Hasta La Gadget!

When it comes to browsing on your smartphone, which browser do you prefer to use? There are many options available at the moment, such as Mozilla’s Firefox, Opera, and Google Chrome as some of the downloadable options, but it seems that despite Android’s massive market share lead over iOS, Safari is proving to be the browser of choice on mobile devices.

According to a recent report by Flurry, they have found that native apps are highly preferred over webapps, but when it comes to surfing, Safari appears to be the clear winner and is leading Google Chrome by 2%. (more…)

Safari Is The Browser Of Choice When It Comes To Mobile [Report] original content from Ubergizmo.

This article was written on June 13, 2007 by CyberNet.

Web Browser Wednesday

The new Safari on Windows is boasted as one of the fastest browsers available for the Windows operating system. Well, that might be a little biased considering that it is according to Safari’s homepage, but I’ve tinkered with it over the past day and it is among the fastest browsers that I’ve used. It also has some shortcomings though…

First and foremost there have been a number of security concerns with Safari on Windows, which is something I definitely expected. Apple released Safari saying that their “engineers designed Safari to be secure from day one.” We all know that talk is cheap, and the vulnerabilities are something that I expected since Apple doesn’t make Windows software very frequently. Not only that, but this is also a pre-release application, so they have time to correct things before anyone can really start criticizing.

All browsers have their security woes, so in this review I’m going to set that aside and look strictly at the features. I’m going to give a bulleted list of the things that Safari includes, and then I’ll provide a short screencast where I’ll point out some of the cool features as well as the things that it lacks.

–The Features–

Here are the more notable features in Safari (for Windows) that you should be aware of, as specified on the Safari homepage.

• Performance – As the Safari homepage points out, this browser is very good at loading Websites quickly. I was able to notice a significant reduction in page load times as I was browsing the Web, but that’s not the only kind of performance that is important. The Safari site fails to say what the memory usage is like for the browser, and I’ll be the first to say it’s horrible. At any given time, it is twice what Firefox, Opera, or even Internet Explorer is using up even when visiting the same sites.
• Interface – Ahh, this is something I don’t really know that I can touch on. Apple made sure that they gave people the feeling that they are using a Mac computer by preventing the Windows operating system from controlling any aspect of the appearance. I think it is safe to conclude that people will be able to easily see when you’re using Safari on a Windows computer. It sticks out like a sore thumb.
• Bookmarks – This is something that I cover more in the screencast, but overall this is one of the biggest downfalls in Safari. I’m a right-click/drag-and-drop freak and the Bookmarks Bar hardly allows for any of that. You can’t arrange your bookmarks by dragging them around in that bar, instead you have to use the Bookmark Collections which is a hassle. Oh, and did I mention that there is no Bookmarks sidebar for you to use?
• Searching – The searching in Safari is almost its best feature. They have done a great job of making the results stand out, and that is something I very much appreciate.
• Tabbed Browsing – Come on, all of the cool browsers have tabbed browsing these days. The only thing cool about Safari’s is that you can drag a tab off of the tab bar and it will open in a new window.
• SnapBack – This is pretty nice as well since many of us perform a lot of searches. After doing a search and clicking on a result there will be a little orange icon in the upper-right search box in Safari. That will always be there as a means to take you back to the initial search that you performed.
• AutoFill Forms – Meh, it’s a form filler and nothing more.
• RSS Reader – The built-in RSS reader is a nice cross between the Live Bookmarks that Firefox has and a full RSS feed reader. It even has a cool slider that instantly lets you adjust the length of the articles being displayed. It’s important to note, however, that they do not let you configure an external feed reader for subscribing to the feeds though.
• Resizable Text Fields – This seems to be the hot new thing since Netscape 9 Beta also has this feature. All it does is let you resize text boxes on a site, such as the one we have below for commenting.
• Private Browsing – With Private Browsing enabled, Safari won’t store your Google searches, your cookies, the history of sites you’ve visited, your download history, or information from online forms you’ve filled out. With the increasing concern over privacy, this is a feature some users will appreciate.
• Security – I think I said enough about this up top.

So that’s how I feel about the features Safari has in it that is supposed to make it the browser for you to use. Some of them are cool, but a lot of them have already been seen in existing browsers which makes them far from spectacular.

–The Screencast–

Latest take a more hands-on look at how I feel about the features in Safari:

–The Overview–

As you can see, Safari has several cool features that I would like to see available in other browsers. There is nothing in it that makes it better than Firefox, Opera, or even Internet Explorer in my opinion, so there will probably be few people actually using it. The only way that it will benefit me is allowing me to easily test my site to make sure it renders properly in the Safari browser.

Download the Safari 3 Preview

Copyright © 2014 CyberNetNews.com

This article was written on March 26, 2008 by CyberNet.

Web Browser Wednesday

We’ve been asked for quite awhile to provide a performance comparison of the different mainstream browsers out there, and so today we are going to show you the stats from several different areas that users generally find to be the most important. Things like memory usage, page load time, and JavaScript performance will all be covered below.

One thing that you need to remember with these tests is that the results are all relative to each other. Each browser is running on the exact same machine so that the comparisons are accurate. What we heard the last time we did tests like this is “such and such browser performed a lot better/worse for me.” We appreciate hearing what your results are, but for the sake of accuracy they can’t really be compared to what we get.

Notes:

• All of these tests are performed on the same Windows Vista SP1 machine, and is wired into a network to minimize the effects of wireless disturbances.
• To test both IE7 and IE8 Beta I ran all of the tests in IE 7, installed IE 8, and then reran all the tests again.
• All browsers started with a clean profile and no add-ons/extensions installed.
• Caches were cleared before each test was run.
• Only one browser was open at a time and no other applications (other than standard Vista services) were running.
• Internet Explorer 8 was always used in the native rendering mode (a.k.a. standards compliant mode).

–JavaScript Tests–

We’ve previously run Apple’s SunSpider JavaScript tests, but there was apparently some controversy of using that because people felt that it could be a little biased. We wanted to pick a test that used tools you’ll find in sites you visit everyday. That’s why we went with the MooTools SlickSpeed test which checks the browser against different JavaScript libraries: Dojo 1.0.2, JQuery 1.2.3, MooTools 1.2B2, and Prototype 1.6.0.2.

Many sites use those libraries, and even we use JQuery for things such as the AJAX commenting. By putting the browsers back-to-back with the SlickSpeed test, we’ll be able to find out exactly which ones will give us the better JavaScript performance (this is what really matters on a day to day basis).

Pretty much none of the browsers were able to complete all of the tests error-free, and so we’re focusing purely on the speed. We ran each test three times, totaled the runtime (measured in milliseconds) for all four libraries, and then averaged the results. In the parenthesis you’ll see the results of each test we ran before averaging them together (the overall smaller number is better):

1. Safari 3.1: 447.33ms (407,536,399)
2. Opera 9.5.9841 Beta: 502.00ms (523,456,527)
3. Firefox 3 Beta 4: 909.00ms (921,904,902)
4. Opera 9.26: 1036.33ms (992,1034,1083)
5. Firefox 2.0.0.12: 1507.67ms (1523,1472,1528)
6. Internet Explorer 7: 5944.33ms (5965,5998,5870)
7. Internet Explorer 8 Beta: 6690ms (6245,7206,6619)

It looks like the new Safari 3.1 takes the crown on this set of tests!

–Page Load Times–

I was trying to figure out what the best method would be to measure page load times in all the browsers. Sure some of the browsers report how long it takes for a site to load, but we wanted a universal way that would work across all of the browsers. We figured sitting here with a stop watch just wouldn’t cut it.

After some searching around I came across the Numion Stopwatch, which is a great tool for measuring how long it takes for a site to load. It’s entirely encased in a website so that there is nothing to install, and it uses JavaScript to notify you exactly how long it takes a page to load. From what I can tell it does a rather superb job!

We ran the page load test three times on two different sites so that we could really see what the results were like. We used the Official Google Blog and the Yahoo Search Blog for our benchmarks, and there are very good reasons that we chose those sites. Both of those serve up nearly the exact same content every time you load the site. If I chose a site such as ours we would run into the issue of different ads being served in the different browsers.

For each test the browser started with a cleared cache, and the three results were averaged together to get a single overall load time (measured in seconds). In the parenthesis you’ll see the results of each test we ran before averaging them together (the overall smaller number is better):

Note: I literally went and deleted each browser’s cache after each refresh just to remove any concern that a Control/Shift refresh was not deleting the site’s cache correctly.

The Google Blog:

1. Opera 9.5.9841 Beta: 2.498s (2.129,2.606,2.760)
2. Safari 3.1: 2.798s (2.619,2.963,2.811)
3. Firefox 3 Beta 4: 3.009s (3.167,3.347,2.513)
4. Opera 9.26: 3.360s (3.606,3.215,3.260)
5. Internet Explorer 7: 4.235s (4.402,3.800,4.504)
6. Firefox 2.0.0.12: 4.485s (4.852,4.258,4.346)
7. Internet Explorer 8 Beta: 4.602s (4.409,4.238,5.158)

The Yahoo Search Blog:

1. Safari 3.1: 1.411s (1.547,1.312,1.375)
2. Opera 9.5.9841 Beta: 1.599s (1.578,1.625,1.593)
3. Opera 9.26: 1.677s (1.547,1.625,1.860)
4. Firefox 2.0.0.12: 1.771s (1.797,1.844,1.672)
5. Firefox 3 Beta 4: 2.055s (2.430,2.143,1.591)
6. Internet Explorer 7: 2.594s (2.563,2.219,3.000)
7. Internet Explorer 8 Beta: 3.365s (2.875,3.750,3.470)

It looks like Safari 3.1 and Opera 9.5 both do really well in these tests, and I would consider it a tie between the two.

–Memory Usage–

This is probably one of the areas that interests most of you. Memory usage has become a big concern these days as we’ve seen some browsers (*cough* Firefox *cough*) use up insane amounts of our computer’s resources. So we took each of the browsers seen in the previous tests, developed a list of sites to open in each, and went at it.

We’re not going to list out all of the sites that we decided to visit, but they are all sites that are extremely popular. Places like MySpace, YouTube, CNN, and others were all included as we chugged through our four different memory usage readings:

1. Started the browser, and took a memory usage reading.
2. Loaded 10 predetermined sites in tabs, and took a memory usage reading after all the sites finished loading.
3. Loaded 15 more predetermined sites in tabs (totaling 25 sites), and took a memory usage reading after all the sites finished loading.
4. Let the browser sit for 10 minutes with the 25 tabs open, and then took a memory usage reading.

And now for the results! The table below lists the different browsers and the result from each test mentioned above. The best browser from each test is highlighted in green, and the worst is highlighted in red.

For this round it’s clear that Firefox 3 Beta 4 walks away as the clear winner. Mozilla has obviously put some work into making Firefox 3 a more memory efficient browser than it previously was, and this is proof of that.

I can’t say that I was surprised that some version of Internet Explorer almost always did the worst, but I was quite taken back that Internet Explorer 8 shows little improvement over version 7. Apparently that is not the focus of Microsoft right now.

–Overview–

It took us about 6 hours to compile all of the results that you see above, and I would say that doing this on your own is not really for the faint of heart. Things like not being able to run IE7 and IE8 side-by-side is really a time killer, but we wanted to be sure to include both versions in our results. And surprisingly the only browser that crashed on us was Internet Explorer 8 Beta when trying to open the 25 tabs.

We’d love to hear any comments you may have regarding our results, but remember that what you’ll see on your computer will likely differ from what we see. The important thing to take out of the stats is how each of them relatively rank up against each other.

Copyright © 2014 CyberNetNews.com

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