Cover Flow won't show in Safari 4 sans DirectX
As those of you with older PCs may have noticed the hard way, some of the new features in Apple's Safari 4 beta for Windows require a graphics card with at least 64MB of on-board RAM that supports at least DirectX 9. This makes it the first browser I've heard of with an explicit graphics card requirement, but is this really a big deal?
Missing from next to the Bookmark icon is the toggle for Top Sites.
(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)DirectX 9 has been around since 2004, and you can pick up a card for your desktop that supports it for around 20 bucks. This isn't quite analogous to Windows requiring a massive hardware upgrade for Vista, although it is definitely annoying.
What is strange is that Cover Flow on iTunes will work on these older machines, including the main Windows XP computer I use at work. The graphics card is older, yet, as you can see in the screenshots, Cover Flow works in iTunes and doesn't in Safari 4. This leads to my other complaint about the beta: Safari offers no notification when your graphics card is not compliant. Top Sites and Cover Flow merely don't appear. So if the browser must require an upgrade, when iTunes doesn't, the least Apple could do is include some kind of warning.
Taken on the same Windows XP machine, Cover Flow in iTunes works fine.
(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)This isn't the biggest deal in the world, and Safari 4 is still in beta so there's plenty of time to work out the kinks. But this strikes me as a seriously annoying problem, if nothing else, when you consider that the graphics and design elements of Apple software are one of their big attractions.
Apple suggests that one solution could be to upgrade your graphics card drivers, which didn't work for me. Apple had not returned my call requesting comment at the time of publication.
If you have other problems or solutions to problems in Safari 4 beta, tell me about them in the comments.
Seth peers into the deep, dark corners of software so that you don't have to. He has yet to suffer a single nightmare about OS/2. You can follow him on Twitter. 
Don't criticize the beta too much. This isn't Google and it probably will be out of Beta shortly.
HOWEVER, on that top 10 site animation trick,
Feb 28 01:16:08 mini [0x0-0x76076].com.apple.Safari[976]: CoreAnimation: 1360 by 2098 image is too large for GPU, ignoring
There is no conspiracy. It is either Windows OpenGL or the amount of GDI space Apple uses since it is only method Windows gives to them.
I highly doubt Apple will use DirectX. They must be using OpenGL and if OpenGL doesn't support it on Windows, it is your graphics cards vendor to blame not offering up to date OpenGL support.
Apple's programming style is never breaking the core experience trying to do show off tricks if the hardware is uncapable of doing it without load.
but i see it have some bugs the one i see is when you touch the history button and you click the web site
it apper it load low performance but i see that safari change the web browser history.
When does Apple return a call? They do not unless they would like to comment on something and it is not asked by the press. :)
Moreover the above statement seems to have lost its gloss because the press has used it once too often.
Go get some ram and stop blaming microsoft
Kind of funny as well that hardware made for pc is newer then hardware for mac
If your going to be that picky about it wait until the final version is released
Graphic Card: NVIDIA GeForce 3 - 64MB
Latest DirectX 9
Aside from the prettier graphics, Safari just reminds me of Chrome anyway.
Most websites, even newer flash or silverlight sites require more video processing power, so if you're spending more for the memory and CPU, you might as well make sure there's an NVIDIA or ATI video card in that PC.
- by quiksilver1804 March 3, 2009 8:45 AM PST
- Macbook Pro running Leopard (10.5.6): Install won't run unless Security Update 2009-001 is installed (which requires a reboot). Parallels Desktop 3.0 Build 5600: Safari won't show Cover art in history and the Top Sites button doesn't appear either.
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Showing 1 of 2 pages (38 Comments)E6400 @ 3.2ghz / XFX 9800GT on Vista64: All features work. However, constant time outs on all websites. Many times websites won't load at all. IE8 and Firefox 3 on the other hand loads multiple sites/tabs as fast as I create new tabs. So much for world's fastest browser!