Home From Safari

I surfed with Safari last night and I have to say I’m not impressed. On my TiBook (500mhz w/ 512mb), it took 5 seconds to launch. Mozilla takes 9 to bring up the first browser window, and I get more. Chimera only took 4, and provides most of the features of Mozilla. I’m not going to switch, because there’s nothing really new there. Steve touted the snapback button, and the improved bookmarks, which I don’t think are really all that great to begin with.

It’s not that it’s not good software. It does render pages quickly. It is nice to look at. But, it could be so much more. I’m not really happy having to worry about another browser, even though its rendering problems seem minor.

Keynote Ramblings

I picked up the MacWorld Keynote by Mr. Jobs in the middle while he was showing off iPhoto, iMovie and iDVD. What just came to me while watching this is that Apple isn’t gunning for the workplace anymore. They’ve ceded that to Microsoft. They’ve created an amazing Lifestyle Suite of software. The collection of iApps is robust, and with the new features, I think the Mac’s killer app. We geeks can talk about the BSD underpinnings of OS X, the cool things we can do with things like Fink and the Apache webserver built in.

Yeah, and I just saw the part where he dropped the name on us: iLife. Yeah… Ummm… I called it?

Anyway, I’m pretty excited about the bundle and the new features in all three. PLUS, the predictions were wrong. You’ll be able to download iPhoto, iTunes and iMovie for free or go buy the bundle. Sweet.

Ummm, why did they go and build their own browser? Hopefully, it’s based on Gecko so we don’t have to worry about yet another browser’s quirks. It’s pretty funny how familiar the Safari toolbar is to the Windows AOL Client’s. I’m honestly not seeing anything too hot about Safari so far. The benchmarks looked good, but the features don’t look compelling enough to make enough people switch to make supporting it worthwhile. Also, Steve, please stop touting the Google integration. Big deal. There are Google bars for pretty much every browser out there that offer the same features. Hopefully, it won’t be another HotJava (Sun’s unbelievable horrible browser packaged with Solaris).

If you don’t own a Mac… consider it. I’m making the switch as we speak (it’s harder at work than at home, where the switch is already pretty much complete), and I’ve been extremely impressed.

Christmas Pictures