Chrome is fast. That had always been a big advantage. It made better use of screen real estate, particularly in how the way tabs are rendered in the UI. (Safari did it the Chrome way during one of its beta phases, but the final release versions reverted to the traditional tabbed interface.)

But I’ve always been a stickler for standards compliance and interoperability. I loved Safari because it aced the Acid3 tests with a perfect score. No other web browser managed that. Not including Chrome, even though it was also based on WebKit like Safari is.

Chrome has made great strides. It now also gets a perfect score on the Acid3 tests. On top of that, on the HTML5 compliance tests, Chrome actually edged out over Safari (although by a small margin). It’s a little surprising, because I had the impression that Safari would have made HTML5 support a priority. At least that’s what Apple seems to want to support. Or perhaps it was just marketing strategy, because Steve Jobs did not want to support Adobe Flash. Well, Chrome wins HTML5 compliance right now.

Chrome on Mac OS X also integrates properly into the Mac way of doing things. For example, the idea that passwords are centrally managed in Keychain.

So now… is it the right time to switch?

Update: My own benchmarks seem to show (by visual impression) that Safari actually loads up faster than Chrome, on a MacBook Pro. The difference is very marginal, but it is noticeable. I’m quite surprised. But in terms of memory usage (observed from Activity Monitor), Chrome is very significantly more memory efficient than Safari.

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Safari 4 is an important upgrade because of several key improvements. I’m quite picky about standards compliance, and it being the only mainstream web browser to fully pass the W3 ACID3 tests with a 100/100 score is very significant to me. I think any serious web developer would appreciate working with a web browser that is standards compliant.

In terms of performance, Safari 4 is reputed to be the leader of the pack in Javascript execution speed with its new Nitro Javascript engine. That’s also something very important considering that the web is now quite dependent on plenty of client side processing capabilities.

A slightly disappointing development to me is that the browser tabs, which used to appear in the title bar like in Google’s Chrome browser, has been removed and the tabs are now in their more conventional location inside the browser window. I like the tabs in the title bar. It saves screen real estate and doesn’t change the internal browser window size when I add tabs to an existing single-tab window.

Funnily, a quick Google search revealed that many people are trying to get back the conventional behaviour in their Safari 4 beta browser.

Help, I want the tabs in my title bar! The hidden preferences to disable it Safari 4 beta doesn’t seem to work to enable it in the final Safari 4 release.

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Many WordPress bloggers have been anticipating the next major release of the blogging software. There are significant improvements that the WordPress development team skipped the version 2.4 release, and headed straight for version 2.5. WordPress 2.5 RC1 has been released. Is it ready for a spin?

Well, I decided to take the plunge. Backed up the blog files and database, and upgraded to 2.5 RC1. There are no visible differences to the blog front itself. The administration interface, however, has gotten face lift. Although the interface is not fundamentally earth-shattering (maybe my expectations are too high), it is no doubt the most talked-about improvement. (See review on geek ramblings.) In terms of functionality, I think the online plugin upgrade is a much needed feature.

There are problems for me. For some strange reason, the TinyMCE editor bunches up all my paragraphs. I get to see the paragraphing as I type, but after saving, everything is bunched up in a big paragraph. I first noticed this problem on WordPress 2.3.3 too, but that was only when I browsed using Apple’s Safari 3.1 browser. There was a tweak to the JavaScript to fix it. But this paragraph bunching problem on 2.5 RC1 is now happening to Firefox, Safari, regardless of Mac OS X or Windows XP platforms. I didn’t have any problem with a fresh installation of WordPress 2.5 RC1. So, some cruft left behind from 2.3.3 is mucking things up. (WordPress 2.5 comes with TinyMCE 3, which has fixed compatibility problems with Safari 3.1.)

The next thing that didn’t go well for me is WPG2, the WordPress Gallery 2 plugin. It is a known problem, and the WPG2 developers are making this a priority item.

In the end, I decided to rollback to 2.3.3 and wait. Hopefully these issues get fixed. The new administration interface is nice, and the couple of feature improvements here and there are neat. But they are outweighed by the hiccups I encountered. For the blog readers, there are also no significant improvements (unless your readers care significantly about Gravatars).

Just a friendly reminder if you want to take 2.5 RC1 out for a spin: Backup your files (the directory tree containing your WordPress installation), and your database. Upgrading to 2.5 RC1 will cause schema changes to your database.

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Installation was fuss-free. Well, except for a minor oddity that the installation on Mac OS X required to restart the computer. Surprisingly the installation on Windows XP did not require a reboot. How strange for Apple’s own browser on Apple’s own operating system to behave this way. Small matter anyway.

Whether it’s on the Mac OS X or Windows, Safari spots the same user interface style that is taken from Mac OS X. It is a refreshing change if you’ve been too used to the standard Windows look. The Safari browser is clean, simple and uncluttered.

Apple says Safari is the fastest in both HTML performance and Javascript performance when compared with Firefox 2, Internet Explorer 7 and Opera 9. I only regularly use Firefox. Safari does feel a little snappier, although I did not carry out any objective measurement. It could all well be due to the fact that Safari is not burdened with cruft from my browsing history, browser extensions, etc.

There is no status bar at the bottom of the Safari window. In Firefox, if you hover your mouse cursor over a hyperlink, you get to see the URL in the status bar. It is a habbit of mine to check where I’m going to be headed off to before I click on a hyperlink. With Safari, I now feel a bit lost. Perhaps it is a configurable setting I can fix somewhere. Does anyone have any ideas?

What else do I miss with Safari? Well, a couple of Firefox plugins: Firebug and Web Developer. I find these extensions invaluable to my work. If I may add on, I would also love to have Html Validator and Live HTTP Headers.

Safari does have plugins too, although the selection is quite limited. You can check out PimpMySafari. Another unusual thing for Apple’s famed user interface friendliness… installing Safari plugins is shockingly clumpsy.

I think, for now, I’ll just stick with Firefox.

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