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Flogging a dead browser

  • Mar. 21st, 2007 at 1:58 PM
tintype
henrylyne
I like that the Safari web browser is built on the KHTML rendering engine, but that's where my love for it ends. It's not a popular browser, and the only thing that seems to be keeping it afloat is Apple's support for it. It's not a good browser to develop for, there are things you just can't do with javascript in Safari, that you can do with the other popular browsers.

I could see Safari eventually catching up to the rest, but they have a lot of ground to cover. And they would need to get their users to upgrade quickly. I for one don't think it's a browser worth supporting.

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Comments

( 10 comments — Leave a comment )
burr86
Mar. 21st, 2007 10:19 pm (UTC)
It doesn't even support <label> tags, which drives me crazy.
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henrylyne
Mar. 21st, 2007 10:30 pm (UTC)
There is something ugly about label tags. I almost think there should be a CSS way of associating a page element with another instead of something that looks and feels HTML 1.0. That said, I do wish Safari supported label tags.
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brad
Mar. 21st, 2007 11:20 pm (UTC)
They do in latest release.
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rahaeli
Mar. 21st, 2007 10:24 pm (UTC)
I will confess that I am a total aesthetics whore: I use Safari rather than Firefox because Safari just looks cleaner and crisper. FF's colors and rendering just look so dirty and muddy to me -- even white isn't white, it's sort of ecru.
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burr86
Mar. 21st, 2007 10:26 pm (UTC)
+1, at least on a Mac. I like it FF better than the others on Windows.
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henrylyne
Mar. 21st, 2007 10:27 pm (UTC)
It does have pretty form buttons.
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rahaeli
Mar. 21st, 2007 10:33 pm (UTC)
The colors and edging are just -- crisper, too. It's hard to explain without resorting to woo-woo handwaving, but Safari just feels more aesthetically clean.

Annoying as fuck that it doesn't support stuff, yeah, and I'm sick of having to keep another browser around just to use sites that don't support Safari -- but using FF for any length of time makes my eyeballs feel gritty.
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matthew
Mar. 21st, 2007 10:48 pm (UTC)
I have several gripes with FF, but my main one is this:

Double click some plain text in the body of a page and then drag. Now do the same in the location bar. Note how in the location bar it selects by word whereas in the body it does the first selects by word and then drags by letter. Everything else on my mac works like the location bar.

Inconsistent user interfaces are evil.
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henrylyne
Mar. 21st, 2007 10:54 pm (UTC)
I have noticed that behavior on Firefox's Location bar. Click in the Location field and it highlights the whole thing. Double click after that and it hightlights a word. Now if you want to highlight the whole URL you need to triple-click. It works, but it has never felt intuitive to me.
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janinedog
Mar. 21st, 2007 11:01 pm (UTC)
Maybe I'm used to it, but I like that behavior. IE, on the other hand, doesn't let me double-click (or any click) to select a word at all. It either selects the whole thing, or nothing. Since I often change just one part of a URL, I like being able to double-click a part and change it quickly. Clicking and dragging to select a portion takes too long. :P
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( 10 comments — Leave a comment )