Apple Updates Safari | Hacker News Reader

Apple Updates Safari

techcrunch.com

60 pointslaxcrosi55 comments

In terms of the supported Web Platform APIs, is this new Safari release any different from the recent WebKit snapshots? (http://nightly.webkit.org/builds/trunk/mac/1)

Also, is WebKit2 framework still private on OSX 10.9?

Google Chrome Team: "Ah snap, and we just dropped WebKit!"

Edit: It's a joke, guys. :/

Nothing in there was particularly unknown as far as I know – Webkit 2 has been around for a while, Blink wanted a different direction on much of the newer architectural decisions IIRC.

They have been using different JavaScript interpreters all along. Chrome also had per-tab processes since (it feels like) 2010.

I actually downgraded back to v5 because of the terrible changes they made to Web Inspector in v6, so I'm pretty annoyed that they didn't even mention it when introducing the new version -- at a developers' conference, no less!

It's not in the keynote, but if you get the Developer Preview you can see what's new.

Safari 6.x is jam packed with new web inspector capabilities. What are you talking about?

It's more capable, unfortunately the interface is rather inscrutable. It's a bunch of little tiny icons with no context you have to guess at.

When I have a lot of work to do debugging something, I switch over to Chrome which still has the old style layout, because I find it much easier to use.

yeah the UI is much different. I read somewhere apple is trying to keep the UI consistent among XCode debugger and Safari debugger. Notice, they have almost the same UI design.

That's true, it is somewhat similar with the XCode interface. I'd rather they switch the XCode interface to be more like Safari 5 had.

The interface in XCode isn't bad. My big problem is that you can't view source any more, it's crammed in that panel. The list of requests? Crammed in that panel. JS console? Inspecting elements? All crammed in there.

I always feel light I'm fighting to find what I want instead of switching between things I might need.

This year's WWDC they broke down how to use the debugger and some advanced tips (2 sessions that you can watch online: https://developer.apple.com/wwdc/videos/). Btw, new Safari seems to have changed the UI again, this time for better the icons are bigger now :)

I too agree that the tiny icons are beyond worthless.

You'll love 7.0 then!

The tools save all the robust features added in 6.0, but they sent a designer to go over them again in 7.0 so it's pretty and powerful now.

Here's a screenshot of me running the Safari 7.0 dev tools in the multi-monitor space:

http://cl.ly/PYL4

Now with PRISM support! j/k

Thing is, that's definitely NOT a joke

An iCloud keychain? No thanks.

Yes, announcing that right after PRISM is leaked may not be the best idea. :)

The last side basically says: "encrypted client side".

Well, HN has told me that the NSA is all-powerful, so I'll take that with a grain of cyber-salt. /s

Edit: Non-sarcastically, but what about the metadata about the keys?

like the position of the keys on the keyboard you pressed when you typed your password? it's meta-data ;)

LastPass does this really well for all devices, works with any browser, even mobile too!

This iCloud key chain must be Safari only! :)

Just wish I could use it more easily on ios. The lastpass app is OK, and the bookmarklet is meh.

FireFox already interfaces with the normal KeyChain. Why must it be Safari only?

I thought they'll add KeyChain integration in iOS more deeply. Something like, "If you tap-hold on a password field in an iOS app, the OS will ask you if you want to paste the password from your KeyChain." That's where it becomes much more useful than LastPass.

Isn't the keychain encrypted client side though?

How do we know they aren't holding our private key in escrow?

How about we hold off on leaping to conclusions before we see how it works?

I'm not leaping to any conclusions. I think my question is totally fair. Is Apple providing the source code to this system so that we can audit it? Or do we just have to trust one of the companies implicated in the PRISM scandal?

I will be interested in seeing how well this works, given what a pig's breakfast the old .Mac keychain syncing was.

The average non-technical user is going to be far better off with that than the current state of "password1!" used on every site across the internet.

The average non-technical user will now have "password1!" synced with iCloud.

It automatically suggests new passwords based on Random strings when it sees a password box.

The average user already has created most of the accounts she will create. Outside of HN not everyone is trying out new services everyday. I could also see many people being confused by a random password and think to themselves that they'll never remember it and then override to use their trusty [but] insecure password. It's also not cross platform so not a solution for many people.

It's not Apple's fault, I'm sure it's a great password manager. The problem is passwords are broken. Managers are a good band aid, but fundamentally passwords are broken.

What would a better solution look like?

Funny, I thought "at last!" 1Password is fine, but I'd prefer a more integrated experience.

The idea an sich is good. In light of last week's news however, I'll stick with 1Password.

The news cycle rolls on.

Let's see how challenger WWDC fares against defender PRISM.

I saw another story today about someone experimenting with their sleep/life/work cycle. Felt like old times!

PRISM will be a top story again when something new of substance happens. Are they supposed to be reporting 'nothing changed in PRISM scandal' as a top story?

I think this is precisely why the original reporter made it clear that there was new information that has yet to be revealed.

If they blow their news all at once, they won't get a sustained reaction as they would by releasing snippits every day.

There should be a way to vote for an ongoing event to remain at the top of the frontpage of HN for some days or weeks in form of a link to all related stories/links. I'm sure this could be done in a very automated way, showing milestone articles on a timeline, best comments etc.

> Apple announced the next version of Safari which will launch with OS X Mavericks.

Does this mean it's launching at the same time as Mavericks or does it mean it's launching only with Mavericks?

Hopefully they got rid of whatever "Safari Web Content" was doing. That is the primary reason I don't use Safari.

Are you talking about the process in Activity Monitor? It's just Safari's rendering worker process, just like Chrome's "Google Chrome Worker" processes. What it was "doing" is rendering pages and running javascript. If it gets out of control, CPU or memory-wise, it is almost certainly a misbehaving tab.

Can anyone explain this? http://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2013/06/scaled-s...

Is that real or just BS?

Seems BS to me. Looks just like their "performance" pages for the Macbook Pro on the Apple website.

Yeah I'm going to need a technical rundown before I believe some random slide.

I'm going with BS until they provide more details. They don't even mention what version of Chrome and Firefox they are testing against.

Its's real. You can try the benchmark yourself here, and learn how it is different from other JS benchmarks <http://jsbench.cs.purdue.edu/>.

It's likely "real". By real, I mean that I just ran JSBench on my MacBook Air with Safari and Chrome (latest released version of each) and Safari came out significantly ahead (Chrome took 1.75x longer). They're claiming 2.53x faster than Chrome in that slide so that would mean an improvement of probably around 50% over the current Safari in terms of JS speed on this benchmark. So, it would seem that this particular benchmark already favors Safari's JS engine and that the next Safari will improve on the current Safari's performance.

Now, the issue with JSBench is that it's real-world JS, but only from 5 sources. Granted, they're 5 sources that are very high-trafficked, but it's still a small sample size (http://jsbench.cs.purdue.edu/).

Similarly, Apple showed off SunSpider benchmarks showing the next Safari being faster than Chrome. The current Safari on my MacBook Air beats Chrome, with Chrome taking 6.9% longer. So, part of it is that each browser maker has its preferred benchmarks.

Other JS benchmarks are not based on highly-trafficked real-world sources at all, so perhaps "real" is relative.

What would it say if you ran a benchmark with Safari on your Macbook and Chrome on your Windows/*nix box and Chrome came out significantly ahead?

Benchmarks taken with different software on different hardware isn't very useful.

Why would it BS? This is almost always the case. Safari has plenty of notches on it's belt, it's just that the Chrome and FF teams do far tighter release cycles allowing for improvements like this to be pushed out the door faster.

Safari is a great browser, always has been. This is hardly surprising or new, just like it's not novel that Chrome will meet and exceed those stats within a month or two of the release of Safari 7.

I expect other browsers could greatly improve JSBench performance if they focused on it. But I would be quite surprised if they matched Safari's current results in a month. It took a lot more than a month and significant architectural work to get those results in the first place.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com