The Safari 3 public beta is out
Quite a bit has happened in the last few weeks; we’ve been spending time getting settled in at our new place in Santa Clara and I’m glad to say that were finally we’re done. The move is complete, the boxes are unboxed, the sofa has arrived, and it’s starting to feel like home. Well, the pictures still need to be hung, but they’re going up… slowly.
It happened a week or so ago, but I wanted to mention that the Safari 3 Public Beta came out for the Mac and Windows (download it). I’ve had it installed for awhile on my Mac and it has some interesting additions.
Of notable interest is Safari 3’s new treatment for form elements. You can now style them so that they no longer take on the native aqua look of the Mac OS and textarea’s now can be dynamically resized. The latter I actually find quite nice to combat those itty bitty text boxes that are used from time to time. As for the former, I’ve always liked that Safari displayed the OS controls as-is. I’m sad to see that go, but I know other people will be happy that their styles will work now.
Safari 3 also has a new Web Inspector which can be enabled through the debug menu (on a Mac, I’m not sure on Windows). It’s similar to Firefox’s invaluable Web Developer Toolbar / Firebug plugins and I’m sure developers will welcome this with open arms. While I love Safari for daily browsing I have never really used it for developing, because of it’s lack of debugging tools. I’ve heard that in the nightly webkit builds this feature boasts improved functionality, too, so I’m excited about that.
Now maybe I should go hang the pictures in my place before I get used to the plain white walls.
