boxee is an incredible media center application.

Over the past few weeks, there’s been a fair amount of discussion surrounding the situation between media center application boxee and video streaming service Hulu. When boxee first disclosed that Hulu’s “content providers” requested to be removed from boxee, I was disappointed from a viewer’s standpoint, although I can understand both sides. The networks backing Hulu do still depend on a demand for cable, and as boxee has gained popularity, there’s been a number of movements suggesting that people ditch their cable service.

But it’s still relatively easy to view Hulu on the big screen. Just connect a computer to an HDTV, open up Hulu in a browser, and enter full screen. boxee merely simplifies that process by a few steps – and what’s to say that boxee will always be used in a home theater context? Plus, Hulu is also accessible in another media center application, Plex. If the content providers are so concerned about Hulu’s usage, why have they not targeted Plex?

Hulu's return to boxee.

A couple days ago, boxee announced that Hulu would return via RSS feeds. Soon after that announcement, Hulu proceeded to block access and display a “Content Unavailable” message. It’s shaping out to be a back-and-forth effort between the two – Hulu status notifications are now integrated in boxee, and the team has opened a new Twitter account, @ishuluonboxee.

I’m definitely pulling for boxee on this one. I admire their dedication to the user; they’re not just backing down in fear of a lawsuit.

Avner, you guys rock. Keep doing what you’re doing, and best of luck.

One of my desktop wallpapers is centered around a quote from Jeffrey Zeldman: “To Hell With Bad Browsers”. I couldn’t agree more; a good browser is the first line of defense against a negative online experience. In the past year, we’ve been faced with a number of browsers to validate – Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari, and a few others like Lunascape and Flock.

Notice that I didn’t include Internet Explorer in that list.

Browser Benchmarks

Upon Tuesday’s beta release of Safari 4, I was excited to see what Apple had to bring to the table. On the performance side, I couldn’t be happier with the result. It was benchmarked by CNET, and was found to be the the top performer against Minefield, Chrome, Firefox, Opera, and Internet Explorer. Like its predecessor, it also passed Acid3 testing. I could really feel the speed difference when browsing – there was virtually no wait time to load a page, even over WiFi. Doesn’t get much better than that.

The aesthetics are nice, but I don't see myself using Top Sites too often.

I wasn’t a huge fan of the UI changes, though. From your average end-user’s perspective, Top Sites and Cover Flow does accomplish its aim: a simple, graphical representation of web activity. But as a power user, I’m all about functionality. I don’t really need to see a 3-D panorama of the sites I visit most; I know what sites do it for me. Although, looking at Apple’s Safari page does make me consider reverting my opinion, because, yes – it does look cool.

But the two biggest issues with the UI lie in tabs and the address bar.

Tabs on Top isn’t an awful concept, but the implementation is somewhat lacking. The furthermost left tab doesn’t blend well with the rest of the window and looks very rough. Note that Apple does not show this left tab on their site.

Not an overly clean look.

I’d also like to see the return of the classic “address/loading bar in one”. While Apple’s angle might be that Safari doesn’t have a long enough loading time to justify a progress indicator, Cupertino can’t control every individual’s connection, and therefore the experience will differ.

The good news is that there’s some fixes for those of us who want to tweak the settings a bit. For Mac OS X, you can install a ZIP from this site and configure features directly from Safari’s application menu. On Windows, just open up com.apple.Safari.plist (located in C:\Documents and Settings\User\Application Data\Apple Computer\Preferences), and change the YES or NO located next to these strings:

DebugSafari4TabBarIsOnTop

DebugSafari4IncludeToolbarRedesign

DebugSafari4IncludeGoogleSuggest

DebugSafari4IncludeFancyURLCompletionList

DebugSafari4IncludeTopSites

DebugSafari4LoadProgressStyle

DebugSafari4IncludeFlowViewInBookmarksView

Despite a few quirks, I was quite pleased with Safari 4. Keep in mind that this is still a beta, and that revisions are forthcoming.  I’ll be interested to see the final release; hopefully the small things that hold it back from perfection will be resolved.