Safari 4 == A Load of Marketing Crap

Posted: February 26th, 2009 | Filed under: General | 8 Comments »

As most of you already know Apple Released Safari 4 beta. It is advertised to be “The world’s fastest browser” and have 150 new features as it is “Leading the way with innovation.”.

The first thing I thought when I opened it up was that I clicked the wrong quick launch icon. I thought I pulled up Chrome, and that they had upgraded Cromes most visited page. But nope, It was in fact the new safari with a new interface which was copied highly inspired from Chome’s interface. Next I was thinking the top sites looked pretty good. Then I moused over them for a moment and the fan on my laptop kicked on, and my cpu usage went clean over 30%. Not a good first impression.

After that little kink it seemed that overall it was pretty slick until I opened up more than 10 tabs and realized, o shit, I cannot get to any other tabs unless I click on this stupid little … button. I tried the scroll wheel thinking they stole that from Firefox, nope, so next I tried the ctrl+tab/ctrl+shft+tab, and bingo. Still really annoying, I tried to drag some of the tabs around just to find out I have to drag them by that little icon in the corner, again not good.

Apple, I had to call you out on this one. Yes the new safari is better than version 3 but version 3 completely sucked on windows so it did not take much to do better, even Firefox 1.5 was better then Safari version 3.

I see a couple similarities…

You know its completely ok for apple to patent touch screen devises because they would never copy other peoples technologies.

Stolen Ideas:

1. Top Sites – Originally From Opera and also in Chrome (However at least they added that little star)
2. Full History Search – It’s about damn time…
3. Tabs on Top – When I grow up I want to be just like chrome
4. Full Page Zoom – Yup you were last.
5. Smart Address Field – Yup last again
6. Smart Search Field – And last again
7. Phishing and Malware Protection – Even IE8 has this

Now the things they deserve respect for.

1. Some CSS 3 Support
2. CSS Effects
3. CSS Canvas
4. Acid 3 Compliance
5. HTML 5
6. Development Tools
7. Windows Font Rendering

Why its a Load of Marketing Crap

“The world’s fastest browser”
JavaScript yes, but that’s only 1 part of a browser. Apple claims that safari 4 has its new Nitro JavaScript Engine which is “6 times faster than Internet Explorer 8 and up to 4 times faster than Firefox 3.1.”. I won’t argue that at all because the benchmarks prove it’s the fastest. However load this thing up on Windows Vista x64 and watch that free memory and CPU just disappear.

I did a “real world” test and opened up the same 12 tabs in Safari 4b, Opera 10a, and Firefox 3.1b2 and Chrome 1.0.154.48. (No I did not do IE, it’s almost never a real comparison.) I opened up the 12 websites that the new safari shows on its slow imitation of Opera’s Speed Dial, as well as 1 blank tab/speed dial/most visited/top site. I let them all just sit there for about 2-3 minutes and then took a look at the numbers and heres how they stacked up. (No its not scientific)

CPU Percent – 2.5Ghz dual
Chrome – 15%
Safari – 10%
Opera – 0%
Firefox – 0%

Memory – 3g total
Safari 4 – 394,824K
Chrome – 260,048K
Opera 10a – 152,784K
Firefox 3.1b2 – 132,184K

You can see from these results that “The world’s fastest browser” takes up 2.98 times more resources then Firefox and 2.5 times more than Opera. Safari also uses anywhere from 8-30% of my CPU time even when its minimized and not being touched. Opera and Firefox both use 0 CPU time when idle.

“The world’s fastest browser”, My Ass it is, maybe the world’s most bloated browser would fit the description better.

You really can see how badly chrome spams the process list when you look at it. Also the blanks are other programs that I have just removed from the list to make it easier to read.

“Safari is the first – and only – web browser to pass Acid 3″.
Uhh… I don’t even know what to say to this. Opera beat Safari to this way back in March 2008. Opera Passes Acid Test 3

Coverflow
Pretty cool but basically useless…

150 Features
Yea 150 Features only 28 new ones. I could get 150 Features out of a basic calculator, more marketing crap.

Overall Safari 4 is a great improvement over Safari 3 however on windows that’s not saying much Safari 3 was crap. Hopefully safari runs a lot faster on a Mac then on Windows and that huge memory and CPU consumption are not a problem for any of safari’s “real users”, however I cannot say, since I have not tried it.

This release of Safari was just a load of marketing crap, they took almost all their features from other browsers. Then Apple called these “highly inspired” changes “Leading the way with innovation”.

On a side note Safari you will not grow up and be chrome. Stop trying to look like them and come up with some of your own features in the next release or don’t call it safari 4, call it safari 3.x.

To end it on a good note, Thank you to apple for helping push JavaScript speed, and browser standards. Without these things the web will never be where it could be and for this I say, Thank You.

What are your experiences with the new Safari 4 beta so far? Are they the same as mine or better? Also to someone on a Mac, how is the performace of safari 4 on your system? I am curious as to how much faster it is.

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