It’s not only the best URL shortener that defaults to http://goo.gl. It also makes blogging, tweeting and URL sharing super easy. It is also compatible with every modern browser: Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera and even Internet Explorer.
Get it, 1.5 million downloads is not a fluke.
Could have been better. I wish Safari 5 came with support for more customizations for the toolbars. I don’t want Address & Search bars to appear, I only need the address bar and it’s impossible to make it so that it is the only thing that would appear. This is really annoying.
So far the plugins that I have found are working are Xmarks and Keywurl with this tip. Not bad, these are what I consider to be essential Safari plugins. A lot of the other plugins are too bloated.
Now that extensions are available for Safari, I took the liberty of checking a few of them out. I have kept these installed as they are simply awesome: Invisible Status Bar, Adblock, GReader, IMDb Links, GoMBoX. I’m particularly enjoying the fact that Adblock for Safari is now an extension. Automatic updates ftw!
It’s no Chrome, but since Chrome 5 steadily sips more power now that it is always using the discrete GPU I’m willing to make certain sacrifices. Also some of the things plugins accomplish do not seem to be extensible yet. It would be awesome if one day all of the old plugins find their way to become certified plugins and we can get rid of the SIMBL stuff.
I did notice that HTML5 related tasks are much better on Safari 5. The WebKit engine appears to be of a newer build. Hardware acceleration is also handled better as Safari 5 hands it off automatically and reverts back to IGP without any problems. I do like the fact that it saves more vertical pixel space as well, but that is not new for Safari 5.
Apple has done some things right but I’m not ready to uninstall Chrome just yet. There are certainly some things more convenient with Chrome, such as the private browsing mode. Safari still cannot open two windows, all Safari instances become private when you start private browsing mode.
Safari have been unseated by Google Chrome. Google now need to unseat Firefox and then eventually destroy Internet Explorer.
Don’t worry Apple fanboys. This only means Jobs and company will make Safari’s new Extensions Library perfect when the time is right. Perhaps they will also implement hardware acceleration to Safari 5.1…? o_O
This is probably old news by now but Google released their Chrome browser. I downloaded it today and gave it a whirl and the initial impressions are good.
I love the minimalistic interface, it’s something Microsoft does well, Mozilla does so so and Apple does great. Google however perfected it. I do have a problem with “Home” button being an option to check in order to appear on the toolbar. I thought that was kind of stupid, there was no other way to access Home unless you opened a new tab. Since your bookmarks are accessed via Home I kind of needed it to be easily accessible. Turning it on solved my problems.
Edit: Bookmark bar can be enabled as well, and it looks pretty sweet. No RSS live update though, but that’s not a big problem and can be added.
It doesn’t have the best extensions either. Actually there are none at the moment. That is expected, as the browser is still in beta stage. Hopefully developers catch on soon. There is a big problem though, it uses Apple WebKit. All of your favorite Firefox extensions will need to be recompiled with slight changes to work on Chrome. I wish they had kept the architecture the same.
My favorite thing about Chrome is its separate processes for each tab you open. Albeit it is also a problem as people reports larger than normal memory footprint is needed for all the tabs. As the software is still in beta stage, I’m sure it will be patched in time.
PS: You don’t have to enable the whole big brother stats sending feature in Chrome. So all of that Google stealing my data paranoia can be discarded. They track what you do in all of the Google Apps as well as the standard search engine anyways. Nobody’s lost their credit card numbers due to Google yet, so I don’t expect it to ever happen. Just turn it off if you really cared about this.
All in all, a very good browser. Rendering is perfect and even faster than Mozilla’s Gecko. If and when extensions (*ahem* Adblock *ahem*) become available, I may just switch to it full time.