Well, looks like I can retire WebKit for a little while. The Safari developers have released a beta of version 4. I had a bit of trouble starting it at first (Mac OSX 10.5.6). It was the Glims plugin which was crashing it. I removed it from /Library/Application Support and Safari started up nicely.
Update: Turns out Google Gears doesn’t work in this Safari 4 beta.
Update 2: The Glims developers have release a new version which doesn’t crash Safari, but is missing a chunk of functionality.
Update 3: Safari, even in the development WebKit nightlies exhibited an irritating “bug” with the WordPress 2.7 administrative interface. It would cause a modal overlay dialog to hang. The dialog appears when editing a post with the visual editor (e.g. add a link, upload images, etc.). This is still quite present in 4 beta.
Update 4: (June 11, 2009) The bug mentioned in Update 3 with the modal dialog has been fixed in Safari 4.
Firefox 3.1b2
Google Gears 0.5.4.2
You know what would be really faboo? If the devs for Google Gears figured out it was worthwhile looking at the non-compatibility issue with Firefox 3.1 and Google Gears. I know, I know, it’s free software and there are a million other things to get to. And they’ve said (unofficially) that by the time Firefox 3.1 gets out of beta they’ll be ready. The only reason I’m asking is this:
There are now a preponderance of sites out there now that are JavaScript heavy. All Google products, Facebook, MySpace, and yeah, WordPress – especially the admin backend which is now AJAX supercharged. So when you’re dealing with these sites a lot it really makes a big difference having a browser that can crank through the JS routines and render the damn page already. This is why I’m working with the beta version of Firefox 3.1 (actually, now the OSX optimized version, Shiretoko – there are Windows versions out there too) which has the Tracemonkey JavaScript engine enabled. It’s quite fast; incidentally I’m also testing WebKit, the Safari engine development version which is right up there too.
Anyway, FF 3.1 makes a big difference in shaving off my waiting time, especially here in WordPress-land. And incidentally, the kind folks at WordPress have incorporated Google Gears functionality to offload the download…load. Works great on WebKit/Safari, but since the Gears guys haven’t worked out the FF 3.1 compatibility yet, we’re still waiting.
Not a big rush, really…but it’s Valentine’s Day. Blow me a kiss, boys.
