If you're a regular reader, you may recall my recent adventures experimenting
with installing Safari 4 on my 550 MHz G4-upgraded Pismo PowerBook.
I liked Safari 4 but ran afoul of a bug in OS X 10.4.11 when I
installed the mandatory Mac OS X Security Update 2009-002. That induced
a looping popup error in the System Preferences Network panel with the
message "Your network settings have been changed by another
application", lapsing into Whack-a-Mole mode and blocking user access
to the Network settings.
After trying everything I could think of off the top of my head (not
encyclopedic), I disgustedly trashed the system, reinstalled Tiger from
the OS X install DVD, and ran the 10.4.11 update I had archived,
which meant saying good-bye to speedy Safari 4.
I needn't have. Several LEM readers kindly wrote suggesting and/or supplying
links to a variety of fixes and workarounds for the "Your network
settings have been changed" looping bug, which is a widely known issue
that apparently affects only those of us who still use dialup modems
due to Apple changing the way PPP and PPPoE passwords are maintained,
apparently without taking the time to get it right for we dialup
hostages and holdouts.
Happily, the fixes suggested turned out to be relatively simple and
painless, so last weekend I finally got around to trying again. I ran
the Security Update 2009-002 installer, and sure enough, the looping
error manifested.
From the several potential modes of working around the issue, I
chose going to the Security panel of System Preferences and checking
"Require password to unlock each secure system preference", then closed
the lock. It was recommended that one quit System Preferences to apply
the change, which I did, then opened it again and selected Network.
Happy day. No looping message. Apparently in some setups you may get
the annoying popup once, but now when you click OK it will
dismiss and not loop.
For a more thorough discussion of the issue and fix and dealing with
possible complications that I didn't encounter, see
Changing network settings since the 9/25/08 update.
I Finally Like Safari
It's great to have Safari 4 back on the old Pismo. Actually, this
puts it a leg up on my workhorse Unibody MacBook, on which I'm
not using Safari 4 yet because I've resolved not to install OS X
10.5.7 unless a more compelling reason than updating to use this
browser emerges, since that update is widely panned as an
extraordinarily buggy beast. Hopefully 10.5.8 will resolve those
issues.
On the Pismo in OS X 10.4.11, Safari 4 is gratifyingly fast -
not as fast as Opera 10
with the Turbo booster on, but with Safari you're still getting full
image resolution. I actually like Safari now, for the first time since
Apple launched it.
The Safari interface appearance is still prosaic, and it's somewhat
feature-poor compared with Opera or iCab.
The session restore feature is clumsy, but at least there is one, and
the download manager is still lame compared with Opera's, but the
program's tight integration with the operating system is slick, it
starts up amazingly fast even on the old G4, and it's a generally
smooth performer. (I qualify that with "generally", because I have
experienced a bit of instability and even one crash requiring Force
Quit in the brief interval I've been running it this time - certainly
not bad enough to be a deal-breaker, though.)
My biggest complaint is the lack of a progress bar, more indication
of Apple's resolve to throw low-bandwidth sufferers under the bus (at
best) through benign neglect - an egregious omission - but at least
Safari's prodigious page-load speed helps mitigate that grievance
somewhat.
System Profiler shows if Quartz Extreme is supported.
Unfortunately, neither Safari 4's Top Sites or Cover Flow feature's
will work on the Pismo with its puny Rage Mobility 128 GPU and paltry
8 MB of video RAM. Both features require a graphics card that
supports Quartz Extreme, and the Rage 128 doesn't by several
generations. If you're in doubt about this issue on your Mac, you can
use System Profiler to check if it supports Quartz Extreme by clicking
on "Graphics/Displays" in the left pane and then in the right pane,
look for "Quartz Extreme: Supported" (or "Not Supported").
For Quartz Extreme support, you need you need a graphics processor
unit with the following minimum specs:
- ATI: Any AGP-based ATI Radeon GPU with at least 16 MB VRAM
- Nvidia: Nvidia GeForce 2 MX or later, with at least 16 MB VRAM
As for general system requirements, Safari 4 for Mac requires either
Mac OS X v10.5.7 "Leopard" or 10.4.11 "Tiger" (the latter updated
with Security Update 2009-002), and a minimum 256 MB of memory It is
designed to run on any Intel-based Mac or a Mac with a PowerPC G5, G4,
or G3 processor and built-in FireWire.
