Safari to hit gold master next month

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Apple's Safari web browser will reach the final "gold master" stage next month, sources say. The company's target to declare Safari gold master (GM) is reportedly near the middle of June, in the weeks before the Worldwide Developers Conference.

Just before publicly releasing build 74 last week, which provided a secure bug-fix, Apple seeded build 78 to developers. Sources familiar with build 78 say that when its disk image is mounted, it is entitled "Safari 1.0," suggesting that the current flow of development will indeed lead to the GM, and not another major beta release. Previously, seeded disk images were named "Safari Beta."

Sources also noted that build 78 includes a new "autotab" checkbox column in the bookmarks manager. Clicking on the checkbox turns a bookmark folder into a button which opens its contents into a set of tabs, with one click. This functionality can currently be achieved by Command-clicking on a bookmark folder or by selecting "Open in Tabs" from the bottom of the pop-down bookmark list.

News source: Think Secret

As Apple continues its development of the Safari browser, it is also working to integrate it into Mac OS X 10.3, Panther. Apple has been including new Safari builds with the Panther builds, as well as the browser's frameworks. Panther will ship with its own version of Safari that won't run on Jaguar.

Apple is working to fix known Safari bugs, both for the next public release and for the later release that will be included with Panther. Bugs that Apple is resolving include issues with individual sites, problems with the RealPlayer plug-in, printing and redraw issues with frames, showing cursor feedback for resizable frames, displaying "alt" text for broken images, and problems with pop-up blocking.

The company is also working on a number of feature additions suggested by users. These include the ability to use the keyboard tab to navigate form controls and links, ad image blocking, a way to "save as" downloads to a location other than the one specified in preferences, LiveConnect support, and the option to turn off image animation.

(9 replies) #1 ben_b on 24 May 2003 - 02:46

Does anyone know if a version of safari is plained to come out on windows? Or is it apples way of getting people to switch?

#1.1 timdorr on 24 May 2003 - 03:54

well, it uses the KHTML engine, which is in Konqueror in KDE under Linux. I dunno if you can, but it might be able to work with Cygwin. I dunno if they've merged the changes Apple has submitted back to the KDE project, but it's a start

#1.2 macrosslover on 24 May 2003 - 04:42

[neoquote=#1.0 by ben_b]Does anyone know if a version of safari is plained to come out on windows? Or is it apples way of getting people to switch?[/neoquote] why would you wnat it?? like their aren't enough browsers for windows. i don't understand why people want all these 10,000 different features (bloat) in their browsers. all i want to do is just visit the site, some of these other features like tabbed mess and whatever are useless to me and i imagine the average user.

#1.3 Wickedkitten on 24 May 2003 - 06:58

just because you don't use all of the features that doesn't mean the average user doesn't. Hell if the average user cared for a plain vanilla brower, there wouldn't be so many browser choices.

#1.4 macrosslover on 24 May 2003 - 08:03

[neoquote=#1.3 by Wickedkitten]just because you don't use all of the features that doesn't mean the average user doesn't. Hell if the average user cared for a plain vanilla brower, there wouldn't be so many browser choices.[/neoquote] if the "average" user cared for more options then IE wouldn't own most of the market now would it?? more people would be using the "glorious" mozilla and netscape, which are much more feature rich browsers than IE, but they aren't. let's not forget Opera either.

#1.5 Wickedkitten on 24 May 2003 - 08:35

[neoquote=#1.4 by macrosslover]if the "average" user cared for more options then IE wouldn't own most of the market now would it?? more people would be using the "glorious" mozilla and netscape, which are much more feature rich browsers than IE, but they aren't. let's not forget Opera either. [/neoquote] by IE i take it you are forgetting the dozens of browser variations like myie, avantbrowser, activatordesk and loads more. You really aren't making your point

#1.6 nookadum on 24 May 2003 - 09:08

[neoquote=#1.4 by macrosslover]if the "average" user cared for more options then IE wouldn't own most of the market now would it?? more people would be using the "glorious" mozilla and netscape, which are much more feature rich browsers than IE, but they aren't. let's not forget Opera either.[/neoquote] Those other browsers were made for people who wanted those features (i.e. Popup-blocking, simple skinning.) If you don't like those features, don't use 'em. You're not making your point clear enough.

#1.7 macrosslover on 24 May 2003 - 15:46

[neoquote=#1.6 by nookadum]Those other browsers were made for people who wanted those features (i.e. Popup-blocking, simple skinning.) If you don't like those features, don't use 'em. You're not making your point clear enough.[/neoquote] i think i'm making my point pretty clear. yes those browsers are made with those features for the the people who want them, but just judging my usage numbers the average user doesn't use those browsers they are just fine with IE. don't start acting like you all don't know what the average user is, come on now we've heard it a thousand times "the average user doesn't need all that P4 mess or 1 gig of ram, they only need a machine that will let them connect to the internet to check email and type up papers that's it" blah blah. it's an argument i've heard mac users (and many on the pc side) use time and time again, so we all know what the average user is. quite frankly the average user isn't saying, i wish my browser had tabbed features, or skinning. maybe they are asking for popup blocking, but if they really wanted it, i'm sure most of them know where to go to get it. judging my the massive number of people who know where to go to download their favorite ICQ program, i know they have no problems finding an alternative browser if they really wanted one. the whole initial point was that i don't understand why somebody would want safari on the pc like there weren't already 10,000 browsers that provided all the features that it does. and to wicked: Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 Service Pack 1: 3,655,622 Opera 7.1: 3,172,863 NeoPlanet 5.2.0.1704:1,494,328 Netscape 7.02: 588,741 Mozilla 1.3.1: 399,547 i think that pretty muchs proves my point right there. the rest were so low they weren't worth mentioning. these are all from download.com not from the whole internet, but they show that you have alot of people who actively seek the latest IE. i must say i was impressed with the numbers from opera. all these people who downloaded the service pack version to IE could have easily said i'm tired of it and when to Mozilla or Netscape, but they didn't. these browsers have more advanced features than IE, but they still chose IE. legal or not, we also can't forget that the majority of "average" users are satisfied with the IE that comes with windows, or their ISPs software such as AOL, which is still based on IE i believe. now if they ever switch to their own damn browser maybe a switch of 8 million people to netscape will influence the stats. why only 8 when they have over 35 million subscribers? well it's pretty much common knowledge that not every user upgrades to the latest version so i'd say 8-10 is a pretty liberal estimate. and on a side note, i was browsing the mozilla homepage to see if they had more accurate numbers cause i know more people use the browser than that and i found this funny line "We do not guarantee that any source code or executable code available from the mozilla.org domain is Year 2000 compliant." lol that's pretty bad considering it's 2003.

Last edited by 16693 on 24 May 2003 - 16:07

#1.8 Wickedkitten on 24 May 2003 - 15:50

[neoquote=#1.7 by macrosslover]i think i'm making my point pretty clear. yes those browsers are made with those features for the the people who want them, but just judging my usage numbers the average user doesn't use those browsers they are just fine with IE. don't start acting like you all don't know what the average user is, come on now we've heard it a thousand times "the average user doesn't need all that P4 mess or 1 gig of ram, they only need a machine that will let them connect to the internet to check email and type up papers that's it" blah blah. it's an argument i've heard mac users (and many on the pc side) use time and time again, so we all know what the average user is. quite frankly the average user isn't saying, i wish my browser had tabbed features, or skinning. maybe they are asking for popup blocking, but if they really wanted it, i'm sure most of them know where to go to get it. judging my the massive number of people who know where to go to download their favorite ICQ program, i know they have no problems finding an alternative browser if they really wanted one. the whole initial point was that i don't understand why somebody would want safari on the pc like there weren't already 10,000 browsers that provided all the features that it does.[/neoquote] I think you've forgotten the fact that the average user isn't the computer illiterate idiot of 5 years ago.

#1.9 macrosslover on 24 May 2003 - 16:10

[neoquote=#1.8 by Wickedkitten]I think you've forgotten the fact that the average user isn't the computer illiterate idiot of 5 years ago.[/neoquote] unfortunately the average user is still that computer illiterate idiot of 5 years ago. evidence the spread of windows viruses. if idiots haven't figured out you scan every attachment, there's no way they will ever figure out. obviously it has gotten better in terms of knowledge, but there are still alot of idiots out there, i've listened in on a few tech support calls and the questions some of these people ask are unbelievable.

Last edited by 16693 on 24 May 2003 - 17:18

#2 wtmcgee on 24 May 2003 - 02:47

i doubt a browser will ever be a killer app for an OS. they're just a dime a dozen. maybe they'll port it to windows (there have been rumors about that) but i don't see why they would, other than maybe porting webcore (the backend to safari) to windos, since that is what the iTunes music store uses on the mac platform. guess we'll just have to wait and see.

#3 mrbester on 27 May 2003 - 17:19

What gets me is that as a web designer I have to have this browser somewhere so I can verify that pages render correctly on it. I don't have a Mac and don't intend to get one; they cost too much for what I'd use it for: verifying a web page, but if there is some idiosyncracy in rendering then it is guaranteed that the client (who wants it to be viewable in all browsers / Bobby AAA or 508 compliant etc.) is going to use it just to piss me off. I get enough of it already because some lamer decides to use the non-compliant IE4.5/Mac and REFUSES to upgrade to anything else.

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