might overboard, and Steve Jobs is a fairly strong personality to handle which probably has an effect on the marketing department. Is Safari 3 the best thing ever? Well yes (on the Mac). Windows I've still hardly played with it, but then my Parallels install dumps all URL clicks into the Mac side and Safari anyway so I don't use Firefox either. I use Firefox Mac for 1 purpose, Firebug, thats it.
You could easily argue that my having not used Safari/iTunes/QuickTime in Windows in many months would leave me unqualified to argue these points. QuickTime is shockingly poor and fits amazingly badly into the Windows scheme of things. iTunes is a fair memory hog on Win as well and it seems no one likes the new Windows browser on the block either.
I would have actually preferred it if WinSafari had been designed to fit in with Windows better but used WebCore and JavascriptCore (the frameworks Safari is built on) so the general effect of the rendering remained the same but the App fit in with the OS. Sadly neither Apple nor Microsoft can make an App which fits in with the others OS.
I am slightly heartened by the notice from the WebKit team that they are looking for QA and Software developers from a Windows background to help them improve WebKit on Windows and hopefully Safari as well. It may improve, couple revisions down the line you may even throw out your Firefox, who knows.
The pre 0.7 versions of FF were pretty poor, they had promise but there were plenty of neigh-sayers and detractors saying it will never take off and never take any market share from IE. Things changed.
I don't quite see how Safari is a re-invention of the wheel. The core engine wasn't grown at Apple. When they were first looking to write their own browser they looked at using the gecko rendering engine from Mozilla, but it was apparently too cluttered to extend as they needed while the Linux KDE projects KHTML engine fit better with their needs. All of their fixes, extensions and so on to the core have been nicely fed back into the KDE KHTML project as well.
As you said Firefox used some pretty arcane shortcuts in the beginning, then it changed to fit in more with Windows. While I can't comment on the likelihood of this I would hope WinSafari would progress along a similar path.
Huh? I don't quite get this, the back/forward buttons are right up there with the address bar. It goes like this
Back | Forward | Reload | Add to Favorites | Submit Bug | Address Bar | Google Search
If you don't like it goto View > Customize Toolbar and change it, granted theres not a huge wide ranging scope of the changes you can make, but everything you should need for browsing is there.
also the whole Apple mice are only single click argument has been BS for at least the last year. All desktop Macs ship with a Mighty Mouse which has left/right/middle click, omnidirectional scroll wheel and all Mac laptops you can tap two fingers on the touchpad to right click and omnidirectional two finger scroll.
Which components do you feel are lacking? What else should it be able to do that it doesn't do now?
Don't like the lack of borders, I personally find my eyes dropping off the bottom of the app sometimes, but never the sides. So turn on the status bar with View > Show Status bar.
There is one specific feature of Safari on both Windows and Mac which I feel both MSIE and Firefox are lacking. Not a day goes by where I don't use this and I've mentioned it before. Tab switch keyboard shortcut (Ctrl+Shift+[ and Ctrl+Shift+] for Windows, its actually Ctrl+{ and Ctrl+} but you need shift to get there), neither IE nor Firefox have something like this and it drives me up the wall every time I have to use Windows. Now at least I can have my familiar browser on Windows as well.
I'll concede that you arent likely to get many of your Firefox Extensions into Safari and Windows lacks the functionality to make use of a cool system called SIMBL which could potentially do it. But as a person who uses Safari everyday of his life, albeit on Mac, what exactly is it missing?
The only people I know who do this spend more of their time in Windows and hence use Firefox because they are used to it.Haven't used a Mac in about 6 months. When I did, I was using FF, not Safari. From reading various threads on the net, it seems I am not alone in this
Mac users have the good fortune to have iMovie HD which takes a lot of the pain out of this kind of thingI use quicktime to attempt some video edits on particular files. Very hit and miss, whether it works or not.
No, they are slow, clunky and don't fit with the rest of the OS UI. The interface widgets in Office:Mac feel more like OS9 despite the "2004" stuck on the end of the product name.Microsoft's apps so far have not fit well with OSX? I though the office software was not that bad personally.
This is possibly where some of the memory leaks in FF come from.I have IE7, Opera and FF2 on my system right now. I keep staying with FF even with its faults, because of the customizations. Neither Opera or IE offer me the ability to integrate extensions (or widgets, or whatever) into the shell of the browser like on FF. This reason alone is why I will continue using FF. Safari also doesn't have this feature. Didn't have it on OSX, won't have it on Windows from the looks of it.
And the KDE community has benefited from Safari, the core Safari rendering engine is Open Source which is why Swift exists, though it too is a bit clunky. (Windows WebKit based browser)That's the beauty of certain aspects of open-source. Good ideas will prevail.
Apple often positions things as the best thing since anything else was invented which is why you often get some incredibly opinionated Apple Zealots, my general impression of the Mac community is that we have learnt to take these protestations of excellence with a pinch of salt and some seasoning. Sometimes they are right (iPod, switch to Intel) and sometimes they aren't (switch to Intel, Safari4Win).I was speaking figuratively. Apple is positioning this as the next best thing in browsing. That, frankly, is a bold-faced LIE.
There is a range of apps available on Mac which let you mess to a degree with the appearance of apps, these of course won't have made it to Win yet. Personally I've not really wanted to mess with the UI of Safari I like it. Even Firefox which I used to skin quite a bit in the early days I just don't bother anymore.Safari offers what by way of customization to power users?
File a bug report, I expect X to happen when I do Y. I realise I can get X by doing Z but Y is more in keeping with the other browsers on Windows.Perhaps. But, FF was open-source. Safari? Not so much.
More stuff in Mac is keyboard based, my mum has a mouse with those back/forward buttons, I personally find it immensely annoying. Want to go back/forward without clicking the buttons Ctrl+[, want to go forward Ctrl+]. More of the OS is navigable via keyboard shortcuts in Mac OS than I ever found with Windows.You know, some mouse peripherals have a lovely back and front button on them too right?
It goes something like this.
Click the back button on the mouse, you go back a page. Click the forward button, you go forward a page. If you don't like it, you can go to your mouse properties and change the way it operates in the application. :smoker:
Yah, so apparently Apple doesn't know that.
Ah, excellent finally. I've been searching for that for months. You know what would have been super useful in finding that? If they'd actually documented it in one of the menu's perhaps. A la the Window menu in Safari.I don't understand what you are saying here.
Are you suggesting that you can't switch from one tab to another in IE or FF?
Try this.
Ctrl + the number of the tab (if you have multiple open). Or Ctrl + Tab to navigate. I don't know about you, but for me, the tab's in FF and IE are MUCH better than the crap in Safari. I personally think that, sans extensions, IE7 is MUCH superior in terms of tabbed browsing. Opera is a close second.
I also like the fact that I can assign a page to display when I am opening a fresh/new tab in IE. Plus, the favorites center in IE is MUCH better than any other browser (by default) save Opera.
The Safari Bookmarks manager is not that dissimilar to the FireFox Bookmarks manager. The IE one certainly is more pleasant to use than the Firefox one. I quite like how you click the book icon and the bookmarks manager takes over, when you are done click that button again and you are back to the webpage.Safari's favorite's center seems like it was designed by a retarded monkey. No offense to retarded monkey's intended.
Weather and Clocks I've got in my Dashboard, no need to clutter my browser with detritus. Gmail I've got a notifier in my taskbar area, again no need to clutter my browser. I'd go and find out what Stylish is but the addons.mozilla.org website is down.Weather, clocks, gmail, Stylish, just to name a few, all integrated into the physical body of the browser rather than some retarded, floating widget or some such.
The only people I know who do this spend more of their time in Windows and hence use Firefox because they are used to it.
Mac users have the good fortune to have iMovie HD which takes a lot of the pain out of this kind of thing
No, they are slow, clunky and don't fit with the rest of the OS UI. The interface widgets in Office:Mac feel more like OS9 despite the "2004" stuck on the end of the product name.
This is possibly where some of the memory leaks in FF come from.
And the KDE community has benefited from Safari, the core Safari rendering engine is Open Source which is why Swift exists, though it too is a bit clunky. (Windows WebKit based browser)
Apple often positions things as the best thing since anything else was invented which is why you often get some incredibly opinionated Apple Zealots, my general impression of the Mac community is that we have learnt to take these protestations of excellence with a pinch of salt and some seasoning. Sometimes they are right (iPod, switch to Intel) and sometimes they aren't (switch to Intel, Safari4Win).
There is a range of apps available on Mac which let you mess to a degree with the appearance of apps, these of course won't have made it to Win yet. Personally I've not really wanted to mess with the UI of Safari I like it. Even Firefox which I used to skin quite a bit in the early days I just don't bother anymore.
File a bug report, I expect X to happen when I do Y. I realise I can get X by doing Z but Y is more in keeping with the other browsers on Windows.
Maybe they'll change, maybe they'll make it a preference.
More stuff in Mac is keyboard based, my mum has a mouse with those back/forward buttons, I personally find it immensely annoying. Want to go back/forward without clicking the buttons Ctrl+[, want to go forward Ctrl+]. More of the OS is navigable via keyboard shortcuts in Mac OS than I ever found with Windows.
Still as far as the mouse back/forward buttons go aren't those mapped through some third party application anyway? If you remove that application will IE and FF react to them?
Ah, excellent finally. I've been searching for that for months. You know what would have been super useful in finding that? If they'd actually documented it in one of the menu's perhaps. A la the Window menu in Safari.
Ctrl+Tab I could get used to, Ctrl+Num is just frustrating, having to reach over the keyboard to slap a number key.
The Safari Bookmarks manager is not that dissimilar to the FireFox Bookmarks manager. The IE one certainly is more pleasant to use than the Firefox one. I quite like how you click the book icon and the bookmarks manager takes over, when you are done click that button again and you are back to the webpage.
Weather and Clocks I've got in my Dashboard, no need to clutter my browser with detritus. Gmail I've got a notifier in my taskbar area, again no need to clutter my browser. I'd go and find out what Stylish is but the addons.mozilla.org website is down.
Neither my weather nor my Clocks do I feel in anyway are "retarded". They are gone when I don't need them and there when I do, they don't clutter my work space.
edit: Ok sites up again, found out what stylish is. the whole idea of it sounds terrible and the prospect of some joe user hijacking the carefully designed interface of a site I created both annoys and insults me. If I wanted them to be able to use their own styles I'd have provided the required functionality.
I don't mind people overriding certain aspects with a global stylesheet of their own (accessibility purposes and such) but the willy nilly hijacking of sites designs just seems anti-web to me.
Beginning to wonder if I need to slap !important after all my CSS rules
another edit: The SafariStand plugin for Safari will let you do this kind of thing. As show at SitePoint
Really? I always find myself using the mouse more when I'm on a Mac. It feels like the OS encourages that - for instance, having the Trash icon always present in the dock so you can drag-and-drop files and apps into it. In fact, I think drag-and-drop operations, in general, actually work better on OS X than they do in any other OS I've used.More stuff in Mac is keyboard based, my mum has a mouse with those back/forward buttons, I personally find it immensely annoying. Want to go back/forward without clicking the buttons Ctrl+[, want to go forward Ctrl+]. More of the OS is navigable via keyboard shortcuts in Mac OS than I ever found with Windows.
Unless you want to assign some other task to the buttons, you don't need additional software installed. The side buttons on the mouse function as back/forward buttons by default, even with the vanilla Windows drivers.Still as far as the mouse back/forward buttons go aren't those mapped through some third party application anyway? If you remove that application will IE and FF react to them?
Ctrl+Tab and Ctrl+Shift+Tab are actually very logical keyboard shortcuts for switching between tabs in MDI windows in Windows and Linux, where Alt+Tab and Alt+Shift+Tab are used to switch between individual application windows. Although Alt+Tab exists on OS X, I suspect most of you use Exposé more often.Ctrl+Tab I could get used to, Ctrl+Num is just frustrating, having to reach over the keyboard to slap a number key.
I can't get the bookmarks to pin at all@perris: You want the Bookmarks bar left aligned?
I can't get the bookmarks to pin at all
you mean I can't pin favorites?And this is a problem that I think pretty much everyone is having.
I can't operate without a pinned Fav's center. The way Safari uses its favorites is just stupid.
SafariStand lets you do that on the Mac
By the way, Geffy, do you notice how Stylish and the gmail notification icons are integrated in the shell of my browser?