SOFTWARE REVIEW

Safari RSS review

7.7

Editors' Rating

Daniel Drew Turner ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 18 May 2005

Long gone are the days when Apple CEO Steve Jobs got up in public and said that Internet Explorer was his Web browser of choice. In early 2003, Apple created its own browser, Safari, and started bundling it free within Mac OS X. With Safari RSS, Apple has not only added unique and useful features, such as integrated Really Simple Syndication (RSS), but has also made Safari arguably the fastest Web browser for the Mac platform.

Safari RSS installs with Mac OS X Tiger. Current Safari users can upgrade via Apple's Web site.

For Safari RSS, many of the browser's underpinnings have been revamped, with Apple promising faster performance. In informal tests, we found nothing to dispute that claim. In fact, we discovered that Safari's JavaScript performance had jumped an order of magnitude. For example, graphics-heavy pages loaded much faster. This makes for happier Web browsing.

Like Opera, Safari adds several built-in RSS features, including the easy addition of new RSS feeds, an RSS feed viewer and a personal clipping service that aggregates RSS feeds into one bookmark.

For those who share a computer or browse at work, Safari's Private Browsing feature hides your cookies, browsing history and caches as though you were not surfing at all. Safari also recognises who is logged in to the Apple Mac OS so that parents can control the sites to which their children have access. Apple also claims improved Web standards support for Safari, including CSS3 and DHTML, so more sites will render as their designers intended. But cooler still is Safari's integration with some native Mac OS-level features, such as Apple Command+Option+D, which lets you see the dictionary definition of any word found on a Web page.

Unlike Mozilla Firefox, however, Apple Safari RSS is not extensible. This means you won't profit from the wealth of handy plug-ins available for extensible browsers, such as Firefox.

Apple does not provide separate support for Safari, but you can use the built-in Mac OS Help Viewer or browse through Apple's online knowledge base forums. And reporting a bug (should you find one) is easy: simply click the 'Report bugs to Apple' menu item on the desktop. In addition, knowledgeable users might want to read Surfin' Safari, a blog by David Hyatt, the man responsible for designing much of Safari RSS.