The iOS 6 Review: Maps Thoroughly Investigated and More
by Brian Klug & Saumitra Bhagwat on September 19, 2012 2:21 PM ESTMobile Safari
There are really only a few things that a smartphone OS needs to do right. Messaging (SMS and email), 3rd party applications (with a marketplace), PIM (personal information management – calendar, contacts, etc), and finally inclusion of a decent web browser. This last section is devoted to the iOS 6 improvements to Safari.
With iOS 6, Apple hasn’t dramatically changed anything but (you guessed it), made some tweaks. First is the inclusion of a full screen mode for landscape.
(Left) New fullscreen button at bottom right, (Right), Full screen view for Safari in iOS 6
If you rotate into landscape, there’s a new full screen icon which appears. Tap it and boom you’re given a full screen browsing experience without the loss of status bar and bottom bar. Tapping again in full screen mode brings up the toggle to switch back into windowed mode.
The other new feature is inclusion of an offline reading mode. Tapping on the send/action button lets you send the current page to an offline cache. I have no doubt this leverages some of the reading view backend. There’s a progress indicator under the bookmarks icon while the device is caching pages for reading offline, and it continues on into the background. Going in that menu brings you to another category with a list of what all you’ve made offline that has and hasn’t been read yet.
Currently open on the desktop
Another feature is iCloud tabs, which as the name suggests syncs open tabs across devices with iCloud logins. At some level this brings MobileSafari back up to parity with the equivalent feature in Chrome (synced tabs).
JavaScript Performance
This section wouldn’t be complete without mention of the speedups made to Nitro for MobileSafari, which is Apple’s JavaScript JIT engine which works for ARMv7. I tested the iPhone 4 and 4S on iOS 5.1.1 and iOS 6 GM and saw around a 10% and 30% improvement, respectively. I’m not entirely sure why there’s such a discrepancy between the two, however it’s possible that the new Nitro sends things off to multiple threads more effectively.
| iOS 5.1.1 versus iOS 6 GM | ||||||||
| Device | iOS Version | Sunspider 0.9.1 | Browsermark | HTML5test.com | css3test.com | |||
| iPhone 4 | iOS 5.1.1 | 3553.1 | 52557.0 | 324+9b | 459 of 946, 221 | |||
| iOS 6 GM | 3358.8 | 57351.0 | 360+9b | 498 of 946, 221 | ||||
| iPhone 4S | iOS 5.1.1 | 2242.9 | 86062.0 | N/A | N/A | |||
| iOS 6 GM | 1716.0 | 109775.0 | N/A | N/A | ||||
There’s also a nice jump in HTML5 feature support, which I’m always a fan of seeing. The user agent string in iOS 6 GM now reports webkit 536.26 alongside safari version 8536.25.
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melgross - Wednesday, September 19, 2012 - link
That's not actually true. The only thing you're limited to buying from Apple is apps. Everything else can be bought elsewhere and read, or played. That's true for books, music, video of any kind, including Tv shows and movies, PDF's, etc.reuthermonkey1 - Thursday, September 20, 2012 - link
Assuming that Apple continues to allow those 3rd party apps to exist in their App Store...GSRennie - Wednesday, September 19, 2012 - link
I would rather buy Apps from the Apple Store and have some confidence that the products have been reviewed for functionality and are virus-free. I gave up on Windows years ago after adding up the time I was spending on malware control using the mix of products that you seemed to need to do a complete job. Add to that the item and money spent to get rid of viruses on various family computers (the kids weren't as cautious as I was). No doubt the Windows world is much more secure these days but I'm not going back. I run the occasional Windows program on Parallels on a laptop (with virus protection). Other than Apps for iPhones, iPads, iPods (all Apple devices), I don't see what outside content I'm blocked from getting by Apple. I can buy any software I can run on OSX and run any Windows software using Boot Camp and a Windows installation or Windows emulation options. As to the agency pricing model Apple and its partner publishers were pushing for textbooks, lets wait for a court ruling on whether that amounts to collusive price fixing. Apple wasn't setting the prices, and the publishers (with some considerable support from authors) were making the case they needed more revenue than derived from Amazon discounted sales to survive. I'm not trying to take sides on that issue until I hear more on the merits of both positions.Sufo - Thursday, September 20, 2012 - link
lol, instead of teaching your kids how to not bork a computer you simply ran away from the problem. If you can afford a mac, you could have afforded to buy them their own shitty laptop, which they could infect to the point of failure and then learn how to deal with the mess themselves... or not. Seems the typical mac user is a lazy parent as well as user!robinthakur - Thursday, September 20, 2012 - link
I think we are coming to the point where a computer should not be easily bork-able because it is essentially just an appliance which is reliable and easy to operate. This means things like OS drives and system files should be hidden to end users, but this would drive us technical types round the bend.The solution to most infections is simply to reinstall and restore/repoint data, and buying them a shitty laptop which may get infected constantly will simply waste time that they could otherqwise spend doing something more useful. Unless you teach your kids how to reinstall Windows also, that's a lot of wasted hours.
Also quite a bit of how you don't get infected is not necessarily teachable, which I realised recently trying to explain it to someone les technical. I was downloading a link from Zdnet and on the page there were loads of ads and download managers that looked like the download button but when you clicked them they tried to install some stupid software. The actual download link was fairly hidden. This and the dangers of pop ups/cookies/add-ins is not an easy subject to teach, its something we have learnewd and now take for granted.
If my Windows 7 or 8 pc (self-built I might add) kept getting infected with malware in a way which was difficult to defend against using the standard approaches, I would 100% look at moving to another infrastructure. Not everybody has the knowledge or time to deal with the problem as we would. It does not denote laziness, simply different priorities than you own. If a curated app store does get around the danger of malware from unsafe install locations, it's not surprising that its incredibly popular with regular users and is now being adapted by most of the companies out there. Even Android only trusts known safe download locations by default.
steven75 - Tuesday, September 25, 2012 - link
Ah the classic "blame the user" mindset instead of the fact that Microsoft Windows is a perilous platform to use when it comes to security.MykeM - Thursday, September 20, 2012 - link
The choice to shop where goods are sold cheaply is all good but it's not without downfall. But as someone pointed out your fury is bit misguided. With the exception of Apps, I can load onto my iPhone movies, books and songs that I got elsewhere. iTunes doesn't differentiate from items bought from its store or downloaded off Google Play- as long the format is compatible.The irony to finding cheaper price elsewhere is that media whether it's from Google Play, Amazon or iTunes, are priced equally. So there's hardly any truth in that argument.
crankerchick - Thursday, September 20, 2012 - link
Your last statement hasn't quite been my experience, at least on the content I purchase. I do don't do a lot of video purchases, but the few I have purchased have generally been cheaper on Amazon. I also routinely find music to be cheaper on Amazon, along with more specials to be had.Also, Apple may allow you to install media purchased from other sources, but it sure doesn't make such options a desired thing to do. Unsupported media formats require third party apps (for a price) along with the archaic way of transferring that content one-by-one, app by by, using iTunes, instead of allowing a true sync, as with supported content.
It is infinitely easier on Android to put the content you want on your device and consume it as you desire.
Again, not nitpicking, as your statements are accurate, but just point out that while Apple may "allow" something, they certainly don't make those "allowed" things something appealing to do.
Petri - Tuesday, September 25, 2012 - link
I have a mac and an iphone and regularly buy content from Amazon - you're right, it is generally cheaper than itunes. It's also very easy to do, since Amazon supply a downloader for the mac which neatly places all your downloaded content directly in iTunes for you.Of course once the content's in itunes, it syncs with the iphone as easily as anything else does.
Stas - Sunday, September 23, 2012 - link
What a can of worms that is. People are surprisingly easily manipulated. The pen is built around them, and they don't notice or care. Thus the the term - iSheep. But it's our nature, I suppose; not inherent to just iFans. Look at our country and "our" government...