I’ve added an english section to my site for posts that are more relevant to an international audience, such as the posts relating to Mac-software like Safari and Ecto. Like say, for instance, this post. For Norwegian-impaired readers, I’ll translate the link below for you. It says “Read more…”. Click it if you want the reviews of Safari 1.2.

Safari 1.2

Safari 1.2 sports a number of improvements that continues it’s stride towards browser Nirvana. Most important is the new download features. You can now stop and resume downloads, dragging and dropping images copies them from cache instead of downloading them over again and it incorporates one of IE5 for Mac’s really nifty features: While files download the icon display’s a dynamically updating status bar. Who said usability couldn’t be sexy?

Another feature that IE (and most other browser’s) had, tabbing to links, is also in. I would much rather have put in tabbing to other form elements than text input, but I guess you have to leave some features for it’s big brother, the forthcoming OmniWeb 5 (which uses WebCore - Safari’s rendering engine as well). Turns out you need to enable Full Keyboard Access in the System Preferences to do this, silly me. There are also some changes to the text-engine leaving some fonts with a bit tighter spacing than before. You can set a minimum font size as well to combat moron’s who “design” web pages with minuscule fonts.

Speaking of minuscule, form controls which are sized to be smaller now use the Small and Mini version of controls like buttons, drop down menus and check boxes. I’m not sure that I’m too keen on it though (although it should probably fix some misaligned forms), but I’m sure I’ll get used to it. This is also one of the many reasons Safari 1.1 and 1.2 won’t run on earlier versions of Mac OS X (a common complaint). It simply utilize one of the many UI improvements of 10.3 that would be a pain to back-port to 10.2. It’s a nice carrot though, upgrade your OS and get a faster machine AND a faster browser. A concept unknown to that other platform.

There’s also a lot of minor improvements that would probably gone unnoticed if I had not mentioned them. We all know general browsing is even faster now, but also things like the hover-subclass is a lot faster. This means my left menu (based on a lot of the CSS-specs only supported by Safari 1.1+ so far) now does not lag when hovering the cursor above it. Oh, and it supports custom cursors now as well, which you can test by moving your cursor over my automatically generated abbreviations like CSS and XHTML. And accesskeys, which are helpful for keyboard-navigation for people without disabilities and an absolute must for those that have them. You can test the keys implemented here by pressing ctrl-1 to go the front page and ctrl-4 to go directly to the search-box. Note that on some browsers (most notoriously Internet Explorer) you use alt instead of ctrl.

All in all a great stable update thanks to Dave Hyatt and the other more anonymous members of the Safari-team! Oh and one more thing: Thank you for finally implementing image size when just viewing an image. It just made my world that much easier!