The One with the Thoughts of Frans

ExtendOpera.org was launched a few days ago. It’s a user initiative, aimed at bringing those aspects of Opera customization that Opera software has somewhat abandoned together.

Last month, Apple released the Safari 4 beta. A few Opera users, myself included, decided to take action after viewing Apple’s false marketing claims. The following is the result of a combined effort, although I can proudly say that I wrote quite a bit of text for the article. It’s not entirely finished yet, but it’s good enough to cross-post it right now to draw some extra attention to it.

Everything that follows is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article “Deceptive Safari 4 Marketing.”

When the Safari 4 beta was released, on February 24, 2009^[1], Apple Inc. published a feature list claiming a long list of innovations, inventions, and browser firsts^[2]. While Safari 4 may contain numerous features that are new to current Safari users, many of these have been publicly available to users of other browsers for quite some time, invalidating many of Apple’s claims.

Falsely Claimed Innovations In Safari

Implemented Prior to Safari’s Initial Release

The first public beta of Safari was released on January 7, 2003^[3]. This is a list of innovations claimed by Apple that were first added in other browsers prior to Safari’s release.

• Built-in Google search: Apple claims that “Safari was the first popular browser to build a search field into its user interface” (emphasis added). The first public beta of Safari was released on January 7, 2003^[3]. Opera 5, however, which was released on December 6, 2000^[4][5], already featured a built-in search field^[6][7]. The second version of Mozilla Firefox (Phoenix 0.2), which was released on October 1, 2002, contains a similar feature^[8]. Consequently, Apple’s usage of “popular browser,” which has been suggested to validate this claim^[9], is ambiguous at best^[10].

• CSS 3 Web fonts: Apple claims that “Safari is the first web browser to automatically recognize websites that use custom fonts, downloading them as they’re needed” (emphasis added). However, Internet Explorer 4, released in 1997^[11], sports this feature as well^[12].

• Downloads window: Apple asserts that “Safari was the first popular browser with a download management window.” However, Opera 3.5, released on November 18, 1998, first introduced a transfer window to the Opera browser^[13]. Similarly to the built-in Google search, if Opera is assumed not popular enough to falsify the claim, Firefox (Phoenix 0.1) had this feature nearly half a year prior to Safari on September 23, 2002^[8].

• Inline Progress Indicator: While Apple states that “Safari was the first browser to move the progress indicator into the address field,” Opera first added this feature in Opera 5.10, released in 2001^[14].

• Movable tabs: In Apple’s words, “Safari was the first browser to let you organize tabs by dragging and dropping. … Rearrange tabs by dragging their tab handle left or right. Drag a tab out of a window to create a new window. Or drag a tab from one window to another window to merge their tabs” (emphasis added). Opera 7 Beta 1, released on November 13, 2002^[5], came with “Extended and vastly improved drag-and-drop support,” and this included the ability to “Move bookmarks, tabs, and MDI pages between SDI windows”^[15]. Furthermore, the same feature was already available as an extension^[16] in Firefox and was added as a feature to Firefox 1.5^[17], released on November 29, 2005. Safari did not add movable tabs until Safari 3^[18], which was released on June 11, 2007^[3].
  • Releaseyears of tabbed browsers: NetCaptor in 1998^[19], later by IBrowse in 1999, Opera in 2000, Mozilla in 2001, Konqueror and Safari in 2003, Internet Explorer 7 in 2006 and Google Chrome in 2008.
  • Releaseyears of movable tabs: NetCaptor 5.0 in 1998^[19], IBrowse 2.3 at 29 Jan 2003^[20], Opera 7 in 2003, Google Chrome 1 in 2008, Safari 4 in 2009.

• Open multiple bookmarks in one click – According to Apple, “[Safari] was the first browser to offer Auto-Click bookmarks.” This feature offers the ability “to open multiple pages in individual tabs with a single click.” Opera 4, released in 2000^[13], could open all of the bookmarks inside of a folder through the right-click menu. Opera 6 added the feature to open all bookmarks in a folder with a single middle click and added “Open all folder items” to the drop-down menu on the personal bar^[21].

• Third party cookie blocking: According to Apple, “Safari is the first browser that blocks … tracking cookies by default” (emphasis added). It is hard to verify or falsify this claim; nevertheless, it should be noted that this feature was already present in Opera 4^[21].

Implemented Prior to Inclusion in Safari

• RSS Aggregator: While Apple claims that Safari is the first browser that integrated an RSS reader into the browser, Opera integrated an RSS reader into its browser in 2003^[22], well before Apple in 2005^[3][23].

Not Implemented Exclusively in Safari

• Acid 3 Compliance: Apple asserts, “Safari is the first — and only — web browser to pass Acid 3″ (emphasis added). It is arguable that WebKit was the first rendering engine to get 100/100 (it was close between Opera and WebKit). However, Safari is not the only WebKit browser. Lunascape is also capable of using the Webkit rendering engine, and thus also passes the Acid 3 test^[24].

Other

• Apple claims, “Safari [4] supports Accessible Rich Internet Applications,” yet it is only partially implemented^[25].

References

I really want to do the following, but I’m still stuck with Microsoft’s icon format and PNG.

<link rel="shortcut icon" href="some-vector-image.svg" type="type="image/svg+xml">

I’m especially surprised that Google Chrome doesn’t support this. They do the whole web application thing; which utilizes the favicons of sites as application icons. SVG would be perfect to also offer a nice larger size icon. Another thing I didn’t know is that IE7 still doesn’t support PNGs as favicons.

Last, but not least, here is the favicon I created in the end: .

I know Opera Mini 4 has been out for a while (a week, maybe two?), but in combination with my new mobile phone it’s absolutely awesome, that’s for sure.

Don’t be ridiculous. Opera 9 has been out for a while and Firefox 2 should be officially released tomorrow.

That’s hopefully the last I’ll say on the IE subject for now.

I’m not being sarcastic here. I like Internet Explorer 7 because it has some kind of built-in protection from installing itself. If it would include a third button to directly install Opera, I’d love it.

I loathe ye who do not support this.

Loathe is perhaps a bit strong, but why so few browsers support this? Opera already has supported display:inline-block for years, Safari has since fairly recently, Gecko has a really buggy test implementation, and IE7 supports it flawlessly like Opera.

The part about IE7 was sarcastic.

Luckily the environment was completely controlled (my laptop), but damn. Just damn. Just how many stupid workarounds one would have to make for some things to look (nearly) identical.

I should create a webpage which specifically uses the more stable parts of CSS3 and see it grow more supported over time or something like that…

I just thought I should mention that Opera often gives very useful error notices. Sometimes Firefox gives more useful one’s, like in this case missing : after case whereas Opera only informed me of a parsing error on the same line. Internet Explorer doesn’t add much useful information in it’s “error-console” (which doesn’t even exist in a similar sense which makes it even harder to use).

I wonder how I can forget a : and not even notice it. I guess I was just convinced I didn’t forget something that simple. Ah well…

If you’re wondering what this is about, I’ll probably write something about it when it’s all over, which is in about two weeks. Essentially it’s a UI demonstration which I wrote in HTML+CSS+Javascript, which most people would probably have created in Flash.

Why do I post this if I actually said nothing at all? I don’t know, I think I just needed a break. Should I have taken it away from the computer? Yes. But in 30 minutes, that’s exactly what I’ll do. Besides I got gold on the first race of the last grand prix of Burnout 2 about 1.5 hours ago.

Who doesn’t love a new toy/tool? And best of all, it’s free. I consider the Opera 9 technical preview 2 to be far more exiting than IE7 beta 2 or the latest Firefox nightly. “Living on the edge” as I am, I will migrate my custom settings and start to use it as my main browser. Not that I ever felt on the edge with an Opera technical preview (except perhaps with the experimental BitTorrent implementation), so kudos for that.

I am not too sure about the new thumbnails if you hover over tabs. As I seldomly use that anyway I decided to enable them as well for ctrl+tab. It seems to slow down things a little without being really useful, but I’m going to leave it enabled for a while to see if I like it. Perhaps it’s useful if I have more than 30 pages open, but I seldomly have and in the few cases I do have so many windows open, I consider the windows manager the most convenient way to deal with them in Opera.

Then there’s the addition of widgets, but you should know that I uninstalled Konfabulator quickly after trying it once it became free. For now the only widget I considered interesting enough to enable was the analog clock, which is not interesting at all, especially since I use the ASD Clock (don’t mind the design, I’ll be involved in creating something good looking, semantic and standards compliant in the future).

Anne wrote about it. Tim wrote about it. Moose posted about his personal work on the internal stylesheets and, of course, updated the designer setup. I personally do keep the risky Javascript enabled however, so if you’re like me, keep in mind that you’ll have to edit that. Moose’s idea is of course to only enable Javascript on sites you trust and keep it disabled anywhere else except to enable it to quickly check something out, but I’m lazy for now. First I should update my site-specific styles to the new method anyway.

I don’t think there’s more to tell, except perhaps where to get it and where to read the changelog.

I only just noticed. The history is finally similar to IE’s history, which, as far as I’m concerned, is good.

At the IEblog a little was posted about ClearType in IE7. Of course this was posted at a time more suitable for Americans, so it was already filled with comments. Thus my opinion had already been posted by someone else.

Why is this a setting in IE 7 and not taken from the system wide setting in display properties?

It doesn’t make sense to me that only one app (well, two, IE and Outlook Express) should have the option specifically for that app when all apps have the option from the global property. Particularly because this isn’t a setting you would enable a per application basis.

Clear type is nice and all if you have the right monitor, but come on, this doesn’t make sense.

There were more posts on the blog, some of which actually managed to make me laugh or raise an eyebrow. I’ll quote an example. It’s an old friend for us Opera users (and more recently to Firefox users with some extension and Maxthon users).

What’s my favourite feature in the new IE? I’m an old Office hound myself, and so I really love to see Zoom. Available from the bottom right of the main browse window, this acts like it does in Word or Excel – it enlarges or reduces the entire page (text and graphics) to a specific zoom setting.

My opinion of IE has not changed, nor is it likely to change. All that’s changed is that it’s moving a bit again, which might maintain userbase. But I still forecast a flow of users towards other browsers. The roots of “the others” have simply grown to deep to stop their growth now.

Or one could write this into a “biblical” story, in which case my conclusion in the above paragraph would be like this:

Cane just laughed, and the sound was as of a thousand coins of gold rained down from the heavens. Many heard the laughter, and felt comforted. Others, though, knew Cane for what it was: the same Cane as old, only polished, shiny and new.