Beta Blues!

My profession of love for Apple’s new Safari browser was premature. Is it fast? Oh, it’s fast. Is it sharp? Oh, yes, it is gorgeous on the screen (though I could live without the brushed metal look, but pages draw beautifully). Does it automatically install downloads and clean up after itself? Oh, it does all that, all right.

It also frags your system . . . and that’s if you’re lucky. The unlucky ones are losing hard disk data. I was cocky . . . when I had none of the bad mojo that people were experiencing with the previous build, I went ahead and blindly installed the newer build, which Apple said would take care of the problems people were experiencing. Then, ran Safari once, and OS X, which is pretty damn crashproof, started crashing all over the place. And then it wouldn’t restart. Beta?!! It’s not even alpha! So, my evening has been spent rebuilding the system. Didn’t lose anything other than some preferences, but it was a major annoyance much closer to a Windows experience than an Apple experience. I’ll report back on Safari 2.0; until then, I’ll put up with the slowness of Internet Explorer or the inadequacies of Chimera. Right now, I’m posting on the kids’ iMac. No matter what system you have, it’s almost necessary to have two these days in order to keep things running.

By the way: cold? Oh, yes, it’s cold.