Safari 4 beta

[alevasseur14]

I just typed in the terminal commands to return the tab bar and page loading progress bar to their Safari 3 state. Waaaaaay better. I've used Chrome on my Windows box and I just don't get the desire to move tabs to the top of the window. It seems so counter intuitive.

That said, I'm still using Firefox as my daily browser. Nothing against the new Safari now that I've 'fixed' it, I'm just a creature of habit I guess.

 

[phexac]

Ok, the first thing I noticed when I installed Safari 4 and opened it is that it uses up 200MB of RAM and 10-20% of C2D just sitting there with 1 tab open. That's completely unacceptable for a web browser. At 10 tabs, it's over 300 MB of memory, and CPU usage goes up even higher. When you use on of the animation features, it adds and SECOND 100MB+ process. So with a few open tabs and the main page running, you are at nearly half a gig of memory and 25% of powerful modern CPU. I know Apple software for Windows is notoriously terrible and they pride themselves on flash over substance, but jesus christ...where does reality check come in?

Second is tab management is just terrible. They get progressively tinier at the top of the screen. Combined with transparent theme of windows, their titles soon become unreadable and half of them go off screen. You end up with a blurry line on the top and no way of scrolling it right and left. You can only use a drop-down menu of the list of tabs you have open. Very annoying to use.

Third, the pretty little tile showing of pages at the start page...has no way of picking the pages you want there. Instead, it uses some Apple voodoo to guess you preferences. This means that when I want to change to appears there, I have no way of doing so outside of going to that page for a month and only then being able to pin it there. Seriously, throughout the development NO ONE...EVER suggested making it possible to type in the sites you actually want there?

As for its speed, I am not really sure what you guys are talking about. Not saying it's slow, but I've never had problem with other browsers being slow, and Safari seems about the same minus the time to display the gay little Apple animations.

So when on the one hand you have this HUGE resource hog monster with completely obtuse design, and on the other hand you have Firefox, which uses 50-100 MB with multiple addons whose functionality Safari does not even come close to including, and IE8, which uses about 10MB/tab (yes that means under 20MB with 1 tab open) and has a much more modern and legible tab management, one has to wonder why anyone in their right mind would ever use Safari.

 

[QueBert]

While I never checked CPU usage, with 5 tabs open my Firefox would hit 400 megs+ with ease. IE is built in to XP/VISTA it's unfair to compare the memory usage here, comparing Safari vs Firefox va Chrome is fair. And from using them all I can say the memory usage is very similar between the 3.

 

[phexac]

What you say about Firefox is simply not true. My current session, which has been open for a while has 6 tabs and is taking up 98MB. I just opened Safari, and it's sitting there at 233MB and 16% CPU doing ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. And the funny thing is, not a single review out there mentions any of this.

 

[phexac]

Oh yeah, and all of the above does not even include the fact that all work Apple put into making Safari choke your comp to produce blurry little images of your history items (seriously, the rendering is terrible) could have been better spent making a simple session manager, a feature that Opera has had for ages untold. Or a simple download manager. Or a tab manager. Or a torrent downloader. Or a speed dial where you can actually type in the pages you want. All those things can be whipped up by one guy, but that would go against Apple's tradition of not making things for people who use software for its practical applications rather than just dicking around.

 

[QueBert]

Originally posted by: phexac
What you say about Firefox is simply not true. My current session, which has been open for a while has 6 tabs and is taking up 98MB. I just opened Safari, and it's sitting there at 233MB and 16% CPU doing ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. And the funny thing is, not a single review out there mentions any of this.

maybe you're unlucky? My last Firefox I checked (this morning) was at 230 megs with 2 tabs open. I tried Chrome and it was over 400 megs doing next to nothing. I don't know what to tell you.

I love the speed of Safari on my PC pages open faster, I could care less the program takes an extra 2 seconds to open the first time. I keep it open all day and pages load more quickly than they do in IE. As for the memory usage, I have plenty. I had PS CS2 open + Sarafi + I was ripping a DVD and my system had no slow down. All I have is 2 gigs of memory. As for the history, mine doesn't choke at all considering it's loading an actual graphical representation of every page I went to, which look good enough to where I can find a site I'm looking for in my history without any searching (other than looking at the screen shots) the images are tiny screen shots of something that should be close to, if not full screen. Do you expect the text to be readable or something? I just found a picture in my history and it looks fine to me. Maybe you're PC is the problem here I dunno what to tell you...

 

[Kmax82]

For me, system specs in sig... I have six tabs open with Safari 4, and my CPU is hovering at 2-3%. But I believe you all are talking about Windows.

 

[TheStu]

Safari 4, OS X, less than 2% CPU, 193MB RAM used. Will update from Windows 7 Beta.
Safari 4, Win 7, 9% CPU, 220MB RAM used.

 

[QueBert]

found a issue with Safari, it could just be my bad luck but, on Newegg or any site with a similar navigation bar at the top, when I hover over a link it opens with the banner below it over it, and I cannot see any of the links from the top to where the banner ends. And I can't select anything, if I try to move the mouse down over one it vanishes. I've had this happen on 3 different sites. Just rebooted and tried Newegg and same thing anyone have this problem too? or is it just me.