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Last week Apple launched its “Nitro” powered Safari 4 beta browser with a JavaScript engine that, the company claims, is “the world’s fastest and most innovative web browser.”
In an already overcrowded browser bazaar, Safari’s Top Sites, the history search and Cover Flow will entice you to download it. Open the browser you’ll get a stunning display of your most frequently visited sites.
Click on Search History and you get a Cover Flow of the pages you visited, complete with text and graphics. This Cover Flow, made popular by Mac’s operating system, Leopard, also appears when you search through your bookmarks.
Apple claims that the “Nitro” JavaScript engine executes JavaScript up to 30 times faster than Internet Explorer 7 and three times faster than Firefox 3. The claim is not exaggerated.
But there is a problem with the Top Sites feature. During a browsing session I may have visited many sites. When I click on the Show Top Sites icon I would prefer to see the sites visited most during my browsing session. This doesn’t happen here. Instead, I am presented with the most frequently visited pages of the last three or four days.
Apple has to sort out an even bigger problem. Safari just cannot display websites in Bengali, Telugu, Malayalam and Kannada,on a Mac and sometimes on Windows, even if the fonts used on the web page are installed in the system. It renders Hindi, Tamil, Gujarati and Punjabi properly. Bengali and some other Indian languages in Unicode are a common problem in all Apple software. Wonder why can’t they solve this issue, considering that Bengali is the fifth or sixth largest spoken language in the world.
Safari doesn’t support either Dynamic Fonts or EOT. These technologies are used by most websites where there is no built in support for foreign languages. Firefox also doesn’t support these, but it can mimic IE through a plug-in called IE Tab.
The drawback with IE is that it is very prone to malware and spyware attacks. That’s why most people use Firefox. Firefox has the added advantage of third-party add-ons with which you can do various things to enhance the browser’s capabilities.
Frankly, Safari has to be able to deliver more than its rivals to get a permanent place in my desktop on Windows.
New Mac mini
If you’ve always wanted a Mac but found it too expensive, here’s your chance. Apple has just refurbished its Mac mini desktop lines, including faster processors and twice the memory. The new Mac mini comes with powerful new integrated graphics.
The Mac Mini is just a 6.5 inches by 2 inches box containing the processor. You can attach any monitor to it. It costs just Rs 35,000. Look at what you get with it:
The updated Mac mini now has the same groundbreaking NVIDIA GeForce 9400M integrated graphics introduced with the aluminium unibody MacBook family.
The Mac mini is a very energy efficient desktop, drawing less than 13 watts of power when idle. All Mac mini systems come with Mac OS X Leopard. Unlike a Windows PC, you do not need to pay any thing extra for the operating system. Included in the package is iLife’09, Apple’s fantastic suite of consumer programs for managing and organising photos, making movies and creating and learning to play music.
The new 2.0 GHz Mac Mini includes:
• Intel Core 2 Duo processor with 3MB shared L2 cache;
• 1GB of 1066 MHz DDR3 SDRAM expandable up to 4GB;
• NVIDIA GeForce 9400M integrated graphics;
• 120GB Serial ATA hard drive running at 5400 rpm;
• A slot-load 8x Super-Drive with double-layer support;
• Mini Display Port and mini-DVI for video output (adapters sold separately);
• Built-in AirPort Extreme wireless networking & Bluetooth 2.1+EDR;
• Gigabit Ethernet (10/100/1000 BASE-T);
• Five USB 2.0 ports;
• One FireWire 800 port; and
• One audio line in and another audio line out port, each supporting both optical digital and analog signals.
That is quite a bargain for just Rs 35,000. Go have a look at it at your nearest Imagine outlet.
Send in your computer- related problems to askdoss@abpmail.com. The solutions will appear soon.
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