All Articles Tagged Safari

Hot on the heels of the just released Safari 3.1, some of whose features are reportedly trickling down to baby brother MobileSafari on the iPhone 2.0 firmware, Apple has reportedly begun seeding early builds of Safari 4 (5526.11.2) to developers.

The big news? WebKit’s screaming fast SquirelFish Javascript engine is a go, and 53% faster, which will be huge for Web 2.0 apps like Google’s… and the newly announced MobileMe service from Apple, of course!

Other new features include the ability to spin off “Site Specific Browsers” (or SSBs), which are basically thin browser clients for your favorite Web 2.0 apps — imagine a dedicate window on your desktop just for MobileMe. Continued CSS attribute additions like gradients, masks, and reflections are also on spec (Gee, gradients and reflections? From Apple? What a surprise…)

Combined with the CSS and HTML 5.0 features already added in 3.1, such as animation, video, and audio tags, Apple seems to be retaining its focus on open, web standard interactivity, in conjunction with old nemesis Flash and similar — sometimes buggy — technologies like Silverlight on the desktop (for now), and in lieu of them on the iPhone. Add in QuickTime X, and Apple is definitely trying to leverage some space away from the current, pseudo-proprietary web video giants.

While OS 10.6 Snow Leopard isn’t expected until mid-2009, Safari 4 seems on the fast track for a much sooner release.

Can another MobileSafari bump for the iPhone be far behind?

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We’re running a new series here at TiPb (Titanium Powerbook? No, The iPhone Blog!) that brings older but still relevant/interesting/noteworthy articles, reviews, and blog posts back into the forefront of the discussion. Hopefully, we’ll be able to uncover some great articles that you might have missed and offer further insight on everyone’s favorite toy.

Also, it’ll help transition our still new merger, PhoneDifferent fans will get a taste of TiPb writing and TiPb readers will catch up with what has happened in the PhoneDifferent world! Think of it as a blog within a blog or for the metaphorically inclined, dinnertime stories at a big happy family reunion..

Today, we’ll bring back the topic of Bookmarklets. Mike Overbo, our Editor Emeritus, found that Bookmarklets extend the reach and capabilities of the iPhone’s Safari browser. Essentially, Bookmarklets are small computer applications stored as a URL on your bookmarks bar. Examples would include a Find feature, IMDB search, eBay search, etc.

To use these Bookmarklets, simply store them to your iPhone’s bookmarks and when you are in need of, say a quick Wikipedia search, open that particular Bookmarklet and it’ll prompt you with a direct search screen rather than waiting for the page to open up. I use Bookmarklets everyday to quicken my online searching (darn that EDGE), take a look and see if there is anything you can use!

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We’ve covered the iPhone Flash saga ad nauseam here, but in an interesting post involving the technology itself, NetNewsWire developer Brent Simmons (via DaringFireball) shares some interesting error/crash logs highlighting the instability-adding benefits of Flash, and the rapid catchup of Microsoft’s copycat, Silverlight:

I’ve said it before — one of my favorite things about the iPhone is no Flash. I will now add and no SilverlightPlugin.

As a web developer who uses Flash routinely, I’ve also come to enjoy its absence on the iPhone (and the absence of like technologies, and even prehistoric kin like animated GIFs), and the amazing increase that absence give to the information over noise ratio. It’s led me closer towards “Web 2.0″-style AJaX for interactivity, and away from the proprietary, and often overkill, that is plugin technology.

What do you think?

Have you ever been surfing the real internet on your iPhone, discovered and amazing picture, and wished you could save it to your photo album?

Well, now you can.

Here’s how: Touch the image you want to save, hold your finger there for a very long time, and — boom! — iPhone will ask you if you want to Save Photo, Go To URL, or Cancel.

It’s that easy.

For more information, visit Gizmodo’s anonymous tipsters who just love them some digging around in Apple’s iPhone 2.0 Beta 3 software.

The folks at Mozilla are still fuming mad over Safari-gate. The developers behind the popular open source browser Firefox stated flatly that no efforts will be made to port Firefox to iPhone, blaming Apple’s Gestapo-like restrictive software license.

So this means I can’t look forward to a browser that consumes half my memory and grinds to a halt on AJAX-heavy websites? Tragic.

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Blimey! Hey, Bert - you see this news on the telly today? Yeah, tarts. It says ere that iPhone is kicking Nokia’s bum something awful in the browser business - a real flogging as it were. Some blokes at a firm called StatCounter is sayin it’ll overtake Nokia soon in mobile web share, and you know how the Finns are about losing.

Remember what they did when they lost the world cup soccer championship? Helsinki burned to the ground, it did. Bloody business that was. God save Safari.

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iPhone users can now more easily access and update their Twitter feeds thanks to Twitter’s efforts to improve support for mobile browsers, including Safari. Now when you access Twitter.com from your iPhone, you are greeted with a mobile friendly version of the service instead of the standard “pinch me please” desktop version.

Finally I can inform my followers of important moments in day. “I’m eating a ham sandwich, sitting on the john.”

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Apple has released their latest, greatest, fastest, and coolest new browser yet — Safari 3.1 (big brother to the MobileSafari Touch browser built into the iPhone).

Safari is based on Apple’s open-source WebKit (a branch of the Konqueror/KHTML engine), the same foundation Nokia, Google’s upcoming Android, and even Adobe’s AIR runtime get their render on with.

In addition to faster rendering and Javascript, what makes this latest release so exciting is built-in support for the new HTML (Hyper-Text Markup Language) 5 draft. Apple VP of Marketing Phil Schiller tells us:

“Safari 3.1 for Mac and Windows is blazingly fast, easy to use and features an elegant user interface. And best of all, Safari supports the latest audio, video [as tags -- yes!] and animation standards [CSS animation FTW!] for an industry-leading Web 2.0 experience.”

And (looking at you Google Gears!) local SQLite databases for offline functionality.

These features, while nice for the desktop, seem perfect for an upcoming rev of Safari on the iPhone as well. Being able to easily code rich media sites that support enough interactivity to avoid the more complex Flash will give a lot of much-needed power to entertainment web-sphere. Offline data access, of course, opens things up wide for software-as-services WebApps like browser-based office suites. (Picture collaborating on an online spread sheet, taking off on an airplane with the browser keeping your portion of the data live and available, and then syncing back up with the team when you land).

Lighter? Faster? More Standard? To steal Dieter’s catch-phrase — Yes Please!

Already rocking Safari 3.1? Head over to Webkit’s Surfin’ Safari blog for the latest Acid3 (standards compliance test) results and sample some of the new features!

The New York Times is reporting that the iPhone started its life out as a “Safari Pad”. An Internet tablet if you will. Once Steve Jobs saw it, he used his panache and morphed it into an iPhone. The author also goes on to say that when he spoke to Steve Jobs at the recent MacWorld in January, he asked if there would be a larger form-factor iPod touch device. Steve Jobs replied,

“I can’t talk about unannounced products.”

I would personally love a tablet sized device that had Wi-Fi and a data connection a-la Amazon’s Kindle. What is in the future for Apple?

We’ve heard it before, Google has an iPhone fixation. Well it’s looking like that fixation works both ways - apparently the earlier numbers we saw that said the iPhone was on the web more than any other mobile web browser were, how shall we say it? ….Ridiculously conservative.

Google sees 50 times more web searches from iPhones than they do from any other mobile browser:

Google on Wednesday said it had seen 50 times more searches on Apple‘s iPhone than any other mobile handset, adding weight to the group’s confidence at being able to generate significant revenues from the mobile internet.

“We thought it was a mistake and made our engineers check the logs again,” Vic Gundotra, head of Google’s mobile operations told the Financial Times at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. - Financial Times

If you still doubt that the iPhone was the #2 smartphone in the US, you can stop now.

Just. Wow.

What feature request has been on the lips of every iPhone user since the idolized gadget first came galloping out the gate? I’ll give you a hint, it starts with the letter “F”, and is the same thing your inebriated Uncle Frank does at family get togethers after knocking back one too many martinis. Of course, I’m talking about Flash.

GearLive claims that Apple will be announcing Adobe Flash for WebKit (aka mobile Safari). There have been rumors to this effect for some time, but with the blessed arrival of the much anticipated SDK now only days away, this seems plausible. Still, I wouldn’t start bookmarking YouTube.com on your iPhone just yet. Let’s wait for Apple make this rumor a reality.

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It seems that Mozilla has finally acknowledged the need for a mobile browser on the mozilla codebase that isn’t wreteched. PC Advisor reports that the mozilla foundation will be putting resources towards a mobile browser. And they didn’t act until now on the mobile browsing kit on the iPhone, 3 months after WebKit shines on the iPhone. To add insult to injury, Nokia has been using Apple’s WebKit, the browsing engine that powers Safari on the iPhone, instead of anything based off of Mozilla’s code, though Nokia also has a mozilla-basbed browser on their N800 tablet.

For those of you that are aware of Minimo, the project to bring mozilla to mobile devices, erm, make that Windows Mobile devices, the project is essentially dead. Minimo, doomed with only one developer who was not willing to expend extra time on the project, will never see an update again. A mobile browser project will now instead start from scratch.

You know, Opera has really been on top of the browser space. They put opera pretty much everywhere they could, and really got it out there. Their J2ME browser, Opera Mini, is a breakthrough bit of software for featurephones. I’m not generally liable to say anything pleasant about Internet Explorer, and by extension Pocket IE, but Pocket IE was a sight better than Minimo. It makes sad that Mozilla didn’t get until now that the mobile browsing world isn’t really a segment of the market where you want to be in last place.

Information Week reviewed the browsing experience on many current U.S. handsets, and came to the conclusion that the iPhone provided the best user experience. I’ll provide two quotes to give some context.

“There’s no need to compare the Safari browser on the iPhone with a desktop browser. It is a desktop browser”

“The good news, as you might expect, is the Apple iPhone. The genius of Apple is its ability, over and over again, to completely reinvent, from the ground up, the user interface for hardware, and to support it with brilliant software. Web browsing on the iPhone is a paradigm shift, a completely different experience — just as the BlackBerry was, in its time, a paradigm shift.”

To be fair, Symbian — a popular mobile system elsewhere in the world — wasn’t tested most likely due to the fact that no one uses Symbian in the States. Anyway, they’re right in that MobileSafari delivers the same page that you’d see on a desktop browser. There are still some limitations, of course — there’s no Flash, no Java, and you can’t download files. Some complicated sites don’t work fully yet on MobileSafari; docs.google.com being a notable example. Is it still better than browsing on any other mobile platform? Well, yeah. Duh.

Enophi is a new online service designed specifically for iPhone users. This RSS feed reader allows you to track your favorite newsfeeds, sprinkled with some social web trappings as well.

The service works as advertised and is free. Just point your iPhone to enophi.com and register. Create a list of feeds, then sit back and let your fingers do the walking…or scrolling, such as it is.

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Mundu has a long pedigree in the world of business-class mobile instant messaging software. I have used their Mobile Messenger client on PalmOS and Windows Mobile - it works like magic. So it didn’t take long for their developers to show some iPhone love.

The company has announced a web based service that fully supports iPhone, via Safari of course (we’ve heard this line before). To access the web client simply point your iPhone to iphone.mundu.com. Login to any existing IM accounts (Yahoo, Gtalk, AIM, or Windows Live Messenger protocols supported), and text your way to repetitive stress injury.

The service is in beta, so don’t look surprised when Safari chokes and drops you back to the homescreen.

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