Safari 5 | Hacker News Reader

Safari 5

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63 pointsGhost_Noname79 comments

I work for a large newspaper, and we're not very amused by the built-in "Reader" (removes ads and crud, like Readability): http://www.apple.com/safari/whats-new.html ... for users, it looks like a good feature though.

If I understand it right, the ads are displayed initially and are still in the background when reader is on. If an ad is interesting enough, the user would still see and click it.

There's an annoying habit of linking to the print version of articles, regardless of the look of the site and article, though.

Well, Safari5 Reader's approach may make that feel less necessary - since one can easily click in and out of Reader-view.

And an advantage (as I test-drive it) is that turning the Reader-view on/off for a given article is almost instantaneous: whereas with Readability to move _out_ of Readability-View involves _reloading_ the entire page (which I find annoyingly slow on pages like TechCrunch, RWW, etc where there are tons of ads to be (re)loaded.

I think the Safari-Reader approach may increase time I spend with a full, ad-laden page open.

It's a trend that has to be fought---if "fought" is the right word. I assume Instapaper has a lot to do with this trend.

Because non-print versions kinda blow. Spanning a single article over 10 pages with a few dozen words per page just so you can get 10 times the ad impression is not acceptable.

Some do. Spanning an article over 10 pages is fine as long as you offer a single-page view like nytimes does. Unfortunately some don't offer this.

I'm afraid people will have to deal with the fact that it's the user who controls the browser. You can't just shove stuff down your users' throats — it's their browser.

I agree! :-)

I also want to present the counter viewppoint - http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2010/03/why-ad-blocking...

Newspapers were dying because nobody wanted to pay for news, which they could get for free at Google News. Newspapers were told to suck it up and instead move online - to an ad supported model. No more ads.

I dont think the newspapers are the bad guy here.

Newspapers are dying because they are staffed to heavily, not because people don't pay.

Now look at smaller publications such as Gawker, hyper local news. They are doing just fine.

Wired sold almost as many iPad versions (75.000 at 5USD a pop) as they did paper version since they launched it. Thats excluding advertising.

Clearly there is a market for news. It's just not going to be of the NYT kind.

Yeah, good journalism costs money.

To have a staff of correspondents reporting around the world isn't cheap. But I think it's worth it.

I think in order for newspapers to survive, people have to learn that they need to pay. Advertising alone isn't going to pay the bills.

I personally think that charging people money for things on the internet isn't such a crazy idea. ;-)

I don't think it's good journalism that cost money but the infrastructure to maintain so many journalists being situated around the world. The question is if this is really necessary. My guess is more and more, no it isn't

Obviously you don't really need a journalist for every newspaper being situated in different parts of the world. I understand why they do it, but the problem is that they are often forced to compete with local citizens with cellphones, twitter, citizen journalism etc.

Most people don't really read news for the good journalism, they read it for the value of reading news.

How well this news is being written is in my mind secondary from that point of view.

But obviously it's not so simple. I just don't buy the argument about good journalism.

I agree that twitter and citizen journalism have shown themselves to be quite capable of disseminating information and news.

It's still not quite the same as reading a well written, unbiased, in-depth analysis of a story in The Economist or The New York Times (or even Al Jazeera).

Sure, there's a large market for "news-tainment". But I think there's also a market for high quality journalism.

I'm also tipping that people are more likely to pay (and pay more) for the latter too.

I too love well written articles. But it is unlikely a big enough market to entertain that many newspapers.

I do however have quibbles with the idea of unbiased journalism.

Personally I prefer highly opinionated pieces, but that's another discussion :)

I think you would be surprised. :-)

You're right about unbiased news though. It's a myth.

You really need to make up your own mind and read various sources to get some balance. I'm pretty sure all news has some inherent bias.

Opinion is fine, but don't try to make out like it's real news. Techcrunch is a major offender here.

This is a distressingly common sentiment these days. I can't think of any good reason to prefer opinionated screeds to well-balanced factual analysis. Very often it boils down to "I don't have confidence in news stories to have a 100% optimal distribution and analysis of the facts, so I've decided it's not even worth pursuing the truth."

Opinionated does not mean that it's not balanced or factual.

Everything is at the end of the day interpretation. I would rather know what peoples stance are whether I agree or disagree than to read something that is stated as the truth.

Something opinionated is by definition not balanced (in the sense of giving everything an equal shake) or factual. "Fact" and "opinion" are antonyms. And I can't imagine what it would look like for an article to be opinionated but not explicitly favor any particular view over another.

Are we using different definitions here or do you genuinely believe somebody arguing that Steve Jobs is a worthless sonovabitch is being evenhanded?

We are perhaps using different definitions.

How many news organizations have good journalists though? I can count the ones I like on my fingers and some of them are mostly just bloggers as well. The market can support a few organizations doing international stuff, most of the rest just need reprint permissions.

The field is moving to much more federated-ness very quickly. People will not pay. Newspapers will not survive. Sorry.

"I think in order for newspapers to survive, people have to learn that they need to pay."

The Wall Street Journal and the Economist successfully taught their readers this lesson.

Your comment makes it sound like gawker is some kind of lightweight, nimble organization that provides all the hard news that say the NYT or the Washington Post do but at a fraction of the cost. Gawker is a tabloid. While there are some entertaining stories it in no way replaces a more serious news organization.

I don't mean to be overly critical. I just think that society needs the kind of information that the large papers provide. They definitely are having trouble coming up with a new viable business model, but it doesn't seem prudent to dismiss them by holding up gawker as a model to emulate.

That was not intentional.

My point is simply that there are plenty of room for news it's just that the news organizations most probably need to focus much more as they can't maintain the overhead of covering more and more at the pace news are moving today.

It's not a natural law that newspapers have to cover both local, domestic and international news. This did make sense when the news industry was very different, but insisting that reality somehow seem to conform to their needs is in my opinion absurd (I am not saying you said that)

In my opinion news are fundamentally gossip, until it's verified, written up and if it's found important analyzed further.

The access to the actual news (plane went down in Hudson) is almost ever present which means that you don't have to staff up around the world just to be sure to catch what is going on.

There are so many areas that newspapers still seem to insist on keeping that it makes it impossible for them to get lean enough to make proper profit. And let's not forget that so many much smaller news sites are eating into their profit.

I like you enjoy well written articles, geopolitics and in depth analysis, but we are not the norm.

To most people what is going on around the corner is more important than what's going on in Iraq or Philadelphia.

That doesn't mean there isn't room for serious journalism. Just that it has to change it's scope.

Just my five cents of course.

You don't pay for the news when you buy physical newspaper, you buy for distribution. Newspapers get money from advertisers, online or offline. The problem with online is that many are used to get commodity news for free. Anyway, ads suck (mostly). Newspapers who care first about advertisers (at the expense of readers) suck too and deserve do die, IMHO.

This +lots.

http://marcreeves.blogspot.com/2010/06/speaking-truth-to-pow... (excellent post I stumbled across the other day.)

They will just have to move to putting the ads into the article copy.

I worked with Kontera they do that. Still haven't made my mind up whether that's a good approach or if it pisses me off. It's still to spammy IMHO

"Big newspapers" are not getting the returns from online advertising because they are lazy. The days of 'fire and forget' advertising where you stick a few banners and google ads on a what the money roll in are gone.

You need to find ways to bring your advertiser's products to the attention of your readers in a way that is both useful and interesting.

> I dont think the newspapers are the bad guy here.

It's not about good or bad guys here, it's about a business model being deprecated by technology. And part of the web's technology is that the user agent decides of everything. Including not displaying ads if it doesn't want to. Or reformatting layout. Or even displaying nothing at all and only voicing the text.

Welcome to the future, your business model is dead or dying, you might or might not survive but your model can not and will not. Unless you manage to stop the march of progress.

I would uninstall my ad blocking extensions if, and this is a big if, advertisers wouldn't abuse their privilege for me to see their ad. How do they abuse it? By authoring blinking and moving ads that are unbelievably annoying. Everyone once in a while I disable AdBlock, only to flee back to turn it on within a few hours. I'm sorry, but WTF are they smoking?

I use Opera's content-blocking function, which allows me to nuke just a specific ad, or a specific part of a page. If something truly incenses me, I kill it. I think this is how ad blocking should work in general, given that most ads are benign.

The Google analysis is pretty good, even if their proposed solutions are between weak and non-existing.

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2010/05/google-p...

Basically, the problem is that newspapers make most of their money on ads from "bundled" content, e.g. lifestyle, cars, sport, and almost no money on hard news.

But today people go to specialized web sites for all the economically lucrative content, leaving only the hard news for the newspaper. And the newspapers can't really get people to pay for it, because most news stories are a commodity (it is the same story everywhere).

I have been spending less time on 'large newspaper' sites lately because I find it annoying that the text columns are becoming narrower and the ad columns multiplying to their right.

If CPM rates are dropping from your advertisers, maybe its because you are cramming too many ads in!

I always view the print version of the article. They get their ad views when I first click on the page, but I'm not going to be annoyed by some idiotic animated banner while I'm trying to read the news. If the ads are static, I generally don't mind, but animated (and even worse, ads that ad appear over the content) ads are too much of a nuisance and too distracting.

It also automagically displays the text of the article in one page, despite the obnoxious effort of a site to require you to click through to multiple pages to read a single article.

As far as I can tell, the point of splitting an article into more than one page was just more ad exposure. So it's a double whammy: graying out and background the ads, and decreasing the number of ad-ridden pages one needs to read the article. Awesome in my book.

I actually like multiple pages. I find reading some of the longer (8ish page) NY Times or The Atlantic articles difficult when it's just one enormous piece of text. I like that it's broken down into small chunks, and it offers a convenient place to stop if I don't have time for the full article.

I also don't like it when people here link to Print View instead of the main article page. Partly for that reason, and partly because the text columns tend to be way too wide on print view pages. There's also frequently no way to get back to the non-print-view page.

Set your margins the way you like them:

http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/

Design the page for you, not for the ads.

Wow... I wonder how that works. 'next' and 'previous' links?

Yeah, this technology has been around for a while. Take a look at AutoPager for Firefox.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4925/

If your site is full of "crud", it's hard to be sympathetic.

There has been an uncharacteristic quiet at the New York Times about yesterday's iPhone announcement. Usually, there is at least a more prominent article in the Technology section (Their current blurb is the lackluster "On Newest iPhone, Another Camera"). I wonder if "Reader" has anything to do with it.

I wonder if that's an indirect attack on Google. Very nice feature though.

At the risk of parroting a good chunk of other folks here: your employer's business model is dead.

My personal suspicion is that we're moving quickly toward a world dominated by local newsrooms covering local stories (with international distribution), rather than large international news organizations and centralized reporting. Add in a few companies (some traditional, some not: Reuters, Google, et al) surviving as international news aggregators and licensing hubs (perhaps similar to an MPEG-LA model).

However, none of this plays out well for organizations like the New York Times or other large traditional print companies. "Be flexible."

If your site is designed well and respects your users, they'll have no reason to ever engage Safari 5's Reader on your site.

It fixes the "I want to read this, but it's hard to read" problem. If you don't have that problem, your users won't use Reader.

I find it odd I had to restart after upgrading a browser in OSX, reminds me of that old time. In Windows the upgrade went without a restart.

Edit: Yes, talking about Safari only.

In what Windows did the upgrading go without a restart? Firefox, maybe. But upgrading the MS COM component responsible for drawing shadows on a drop down menu in some obscure MS library for accessing DAO databases ALWAYS requires a restart.

I uninstalled ZoneAlarm a few days ago and clicked "OK" as I went through the motions .. great, now the machine is rebooting and I lost whatever the fuck I was doing.

Compare that to Linux where I was developing custom file system drivers. modprobe foo, and I had a foo driver looking at an intricate piece of chipod, rmmod and it's gone ..

Wax poetic all you want about OS stability, but Windows is the wrong muse to sing to wrt stability, and I say that typing on XP.

I assume the comment referred to Safari 5 for Windows.

The original comment was referring to Safari 5 on Mac. Safari 5 on windows does not require a restart.

I can't edit my first comment again but I was talking about updating Safari in both operating systems. In OSX you are required to restart, in Windows you don't need to.

Upgraded Safari on an XP machine this morning, from 4 to 5, and no restart was required. Also noticed that Apple have made the 'Install iTunes and friends' option opt-in now, which is nice

You are not only upgrading Safari. You are upgrading Webkit as well! And it is used in many other apps, like iTunes. Webkit is very much integrated into OS X. That's why it needs to restart.

It shouldn't be very to hard to generate a list of running apps that link against the updated libs and ask the user for permission to restart them... Or let the user ignore it at own peril.

Almost everything is (potentially) linked against WebKit (At least judging by how broken my system when a rogue rogue flash plugin broke webkit.). Certainly Finder, for example. It could just get away with enforcing log off/log on again, but if multiple users are logged in it is probably simpler just to restart. "Ignoring at their own peril" will almost certainly result in horrible crashes.

Ah, that brings back nice memories of IE and Windows.

Sparkle (the update framework) uses WebKit, so everything that uses Sparkle links against it.

Why would there be crashes? The running apps will keep their already loaded binary until they're restarted.

Maybe there'll be some bugs in handling shared on-disk resources (cache, and maybe something else?), but I doubt that those parts change very often. That would be a reasonable reason to require a reboot, but unless those parts actually change it should be avoided.

I love how fast Safari 5 is (faster than Chrome for me) - but the UI of Chrome just makes browsing and navigation much, much better (auto hiding everything you don't need, combining URL and search bar etc). Apple should have learned from Chrome, it's superior.

Yes, the first thing I did when trying Safari 5 was try to type a google search in the main address bar.

Its funny how quickly Chrome has reprogrammed me.

There are a few extensions here: http://safariextensions.tumblr.com/

I'm loving the 'BuiltWith' extension, to explore the technology stacks used by websites. That will certainly come in handy.

http://blog.builtwith.com/index.php/2010/06/08/builtwith-saf...

Yeah, it could use some prettification but it's interesting, I had never heard of it before.

Sunspider benchmark (Win XP, dual core machine):

Opera (v10.53): 299.8ms +/- 1.0%

Safari (v5): 314.2ms +/- 1.7%

Chrome (v5.0.375.55): 326.6ms +/- 7.9%

Firefox (v3.6.3): 716.4ms +/- 1.7%

I am having some problems with different sites: outlook.com (admin for organization screens) and my bank. It manifests as blank frames or pages.

ARGH !!! It DELETED my Safari 4 even when I put it into another directory ??!!

Who deletes something automatically without a warning/permission these days?

Any sign of a portable/virtualized version yet? Or too soon?

> Who deletes something without a warning/permission in this age?

Without warning or permission? You asked it to upgrade your Safari installation, it upgraded from 4 to 5, what were you expecting exactly?

No, I told it to install into another directory.

I specifically changed the folder and it confirmed it.

Son-of-a-bee that makes me mad.

Nice thing is you click the clock logo in your menu bar, "Enter Time Machine", and drag your Safari 4 icon from an hour ago right back where you want it.

// EDIT: I see below you mention MSIEXEC. So never mind.

Maybe you would have been better off to move/rename the original copy of Safari (4)... Installer probably thought it was just cleaning up after itself (why would the average user want 2 copies of Safari?).

Essentially that's what I am going to have to do now since the installer only allows one copy of safari per PC and I can't figure out an override, even via msiexec.

   1. uninstall S5
   2. install S4
   3. archive S4
   4. install S5 to different directory
   5. unarchive S4

Oh and the reason for multiple installs is of course to test what breaks in what version. Many people won't be upgrading just yet to S5.

update: this now works great and both versions peacefully co-exist

You can also download a lot of different WebKit builds here: http://nightly.webkit.org/builds/trunk/mac/1

It should be possible to use them all side by side.

Those builds should be very similar to Safari. Not exactly sure about the difference. I didn't saw any when I tried last time (a year ago or so).

I'm wondering why the "Export to iBooks" option is missing...

On a Mac, you just print to a PDF, and use that in iBooks.

So the default search engine is Bing. Interesting...

Is it? Still Google for me (though I have the options of Yahoo and Bing now).

I thought they just added it as an option.

Will they remove Yahoo from the list when Yahoo results = Bing results I wonder?

The default search engine is still Google – it’s just that you now can also switch search engines and also pick Yahoo as well as Bing (that’s the order in which they appear in the list).

They just heavily advertise this new option with a huge image [1], ordinarily a feature like that would get a line or two of text or maybe not even be mentioned. I guess that’s supposed to send a message to Google, something like “We have a good relationship with your competitor so you better not fuck with us!” (i.e. stop us from using Maps or something like that).

[1] http://www.apple.com/safari/whats-new.html

what an odd screenshot. look at how much wasted space there is in the browser window.

They already offered Yahoo as an option. It's specifically Bing that's new.

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