xiven.com stating the blatantly obvious since 2002

The Fourth Horseman - part II

I played about a bit with Safari for Windows and started to find the UI to be somewhat annoying. As the UI is usually the thing that makes or breaks a browser for me (aside from standards support of course) I just thought I'd list my pet peeves with Safari.

• Safari's installer puts its icon in the root level of the Start Menu. Why do some developers have the audacity to think that their application is *that* important that it deserves to not be in a subfolder (Microsoft and Adobe are equally guilty of this)? Ok, I'll retract this one - see comments.
• Totally non-standard UI for the operating system it's running under. I'm rarely forgiving of applications whose developers think that following the operating system UI conventions is just an inconvenience. It should at the very least have a standard looking window frame, titlebar and menubar.
• Under Windows, clicking on the currently focussed application's entry in the taskbar should minimize that application. Doesn't work for Safari. Also, if you maximize the window, minimize it, and then click on it in the taskbar, it'll restore it to a non-maximized state.
• Custom blurry-font system that looks nowhere near as nice as Windows' built-in font smoothing.
• Close buttons on the left side of the tabs on a Windows application? Are they crazy?
• Double-click tab strip to open new tab? Nope. Ok, how about a "new tab" button instead? Nope.
• Middle-click open tab to close it? Nope.
• Is there any way to find out what the weird-looking buttons on the toolbar do without actually clicking them? Tooltips perhaps? Seems not. Some kind of hover feedback on the buttons would be nice too.
• Speaking of tooltips, seems like the title="" attribute has no effect in Safari.

Hopefully the UI is still a work in progress and Apple's final release of Safari for Windows will resolve many of these.

Also found a couple of non-UI issues:

• Digest Authentication appears to be very broken.
• On some pages, large sections of content appear to be completely missing.

I'm sure these will also be resolved in due time.

Posted: 2007-06-29 07:52:49 UTC by Xiven | Cross-references (0) | Comments (5)

The Fourth Horseman

Apple has released a beta of Safari for Windows!

Of course the first question I needed answering was: does it cope with Voidwars? The answer is a resounding yes. Yay!

For web developers on the Windows platform the release of Safari is of course great news, as it's finally possible to test compatibility without owning a Mac (and of course more developers testing their websites on Safari is good news for Apple).

(Yes I am of course aware that for the most part it essentially uses the same rendering engine as Konqueror)

Posted: 2007-06-12 00:43:03 UTC by Xiven | Cross-references (0) | Comments (0)