safari reader
Latest
Quickly enable or disable JavaScript in Safari
By using "Disable JavaScript" on Safari's Develop menu, you can eliminate annoyances from some websites, without the frustration of disabling JavaScript altogether. I'll even show you how to make a custom keyboard shortcut for it, so your fingers never even have to leave the keyboard. The initial setup will take a few minutes, but it will be worth it when you realize the power you will wield in your fingers when you're done. JavaScript by itself is neither good nor evil. JavaScript is driving a car. Most people who drive cars are good folks just trying to get from Point A to Point B as easily and quickly as possible. Some people, however, are maniacs, some are drunk drivers and some are just not very good at it. The same is true for JavaScript. Most of the time you don't even notice JavaScript, but it's working in the background to help you and the website work together. Have you ever typed something into a field and the website immediately recognized a problem? That was JavaScript. Unfortunately the analogs of "maniacs" and "drunk drivers" of the JavaScript world all seem to work in marketing. Pop-up windows? Pop-over windows? Ads that suddenly appear or slide over what you were trying to read? Also JavaScript. Those green-double-underline links or other links that show you ads when you hover over them? JavaScript. My favorite is when I'm at a page that won't let me copy text or even right click, thinking this is some sort of "protection." The ironic part is that many of these sites (such as for music lyrics) are posting content they don't own in the first place, and then they try to use JavaScript to block you from using it. On some sites you use Safari's Reader feature, but that doesn't always work. Fortunately, you have more tools at your disposal. Read on for more on taming JavaScript.
Apple releases Safari 5 with Safari Reader, Extensions and Bing search (updated)
Apple has just outed a press release for Safari 5, which curiously didn't get a mention during the company's WWDC10 keynote, but should be ready to download any minute now. Safari Reader is making its debut, as we'd heard it might, alongside a claimed 30 percent performance improvement over Safari 4 and -- mirroring the iPhone 4 -- Bing as one of the preloaded search engine options. Google and Yahoo are still around, don't freak out. Apple is also adding in Extensions (think Firefox's Add-Ons) to the browser, allowing devs to use HTML5, CSS and JavaScript to pretty up the browsing experience. The Reader feature intrigues us most, as it auto-detects articles within webpages and pulls them out for an unencumbered text-only view. The idea sounds great, but we'll naturally need to see how well it works in practice. Apple's been doing a bit of benchmarking too and boasts that Safari 5 runs JavaScript a whole three percent faster than Chrome 5.0 and over twice as fast as Firefox 3.6. Internet Explorer is presumably still working on finishing that test. P.S. We're hearing the current release might be for devs only, hence the lack of a public download. Update: Okay, now it's available for public consumption. Update 2: We've been playing with Safari 5 for a few moments and here's what we've noticed: Reader is pretty gorgeous -- think Instapaper on the fly. It's hard to tell when it'll kick in and show the Reader button in the toolbar, though -- it works on Engadget posts, but not in Wikipedia articles. Yes, Netflix is broken. It seems like it's doing a browser detect and failing with the new build number, so we'd guess it'll be fixed soon. It's much faster at everything from launch to rendering times. We haven't clocked it yet, but it's noticeably snappier on our quad-core i7 iMac. We're dying to try out some Extensions and see how they work, but we haven't seen any yet. Same with the new HTML5 features -- hit us up if you see anything! Bing Search integration is... Bing search integration. What else is there to say?
Safari 5 to join Steve onstage Monday for WWDC?
According to a report from French blog MacGeneration, one of the announcements on tap for Monday's WWDC 2010 keynote (which we'll be covering live, by the way) is a major update for Safari -- namely, version 5. If you believe the docs the site has obtained, there are more than a few big changes coming, including Bing now alongside Yahoo! and Google search options, a new "Safari Reader" for better / easier RSS reading (we're hoping they're taking a cue from Google on this), 25 percent faster JavaScript performance and DNS prefetching (hello, Chrome), improved HTML5 support (no big surprise there), and new developer tools which we assume will be along the lines of Firebug or Chrome's developer helpers. So we hope. The update will allegedly also add hardware acceleration for Windows PCs, an address field that auto-predicts URLs (they're calling it a "Smart Address Field"), and a handful of other minor tweaks and snips. Furthermore, there's an expected minor bump to Snow Leopard (10.6.4) which will resolve some nagging issues, though nothing really more than that. As we're sure you're aware, the next 48 hours or so are going to be filled with all sorts of nutty rumors about what's happening at Monday's keynote -- we'll try and separate the wheat from the chaff for you.
