Steve Jobby Jobs

So everyone’s favorite CEO Steve Jobs has given another one of his famous MacWorld Expo keynote speeches where he announces new products from Apple. Along with some new Powerbooks and an OSX version of X11 comes Safari, Apple’s entry into the web browser market. It’s faster and more OS integrated than any other Mac browser, but I’m disappointed with their choice of codebase. Rather than base it on Mozilla they chose KHTML, the rendering engine of the KDE desktop environment. This means yet another codebase that I need to test everyone I make on, and I don’t even own a machine that will run it. Luckily, a list of bugs has already been started.

On top of that, it apparently runs the Flash plug-in like shit. Just as the Flash 6 plug-in was making performance on a Mac more reasonable, this brings the experience back to a miserable level compared to the equivalent movie running on Windows.

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In other technology news, eBay has release the eBay toolbar for IE/Windows. It lets you search eBay easily, has quick links to the items you’re bidding on, and uses your watch list to give you updates within Windows, not just by email. It actually brings up a reminder that your acution is ending down on the right hand corner of the screen. It’s nice that even though it’s an IE toolbar, it has features outside of the browser.

Another thing I like is that it lets you browse categories in a cascading list, rather than clicking through them on the website.

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EDIT: I need to slip another link into this post—Stories about ticket stubs. Great idea.

View Comments (8)

# January 07, 2003 04:36 PM

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yes, steve jobs is my favorite ceo. oh, and so far safari is working great.

Posted by: miguel on January 7, 2003 10:55 PM

I’m sure it does work great - no doubt about that. It’s not if it’s okay for the average web surfer that I’m concerned with, it’s that it’s an entirely different open source codebase. As long as it’s open source, why not contribute to the Mozilla project instead? That way the rendering is the same, Apple can add its own bells and whistles and even optimize for speed — all without creating web developers having to worry about different rendering engines. Open source brings up the opportunity to eliminate the harmful effects of competition (different rendering engines everywhere!), and focus on the good aspects of competition (speed, features).

Posted by: simon on January 7, 2003 11:03 PM

I have found that I can’t add new sites to my phreakco portal with safari.

Posted by: allison on January 8, 2003 10:39 AM

Luckily I plan on completely re-writing that thing sometime soon. It’s old and buggy.

Posted by: simon on January 8, 2003 11:50 AM

yeah, i can’t really use phreakco w/ safari either. i’ll report that to apple using the “bug report” feature. this is still a beta release … so hopefully the full version will work better. my guess as to why apple didn’t use the mozilla engine is that lots of apple users have abandoned the mozilla engine. it gets a lot of bad press.

Posted by: miguel on January 8, 2003 11:51 AM

Don’t bother to report it; I’m sure it’s the Phreakco Portal’s fault. It was written years ago and I’m contains numerous bugs and non-standard code. Bad press hasn’t been against the Mozilla engine, but against the front ends that have been put on top of it. The various flavors of Netscape 6 and 7 are an example. This isn’t the fault of the Mozilla codebase. Other people have built much more refined browser on top of Mozilla - for example Chimera. That’s the beauty of it. Even the “mozilla” browser is just a different front end for its own engine. Anyone can build a new front end and tweak the performance without touching the codebase, which is near flawless in its support for XHTML, JavaScript, CSS1 and CSS2.

Posted by: simon on January 8, 2003 12:00 PM

i agree simon, there are better mozilla browsers out there than netscape. but i’m still waiting for something to be as amazing as ie5.2. even safari doesn’t top it (yet).

Posted by: miguel on January 8, 2003 11:43 PM

It’s true that IE is good. The only thing I don’t like about it is it’s speed at redering large pages.

Posted by: simon on January 8, 2003 11:47 PM

As Far As I Can Tell

Steve Jobby Jobs

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