drewkam

It’s probably not that much news to the more technical folk out there, but I thought I’d share anyway that Safari 3 beta has been released by Apple a few days ago.

For web developers without a mac - this alleviates the issue of having to jump on your designer’s mac whilst they are in their so called ‘in the zone’ moments (it really pisses them off hahah).

First impressions? It loads pretty quick, the fonts seem thicker - but upon closer inspection of the “preferences” there’s an option for “font smoothing” which defaults to “medium - best for Flat Panel”. Since I use a CRT at work, I’ll change this to “Light”. It’s a bit a easier on my eyes :D

You’ve got tabbing, RSS feed reader, Auto fill, the usual security features, cookie control, pop-up blocking etc

One function I use regularly, is the keyboard shortcut to enter in domain name addresses that end with .com, .net and .org. Specially I can just enter in the domain name only, and then perform the following keyboard shortcuts for the browser to automatically add in the www.[domainname].[extention of com/net/org]:

CTRL + ENTER = .com
CTRL + SHIFT + ENTER = .org
SHIFT + ENTER = .net

All of which is sadly absent from this browser :(

Curiously, I’m not sure how many people notice these things, but Safari whilst just having my own blog displayed in the window is currently gobbling up 70MB of RAM. What’s that all about eh? My Firefox 2.x browser is using up 161 MB - albeit it’s running with 17 tabs!

Anyways, take a look a the differences:

Firefox 2.x

Safari 3 Beta

Conclusions

So far - the browser works well, although it eats up memory like a hungry hippo. Certain functions are missing that I’m used to using as mentioned above (in Firefox, IE, Opera), and there’s no “home”! It has to be access via the menu or keyboard shortcut. Anyhow, it’s responsive which, is a good thing and it’s an interesting alternative for people who want to try something new or want to perform cross browser testing.

ThaiCSS.com is a great site for up and coming web designers in Thailand learning the web trade. It’s key websites like this that are needed to boost the quality of web design in this country.

It’s not completely perfect - my HTML guy at work pointed out that some of the float techniques had attributes that weren’t required - which the website owner named พร อันทะ (Porn Antha) had acknowledged himself. I suppose this is reflects the level of experience - but still in my view far more advanced than many that I have seen so far. So thumbs up to Mr Antha :)

All-in-all this a good step in the right direction for web development in Thailand. I keep hearing about Thai workers (in general) saying of westerners that they are too strict and anal with their work. But you know, it’s this very difference that separates the two sides and why we need to keep pushing for excellence in Thailand. We can only get better …