Safari 4

Apple have made a public beta of the latest version of their Safari web browser available for download. It is a pretty thing indeed. There are a number of bells and whistles that we have seen before (it looks and feels a lot like Chrome). There are a number of new features like the ability to save a web page as an application a la Google Gears or Fluid (edit: although I have yet to find this function). There is also a start page not unlike Chrome or Opera that takes your history and shows you which sites you are going to the most. Pretty useful, not especially innovative but it it executed really well. I’m going to keep working with it for a while where I can. Note that I say where I can.

Sadly I have discovered a couple of problems already that have hindered my experience. First, Safari 4 does not play nice with GrowlMail. If you have that plugin installed then Safari will cause Mail mail to repeatedly crash when it checks for new mail. This is very frustrating, especially as you need to open mail to disable GrowlMail properly. In order to trash GrowlMail I had to remove the following from my Library.

/Library/Mail/Bundles/GrowlMail.bundle
/Library/Receipts/GrowlMail.pkg
/Library/Receipts/growlmailPreflight.pkg

…and then disable GrowlMail in the Growl Prefs pane. It works now I have both S4 and Mail open at the same time. It looked for a while like that was never going to happen again. There is a discussion about this on the Apple Support site.

A more pressing problem and one that I can upon as I was about to write a glowing review was that it appears impossible to use the WYSIWYG interface of WordPress when adding a new post. I was writing this post and attempted to insert a link and the screen went dark as if some javascript was running and then nothing. The box that I wanted was behind a wall of grey and I couldn’t click the grey away. It was most frustrating. See screenshot below.

So I know that it is a preview release and there are bound to be bugs but this means that I can’t use the browser for blogging which really sucks. I hope it gets fixed soon. I’m still playing with it and if I find anything else I will post it up here.

Apple – Safari – Download Safari – Download the world’s fastest and most innovative browser for Mac and PC.

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