[Macworld]

Post your comments for Review: Safari 5.1 here

[zetal]

I believe the newest version of Safari is excellent, but for me unfortunately Safari 5.1 is dead.
After I did the supplemental update on July 26 for the system and safari, Safari is not loading at all.
Used Onyx for cleaning, did permissions, deleted Safari and installed again...nothing works.
I guess, I'll need to to update to Lion...

[myramoki]

Overall I'd be much happier with Safari on Lion if it still supported Page-Up, Page-Down, Home and End buttons.

[SCharles]

I found 5.05 to be the most solid Safari since it first came out. I literally had 200 tabs open, (using "click-to-flash" helped hold down the flash memory usage), and it functioned just fine, which I found pretty amazing. However, soon as I downloaded & installed 5.1, it all came tumbling down. Oddly my "click-to-flash" suddenly disappeared, so I faced a cacophony of various streaming audio & video all trying to play at the same time, which was nerve-wracking from jump. This was followed by all kinds of odd behavior & my computer slowing down to a crawl, as Safari's memory use (even once I re-installed click-to-flash) climbed to 6+ GBs, and with only 8 GBs of RAM on my iMac, I was underwater.

The Apple discussion boards were full of everyone's own ideas of how to fix it, with many re-installing 5.05 over 5.1, either from a backed up drive, or re-installing the entire 10.6.8 combo update, a pretty radical fix. After struggling with it all day, I finally called AppleCare, was soon talking to a higher level tech guy, and was told they were aware of all the issues, and assured me that a fix would be coming ASAP. However, it's now been five or more days, and still nothing on my Software Update, and I do hope they get a fix out soon...
I also wish this was more fully tested before release, especially for we Snow Leopard users, in no need or hurry for Lion-compatible software.

This post has been edited by SCharles: 28 July 2011 - 11:02 AM

[jasonm90]

The bookmarks bar can be enabled in fullscreen by selection View->Always show bookmarks bar while in fullscreen.

[davidlfoster]

Safari 5.1 = Flaky

[avi8tor]

Although I prefer Safari to other browsers, what is wrong with 5.1 is not the new changes, but the features that are now missing. No plugin for PDF files makes it very difficult on sites that require it.

Also, in earlier versions when I clicked on 'Reader' in the address bar I was given an option to download. This option is now missing. It takes an extra step or two to print to Preview and then more steps to save.

I am not sure that I will use the Reader in Safari 5.1. I prefer Instapaper in that I can view the article later on my iPad. I don't have this option using Reader.

[RobLewis]

Though it may be better than previous versions, it still slows to a crawl (or a standstill) after a few days' use with multiple windows and tabs open. I thought Flash was the problem but apparently not. CPU usage is low, so it's an annoying mystery.

[Berend]

myramoki, on 28 July 2011 - 10:55 AM, said:

Overall I'd be much happier with Safari on Lion if it still supported Page-Up, Page-Down, Home and End buttons.

I encountered the same problem on Snow Leopard with my redefinition of Page-Up, Page-Down, Home and End buttons.
If you leave out the redefinitions then Safari 5.1 supports those keys.

I reported a bug about this through the "Report Bugs to Apple..." menu.

[alexbwong]

Safari 5.1 works well for me on my Mac. The Windows version (Win7) is dog slow. Why do they even bother with the port if they're not serious about making it competitive on Windoz?

[jpmhughes]

davidlfoster, on 28 July 2011 - 11:26 AM, said:

Safari 5.1 = Flaky

Why do you say it is flaky?

[bastion]

Macworld, on 28 July 2011 - 10:01 AM, said:

Those who frequently download multiple files simultaneously will probably miss the older approach—in Safari 5.1, you need to view that pop-over display to track the progress of each download, and doing anything else in Safari hides the list—but it seems to be an improvement on the whole.

The only real problem with the old way was that if the downloads window wasn't open when a download began it would open and come to the front. That could be annoying to people who really didn't care. But only annoying. Instead of just making that window purely an on-demand feature, in Lion they went the way this article describes which has substantially reduced Safari's usefulness for me. If you don't have any items in your download list you cannot open the download list. Period. Which means you cannot paste a URL into the download list in order to initiate a download. Pasting still works; as long as you have a way to open the list you can add new things to it manually. You just can't do it unless something's already downloading at the moment.

A second problem with Safari 5.1 that applies to all windows but hits the downloads window even harder than most, is that for some sites that protect content behind login pages Safari will lose the login credentials when the window you used to establish them closes, and even if it is still open those credentials aren't inherited by the download window/popover. So you can't paste into the download display a URL to a resource behind the login page.

[kranbollin]

If you have a Web Snapper plugin installed, Safari 5.1 is unusable. Remove the plugin, and all is fine. Web Snapper can still be used, but you no longer have the handy button in the toolbar.

[hagen]

For me under SL, it's a pain.

It scrolls significantly slower, blinks the screen when I remove a window from in front of it, has frozen twice and crashed twice. All in 1 week.

Not impressed over 5.05's stability.

Dealing with cookies is now simple for viewing but even more obtuse for managing and dealing with them.

Adding comments to MacWorld now no longer works (need to follow a 5 step process to get to the edit screen.

Oh and uses a lot more memory - Safari and Safari Web Content = 1.1 GB of RAM! I haven't watched it to see if it's leaking memory yet.