On Saturday, June 14, 2003, at 07:11 AM, Troy Mello wrote:
> The recent discussion about IE and Safari has made me very curious...
> expecially about Safari.
>
> 1. (and this may be a dumb question!) Safari Public Beta. What does
> "beta" mean? I am assuming it's a reference to something that is a
> test product or an unfinished product. Am I warm?
>
When software is developed, it is supposed to rigorously tested against
all sorts of hardware and operating system combinations. When a program
is first being tested by the developer and his/her friends, family and
whichever acquaintances they can con, err talk into doing this, the
stage is referred to as alpha testing. After problems are worked out
and necessary changes are made it is tested again. Usually this stage
is called beta testing and it is done by folks only remotely known to
the developer and it usually is a larger pool of folks than in the
first round. Problems are supposed to be found and fixed and tested
again, then the thing goes out to the public as "final". At this point
a whole bunch new problems are found and depending on the mood of the
reviewers the thing is roundly booed or given the "after some minor
fixes, this ought to be a great program" nod.
Ah, such is the semi-ideal world. It seldom truly works like that I've
described, but that is the idea anyway.
Apple has been using a different approach to the testing lately with
some of their products (Safari for example), with varying degrees of
success. They use the alpha and beta testing process (mostly anyway)
and then instead of sending it out as final in the first round, they
release it as a "public beta". This allows them to tap into the very
large number of Mac users to test and report back any problems, get it
fixed and then release a "final" version. Some of their critics don't
like it, some love it, some want to make it even larger by expanding
the number of first round beta testers.
> 2. What problems has anyone experienced with the Safari browser?
> Throughout the last discussion, it seems that a small handfull of
> secure websites for banking or shopping may not work well with Safari.
> I mostly use the net for on-line shopping... anyone run into any
> brick walls with Safari?
>
If you get a free program from versiontracker.com called Safari
Enhancer, it will let you turn on Safari's debug menu. This menu has an
option for changing what is called the user agent string. This is the
name that your browser sends to the web-site which can then serve up
content based on what browser is visiting. If you run into a serious
problem, you can tell the site that Safari is IE or NN or one of
several others and go (usually) right on in. You may find occasional
glitches because the site programmers set it specifically up for the
way that a browser acts (incorrect handling of www standards), but for
the most part it will work.
If you find a site where the glitches occur, a politely words message
will often get the problem taken care of. There is a growing sort of
grassroots support that is saying that sites should be set up to
conform to the www standards, not to the idiosyncrasies of one browser,
so if a site gets a reputation for bad support, well peer pressure does
work...
Jerry
> Of course, I have not had any problems with IE. "If it ain't broke,
> don't fix it!".... right? However, I simply like the looks of Safari
> just like all other OSX applications. Plus, a few have mentioned that
> Safari operates faster than IE. Again, IE runs okay, for me.... but
> my interest in Safari is really soaring. I suppose the perfect
> solution would be download Safari and keep IE.... I could have my cake
> and eat it, too!
>
> Thanks so much for any opinions & have a great day everyone!
>
> Troy
>
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>
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>
| The next meeting of the Louisville Computer Society will
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