Safari 3.1 - Bringin' Me Back Around

I left Safari for a while.

I had switched over to Firefox 2.0, and hadn't really thought about it much until I read something about Safari 3.1 offering huge speed improvements. 

So I did what every other self-respecting computer geek would do - downloaded Safari 3.1 and decided to live with it for a while. I'm finding a lot to like with Safari 3.1. For starters, it's definitely the fastest thing going right now. (Firefox 3, currently in beta, promises speed improvements as well).  I'm also finding that for whatever reason, it now seems to work properly with our company's Web-based email and Intranet site. (Safari 2 mangled it so bad that Firefox was a necessity, not a choice). And it also seems to be less of an overall system drain than Firefox.

There are lots of other little touches too, some admittedly "me toos" or catch-ups with FF. For example, you can double-click in an empty space next to a tab in the tab bar to launch a new tabbed page. I don't recall the older version being able to do that, and it's a very handy feature. Safari has first-rate form handling, a good privacy feature, and of course if you have a .Mac account it's nice to sync your bookmarks across all your computers (not to mention syncing them with your iPhone, if you are so fortunate).

Safari still doesn't have all the plug-ins which Firefox offers. The FF plug-in I'll miss the most is called Web Developer, and it's pretty handy for, well, Web development. But it's not something I use every day, and it's easy enough to keep it around for when I need it.

Safari is a true color-managed application, which means that photos will render properly according to their color spaces (sRBG, for example). Even cooler than that, consider this tidbit from Apple?

"With CSS3 web fonts in Safari 3.1, web designers can go beyond web-safe fonts and use any font they want to create stunning new websites using standards-based technology. Safari automatically

recognizes websites that use custom fonts and downloads them as they’re needed."

Now that really IS cool. If only more people used Safari, more sites could be built this way. Hint for Windows users: You can run Safari on PCs, too!