Had to uninstall Safari 3 beta

“Life’s too short to run beta software.” That’s long been my philosophy, specifically in regard to my own personal workstation.

Back when I did a lot of hardware and software testing, there were servers and workstations designated as testbeds, while my personal workstation (sometimes a Mac, sometimes a PC) was sacrosanct.

Every so often, however, I’m tempted to use the latest-and-greatest beta code, and this generally proves to be a disaster. It sure did with the Safari 3 beta for the Mac (announced at the Apple Worldwide Developer Conference), which I installed Monday afternoon, and uninstalled this morning.

There were three significant problems with this beta of Safari 3 on Mac OS X 10.4.9 — even when the new browser itself wasn’t running:

1. It devastated iChat, Apple’s instant messaging application. The application itself ran slower than molasses: even typing text into the entry field appeared o n e c h a r a c t e r a t a t i m e s o m e t i m e s s e c o n d s a p a r t. Pressing Enter to send a message caused a delay of between 10 and 30 seconds. Invitations to chats were painful: I’d hear the sound effect, indicating that someone wanted to chat, and then iChat would hang for up to two minutes before an error message dialog would pop up, saying that there was a problem joining the chat.

2. It wounded Skype, which kept shutting down. Sometimes Skype would close immediately after launch, and sometimes it would stay up for a few hours… but when I went to use it, I’d find that it had quietly closed.

3. It hurt the overall system, in that many apps seemed to be running slower. I have a menubar CPU meter, and also kept an eye on the Activity Monitor, and couldn’t see an obvious cause for the slowdown. The biggest issues were with apps that accessed the Internet, such as NetNewsWire, my RSS reader.

This is all a pity, in that Safari 3 itself seemed to be a real improvement over Safari 2.0.4, the current “stable” version. During this test period, I’d switched from Firefox 2.0.0.4 to Safari 3 as a primary browser, and it was doing fine… other than those unbearable problems.

Fortunately, Apple included an uninstaller with the Safari 3 beta, which brought back the Safari 2.0.4 code. Everything’s back to normal. And next time, I’ll wait for the finished code before putting it on my personal workstation. Frankly, I knew better.

The unfortunate aspect is that if Apple followed safe programming practices, and treated Safari as “just another application,” these compatibility issues should not have occurred, especially when the application itself wasn’t running.

I’ve not done the forensics, but it seems a reasonable guess that the Safari 3 beta installer replaced some shared libraries or altered the network stack in some way… which is bad, bad, bad. Applications shouldn’t be able to affect the operating system and its shared libraries. That type of naughty behavior is one of my biggest beefs with Microsoft (whose installers for products like Windows Media Player, Internet Explorer and Office replace key Windows DLLs), and I’m disappointed to think that Apple may have fallen into that trap.