Safari 1.2: Definitely better caching

Posted by Pierre Igot in: Macintosh
February 20th, 2004 • 4:54 am

When Safari 1.2 was released a couple of weeks ago, Safari developer Dave Hyatt posted an entry in his weblog highlighting the improvements made.

Some of the improvements are obvious to regular readers of Betalogue: If you’ve been using Safari to read this blog, you can now see that the category that is indicated in grey between brackets at the end of each entry’s title is in fact in small caps. It has always been in small caps. Only now Safari 1.2 actually supports small caps. :-)

One less obvious — yet probably more important — change is the “caching improvements” mentioned by Dave Hyatt. They are particularly noticeable for me when using the pMachine control panel to edit Betalogue.

This control panel includes all kinds of small JPEG pictures that are always the same. In previous versions of Safari, for some reason, the browser would regularly reload them from the server even though it had already loaded them a few moments before. This was especially noticeable for me since I am on such a slow dial-up connection.

Now with Safari 1.2, loading the pMachine control panel page is almost always instantaneous. Since I use this page quite frequently, it’s a rather valuable improvement for me.

(The new ExpressionEngine blogging tool uses a control panel without any GIF or JPEG pictures. The control panel is entirely designed using CSS styles. So obviously the pMachine people were aware of the problems caused by the use of these small pictures. That being said, as discussed earlier, I won’t be upgrading to ExpressionEngine in the near future, so I am glad that this Safari update improves the current situation with pMachine.)


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