I installed the latest version of Mac OS X (10.3.9) today and was pleasantly surprised at the improvements in the Safari web browser, especially because some of them have a direct impact on the LGF blog application. Brian Tiemann noticed one of the bug fixes; previous versions of Safari stripped off the final carriage return/line feed from a text file when it was displayed in an HTML <textarea>. This may seem minor (and when compared to, say, the Middle East, it is) but I’ve actually had to code around this bug in various LGF blog modules, so I’m very happy to see it fixed.

Other improvements I noticed in Safari: previous versions had some serious problems in the Javascript getSelection() method when the selection included “upper ASCII” characters such as curly quotes and em dashes, translating them into a series of two or three garbage characters. This directly affected the LGF weblog posting module, and it seems to be fixed now.

I haven’t done much testing on it yet, but I also see improvements in CSS handling for form elements.

Best of all, pages display a lot faster; on reloading/refreshing a page, Safari now redisplays only sections that have actually changed.

The only negative so far: in one of my Javascript bookmarklets, I used the replace method to take some of those “upper ASCII” characters and transform them into their HTML entity equivalents. But when the new version imported the bookmarks, Safari apparently tried to convert those characters into some kind of Unicode-like something and broke the script. For example, this:

sel=sel.replace(/é/g,’é’);

became this:

sel=sel.replace(/%C3%A9/g,’é’);

and at this point there doesn’t seem to be a way around it.