Has anyone else installed the Safari 4 Beta to Vista?
I loved the UI of Safari 3.xx in Vista and on the Mac. The UI of Safari 4 Beta looks more or less like Mozilla and the new IE browsers in Vista. On the Mac Safari 4 does still have what I really liked about 3.xx.
In Safari 3.xx on Vista I particularly liked…
- The way the tabs worked
- The lack of a wide border
- The color integration between the caption bar, tool bar and background
- The drag-size triangle at the lower right corner
All gone now!
The Safari 4 tabs work the same on both Mac and Vista. The other things I liked about the Vista implementation have been retained in the Mac version.
Safari 4 has corrected their font handling under Vista; they now use the Vista font smoothing engine (on Vista) by default so the on-screen fonts match the same fonts as displayed in other application windows. The Apple font handlers are still available on Vista (Light, Medium, and Strong) but the Windows Standard is far and away the best on Vista …IMHO.
White Balance so easy, even our 5 year old can do it.- Melissa Strickland
I'm not using Windows much, but I've been living with Safari 4 on the Mac since the beta first appeared. While I think many of the details of the new UI range from debatable to dubious, I'm not looking back. Here's why: the rendering engine and network handling of this browser simply blow the previous versions—and most other web browsers—away.
Oh, and it's color-managed.
White Balance so easy, even our 5 year old can do it.- Melissa Strickland
By ‘network handling’ do you mean you actually installed Bonjour or do you just mean the way Safari handles the Internet?
By ‘debatable to dubious’ are you referring to the placement of the tabs in the caption bar and using the ‘sizing’ triangle as the handle to change the order of the tabs? Not exactly intuitive, especially the little ‘X’ to open a new tab but it works; I think the Safari engineers were trying to make more space for the content area.
Do you know if it is color managed on Vista as well …I’m being lazy here by not looking it up myself.
White Balance so easy, even our 5 year old can do it.- Melissa Strickland
By ‘network handling’ do you mean you actually installed Bonjour or do you just mean the way Safari handles the Internet?
By network handling, I'm obtusely lumping together how Safari now handles individual tabs, sessions, requests, scripts, threads and all that stuff. It's a much improved architecture.
Quote:
Originally Posted by MarkAlsop
By ‘debatable to dubious’ are you referring to the placement of the tabs in the caption bar and using the ‘sizing’ triangle as the handle to change the order of the tabs? Not exactly intuitive, especially the little ‘X’ to open a new tab but it works; I think the Safari engineers were trying to make more space for the content area.
I don't personally have a problem with the tabs on top. I didn't care for the new "Top Sites" feature, so I shut it off. Others have exhaustively catalogued and analyzed all the little weird, ill-conceived details.
Quote:
Originally Posted by MarkAlsop
Do you know if it is color managed on Vista as well …I’m being lazy here by not looking it up myself.
One of the pleasant surprises about color management on the Mac is that—if you calibrate and profile your display properly—everything on the screen is color managed, even the buttons and icons and stuff, so color management actually improves the entire computing experience.
White Balance so easy, even our 5 year old can do it.- Melissa Strickland
Of course, in practice, the effectiveness of color management in the web browser context is a bit problematic.
The crucial thing is that the display is calibrated and profiled. If the browser is sensitive to that information, then—as far as I understand it—the browser will interpret all web graphics as sRGB. (Unless they have an embedded ICC profile, in which case they should honor that profile.) The end result is a better browsing experience.
Virtually no web graphics have embedded ICC profiles because the profiles significantly increase the size of the graphics file, and that's an unacceptable inefficiency. All general purpose web graphics should already be exported in sRGB, implicitly. So, when should you embed an ICC profile in an image bound for the web?
This is a pretty tricky question. Let's see if I've got this right:
One perspective would answer “never”, because relatively few browsers will honor them. If you post a JPG in ProPhotoRGB with an embedded profile, most web browsers will ignore the profile and display a weird-looking image. This position would advocate always converting all your images to sRGB and exporting them without a profile (since sRGB is the default case).
Of course, if you convert from ProPhotoRGB to sRGB, you're dramatically restricting gamut which may significantly affect some your colors, depending on the nature of your work. So, the other position would be to always export all your portfolio material in the color space that's appropriate for your imagery—embedding the ICC profile—and the 90+% of browser users who use a browser that ignores profiles can just go hang.
I suppose my suggestion would be thus:
1) for now, be conservative and convert everything to sRGB; save the files without embedded profiles
2) vocally support color-management in web browsers and hope for wider adoption
3) use a color managed browser on color managed displays, enjoy the better browsing experience, and educate others about the advantage
White Balance so easy, even our 5 year old can do it.- Melissa Strickland
Linear Mode
