Some brief thoughts on Safari 5

I’d like to start off by saying that currently I am waging an inner struggle to determine what my “main” browser will be. Prior to today the battle was between Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox. My biggest issue with Chrome has been that there is no bookmarks menu as there is in Safari or Firefox (or Opera, or Camino, or Flock et al). Rather it just throws your bookmarks into folders visible on your browser window. I don’t like having all my bookmarks visible, that’s what the bookmarks menu is for - to have a bunch of bookmarks that you don’t use that often but are still worth keeping. My biggest issue with Firefox is the lack of support for the HTML5 friendly version of Youtube. Oh and another pet peeve is that on my iGoogle page, which is my Home page, the Google chat sidebar never looks right. The fonts are either strangely extruded or cutoff and the search bar looks crooked. So I am not sure which pet peeve is worse and the battle rages on between browsers... when... all of a sudden... HERE COMES A NEW CHALLENGER!

Safari 5. Safari has always had a special place in my heart. It was never a bad browser but I felt it lacked many of the cool extensions that are available for Firefox (and Mozilla based browsers like Flock) and Chrome. It has always been quick and since Safari 4 has had some quite beautiful eye candy, and little things like web clip that proved useful every now and then. And it is the browser that best suites OS X visually and integrates nicely with other standard Mac software like Mail and iPhoto. I think Safari 5 is a great addition to the dilemma of choosing your “main” browser. It has opened itself up to having extensions developed for it. Granted, prior to 5 you could have plug-ins like the ever popular 1Password and Safari AdBlock, which I never used for some reason. Now Safari 5 looks like it is set to have extensions more like Chrome and Firefox, built around scripting languages like JavaScript and CSS as is the case with Chrome extensions. That was my only major issue in fully accepting Safari as my main browser. Now it would hopefully be possible to have something like AdBlock Plus on Safari, and the various Youtube video-downloading extensions.

That is the not-to-distant future, but the one stand-out feature you can use right now is both remarkably simple and remarkably awesome. That feature is Reader. Essentially it is Quick Look for reading articles on the web. It looks like a Quick Look preview within Safari and has the benefit of showing you just the pieces of the webpage that pertain to the article you’re reading like the text and associated images. You basically get rid of any unimportant or distracting information on the page. Great for those of us with limited attention spans. This is great if you’re reading the NYTimes with all its superfluous webpage stuff, or a blog like Gizmodo where you don’t necessarily want to block their ads (those dudes deserve to get paid) but would like to focus more on the content. All you have to do to activate this awesome feature is click the “Reader” button that appears on the address bar on compatible webpages. Reader alone is worth using Safari 5 extensively. Trust me. It. Is. Cool. Look!
Good news, bad news time. Good news. If you’re running OS X 10.5 and up you can get Safari 5 via Software Update. Bad news. If you’re one of the many Poor Macs running 10.4 you’re left out in the cold. There is a Safari 4.1 update that has some of the characteristics of 5, such as the return of the blue inline progress bar in the address bar and um, more HTML5 friendliness. Really it’s not bad, you’ll live. Just not that awesomely.

P.J. O’Rourke once said that we should “Always read something that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it”. Safari 5 and Reader will make sure that if you die reading a webpage at the very least you will look good doing it.

More info on Safari 5: Apple