Outfoxed By Flash Fires: I’m Off Safari
March 27, 2008
Just hours after posting my article recommending the latest Safari browser I started hearing about problems with Flash sites and possibly others, so I created a fresh, default install of 3.1 for XP/Vista (without Quicktime) and I went looking for trouble.
Where to? Well, the Flash website seemed a good place to start. At the Macromedia page I was told, “You have version 9,0,115,0 installed”. Ok, good to know, but there wasn’t any flash on the page and the Macromedia.com default page just forwarded me to adobe.com.
But voila, the adobe site has a flash banner promoting Acrobat Reader. The presentation ran fine, though I wondered if I had noticed a (very slight) jitter, so I opened the same page in Firefox and ran them side by side.
While the Firefox media ran at normal speed and ran smoothly, the Safari version ran about half speed, or worse. I had to close the Firefox page to get Safari back to speed. The Safari load/reload times for the Flash were none too impressive either.
So, it certainly didn’t take long to find a problem, though it helps to know what you’re looking for. I could have gone on and looked for more, but there seems little point.
Either way, there is a problem with the Flash addin and several issues have been reported by others such as Alec Saunders and Paul McDougall, so I must withdraw my original recommendation of Safari.
Meanwhile, I CAN recommend Firefox with absolute confidence. I have been using Firefox almost exclusively for several years and it works like a dream. It is free, is truly standards compliant and has captured a growing share of the world market.
World’s Fastest Web Browser Is Free & Easy
March 25, 2008
If you are disappointed with the performance of your web browser you may want to try Safari 3.1, the self-proclaimed “world’s best browser” which was released just last week and is free to use on PC or MAC computers.
Among its features, Safari is noticeably faster than all other browsers. Its website claims its performance is about twice as fast as IE 7 and nearly double the speed of Firefox too.
Keeping in mind that your internet connection (even broadband) is still the weakest link in terms of internet performance, clever strategies for downloading the images, scripts, styles and other files that constitute a ‘webpage’ can make a huge difference in its load time. The Safari team have clearly got it right.
Safari is produced by Apple™ where it has long been the native browser for MAC computers and now it has been made available for Windows™ systems too.
The look and feel of Safari is completely familiar.
Apple™ is well known for producing high quality, user-friendly products and the Safari browser is no exception. Safari is completely “standards compliant” – meaning it will display web content as it was intended to be and it ‘plays nice’ with web sites and servers alike.
The layout is uncluttered and the feel is very familiar. The toolbar and menus are intuitive and anyone who has used a web browser before will feel instantly at ease with it.
To web developers:
You will probably want to keep your Firefox set up because of its brilliant suite of add-ins, even though Safari does offer developer extensions too (which I have not yet investigated).
Even so it would be valuable to install Safari – if not for testing, then perhaps for personal use since most web developers (like myself) probably have the Firefox caching disabled.
A faster browser for general use could be a refreshing change!
