On Safari

I try to keep up-to-date on the goings on of the Safari for Windows browser beta that Apple is doing.

To be honest, I don't really like Safari's look, or layout, or config. But I haven't given up hope because of two really useful features that I hope Firefox can mimic soon. Because of these two reasons, I will still play with Safari every couple of days.

These two features are pretty understated: Private Browsing, which is a great one-click feature to keep you from letting a bunch of crap load itself into your cache, and the speed with which Safari can spawn a new tab. These are great features. Unfortunately, as I learned the last time I tried to use Internet Explorer, the Internet right now kind of really sucks.

IE 5 and 6 don't have any kind of popup-blocking technology, and when I tried to spend 30 minutes surfing an un-moderated Net, and found it unusable. There were flashing GIF ads and banners and popups assaulting me from every avenue. And all I tried to do was load up CNN.com.

I shut the browser off and ran, screaming, back to Firefox and its built-in blocking technology. What's more, Firefox supports a great add-on called "Adblock", which I find to be a critical tool for any Firefox install.

Safari, in comparison, suffers the same problem. No filters! I was about to push Safari into the dustbin next to IE when, on a lark, I wondered if I could push Safari traffic through Privoxy, a web proxying software package.

As it turns out, Safari doesn't have its own proxy config, but it uses IE's config, so I can actually run Safari through Privoxy and it has an appreciable lack of suckiness.

Yay.