First things first, I must say kudos to Apple for building us a better browser. I longed for the day I could use a solid web browser on Mac OS that wasn't Microsoft based. I know that Netscape has been around for a long time for Mac OS, but I've never had any love for their browsers, and especially their long standing issues with CSS. The Mozilla effort helped a lot, but as happens quite often, Apple users get the leftovers from some port efforts. Mozilla and Netscape look nice on OSX, they perform fairly well rendering the content, but they are plain out slow when compared to some others.

Now, take Safari. It renders quickly, it looks nice, but (there is always a but) ... it is buggy in the worst ways. Let me fill you in on a bit of the information at hand here.

I do a lot of web development and have for years, so I am intimate with browsers, their bugs, oddities, and 'features', it is part of my job to know these things. All in all Safari is generally good, with one huge exception that has yet to be handled, although I am sure very many bugs have been reported on it. It has large issues with caching content, and completely ignores the header information for all things cache related. Normally you can set when a page expires, what things to cache and what not to cache in these headers, but I suppose they think that Safari is smarter than the webserver and content providers with regards to cacheing. Sadly it is not.

This alone can cause many hours of aggrevation for both users and web developers. In this day and age we are just starting to really get more and more online vendors to both see Mac OS as a valid platform, and to support our web browsers in their offerings. It has been a long and uphill battle, but we're slowly getting there, but Apple ignoring glaring issues like this only make things worse for us Mac users.

With Apple releasing Safari and calling it their default browser, it has prompted more than one major event in the OSX browser market. Just as OSX users got another browser option, development for Internet Explorer stopped. There will be no more versions of it from what the Microsoft Mac Business Unit has announced. While I have long complained about Microsoft and their software, this is sadly one piece of software that I will miss on Mac OS, if for nothing else for the sake of having the worlds 'most used' browser, that is cross platform and mostly similar to it's Windows based counterpart.

Now, I know that people will complain and say to use Mozilla, Netscape, Camino, and a slew of other browsers that do in fact run on Mac OS. I do in fact use them, but not as my main web browser. They are mostly all ports, meaning they weren't written natively for Mac but adapted to run on Mac, and in some cases not as well as they could have been. There are very many low level features of Mac OS that they do not leverage, nor are they likely ever to given they were not developed on or exclusively for OSX. Safari is one big standout for this. Because it is built by Apple it is integrated at a very low level with the operating system, and it takes advantage of many of the lower level features available.

Apple has made a large step forward in providing an API (basically a programmers interface) for the underlying web services, so in the not so distant future I imagine we will see a whole new family of OSX ready web browsers, but they will unfortunately share the Safari problems due to the fact they are sharing the same core services.

The point of this article? Well bascially it is to complain to Apple to get their act together with this browser. It is _so_ close to being there for me, both as a user and as a developer, but this cache problem is a kicker. There are several sites I administer right now that are being bit daily by these cache problems, and causing a great deal of user support issues. Users complain that our sites are broken, when in fact they perform perfectly on all the mainstream browsers on all the operating systems we test on, except, you guessed it, Safari. This does not do this lovely piece of technology justice! Bring us the last pieces of the puzzle Apple, and make two whole sets of communities happier.