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Spin Through Toolbar View Options

Although many people never change their toolbars from the default settings, all standard toolbars on the Mac offer six states: icon only, text only, and icon and text, with all three coming in normal and small size. You can change them by choosing View > Customize Toolbar.

But there's a shortcut that makes it easier to check out each variant. Simply Command-click the toolbar lozenge at the upper right of a window, and the toolbar switches to the next view. Click it enough times, and you cycle back to the start.

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Networking | 18 Mar 2008 | Listen  | Print Printer-Friendly Version of This Article

Safari 3.1 Enhances Performance and Web Standards Support

by Adam C. Engst Send Email to Author

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Boasting about blazing performance, Apple has released Safari 3.1, the latest version of the company's free Web browser for Mac OS X and Windows. In its press release, Apple claims that Safari 3.1 is 1.9 times faster than Internet Explorer 7 and 1.7 times faster than Firefox 2, at least on a 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo-based iMac with 1 GB of RAM running Windows XP. What, you're not running Windows XP as the primary operating system on your iMac? Luckily, on the main Safari page, Apple presents other benchmarks run under Mac OS X 10.5.2 claiming that Safari loads pages up to 3 times faster than Firefox 2, and executes JavaScript up to 4.5 times faster than Firefox. JavaScript performance is an increasingly big deal as more and more sites provide interactivity in their interfaces by using JavaScript. Unfortunately, nowhere does Apple compare Safari 3.1's performance with that of Safari 3.0, so there's no telling how much of a speed boost current Safari users might see.

Apple also made a big push to support cutting-edge Web standards, enhancing Safari 3.1 to support CSS Web fonts that let designers specify fonts that will be downloaded on the fly as needed, CSS animations, HTML 5 media, and HTML offline storage. Improved too is Safari's support for dynamic SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) images. (See the Safari Product Overview PDF for more details.) Along with those features, Safari 3.1 includes fixes for a number of security vulnerabilities. Of course, since lots of other browsers don't support these standards, Safari's support is merely a welcome paving stone on the road to future Web improvements.

Of particular interest to us is HTML 5 offline storage support, which should help to enable Web applications like Google Docs or Zoho Writer to provide optional offline access to data, storing it in a local SQLite database. Google has started to address this problem with Google Gears, an open-source approach to offline storage that, on the Mac, works only in Firefox. The two are similar, but incompatible, though there may be ways of bringing them together.

Safari 3.1 is available via Software Update or as a 40 MB standalone download. Panther users need not bother clicking through, since Safari 3.1 requires Mac OS X 10.4.11 or later. Presumably due to the fixes in Safari's underlying WebCore and WebKit frameworks, which are used by a wide variety of programs, the update does require a restart.

 

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