things I dislike about Safari 4
I've been a Safari user for ages. I'm not a Firefox fan (just don't like the UI, plus the fact that it doesn't honour my Locations ( we use a proxy at work, but I don't use one at home) annoys me). I've tried various other browsers at various other points, but they've never been enough to make me want to give up Safari. But now might be the time. Here's my list of things I don't like about Safari 4:
- The reload button is moved! Why? This is still tripping me up.
- The new "loading" graphic in the address bar takes up space that could be used by an address, and doesn't actually give me any progress information. Progress information is useful in figuring out whether this particular site is down, or if there's a problem with my network.
- The tabs (which I'm glad are no longer in the title bar as they were in the Safari 4 beta) are a bit hard to see. They just run together, so they don't feel like tabs anymore. The current tab doesn't look very different than the inactive tabs.
- I miss the little X on each tab. I know it's there if I mouseover it, but I rarely close tabs via mouse. I mostly do it via cmd-W, so the lack of X combined with the lack of visual distinction for the tabs means I'm somewhat distrustful when I hit cmd-W to close a tab.
- The topsites page is quite ugly. I tried to use it, and put in the effort to customise it with the sites that I visit the most often, but gave up on it within a few days.
- When I'm entering a URL, the top site listed on the drop-down isn't accurate. It's okay if the top hit is, say, www.microsoft.com. But I never go to that website. When I start typing www.microsoft.com, it's always followed by /mac. When I start typing www.microsoft.com, it just gives me the top-level domain, not the /mac that I want to go to. It sometimes, but not always, shows up in the history below that.
- When I'm entering a URL, the history list is totally useless. It doesn't seem to be the most recent sites I've been to, nor is it the sites that I've visited the most often. For example, if I enter "www." right now, the history shows UPS (which I know I last visited on Wednesday to track a package), Macy's (last weekend), and American Express (Thursday). I've been to other sites that start with www since then, and I've definitely visited sites that start with www more often than those ones. Each of those are sites that I visit very infrequently on this computer.
- When you have more than one tab open, the loading spinner is on the tab itself. When you switch to that tab, the spinner moves from the tab to the address bar. On a slow-loading site, this is annoying because I'm watching the spinner to see if it's finally done, and sometimes I'll switch back to the tab before it's done loading to see how much of it is there. I've been faked out a couple of times because the site was partially downloaded and I didn't notice it wasn't complete because the loading indicator had moved.
Comments
Anonymous
July 08, 2009
clicking on a link with _blank in the target doesn't and cannot be set to open in a new tab, no matter what you do. It's brutal for any business application which inevitably opens tabs for new things you want to work on. Every other browser on the planet does this right, why can't Apple?Anonymous
July 08, 2009
You can force it to open in a new tab, but it requires twiddling a variable via the Terminal: http://www.tuaw.com/2008/09/08/terminal-tips-force-safari-to-open-all-links-in-new-tab/ I've had this set for ages in Safari 3, and I believe it's still working in Safari 4. I haven't noticed being forced into a new window when I want things to open in a new tab, at least.Anonymous
July 08, 2009
I'm with you on everything except Top Sites, Nadyne. I like the effect and the purpose and use it quite regularly. I usually prefer Firefox as my back up, but find that the new 3.5 takes for-ev-er and a day to launch on my Win machine at work. Haven't tried it at home on my PPC Mac.Anonymous
July 08, 2009
Just out of curiosity, for #4, why does it matter if there's no X on the tab bar if you already use the Cmd-W shortcut to close a tab? Aren't you viewing the website that you're closing the tab for already? #2 is annoying but the progress bar information seemed to always be a lie anyway. #5 I actually like fairly well. Giving me a good overview snapshot of what's been recently updated instead of having to open a bookmark that opens 10+ sites and manually having to go to each one. Sure I could use a RSS reader (and do) but there are some sites I go to whenever they are updated (i.e. the RSS feed isn't complete so I go ahead and click to the original site anyway). Chrome actually does a bunch of things right with their omni address bar.Anonymous
July 08, 2009
#4 matters because I often have several tabs open with nearly identical content, say when I'm searching for something or have several tabs open for reference. Since the tabs aren't very visually distinct right now, the little X gave me more indication that this was the selected tab and so I could close it. I like the idea of topsites more than I like the current implementation. The curvature is gratuitous and makes it difficult to figure out which site is which.Anonymous
July 10, 2009
I must say I disagree regarding #3... On my iMac 20" the current tab and the inactive tabs are clearly distinguished from each other as the inactive tabs are in a much darker colour. I do agree that the Topsites page is completely useless. I never use it and I can't dream up an idea why I would ever use it. I tried just now, just to have a second look at it - it took nearly five minutes to load on a 2,4GHz iMac Core2Duo!! Safari went beach ball on me... I'm not sure what to say about #7. Every time I enter a URL the history is accurate - spot on! Always!Anonymous
July 11, 2009
What I despise about Safari 4 is the same thing that I despise about Entourage 2008(2004/X). I cannot paste, or even create, complex HTML in an email message. Good Lord, even my iPhone can paste a web page into an email message, now. It's time for all to start rewriting the HTML guts of the programs, isn't it? The heck with Exchange connectivity. I'd rather have emails that can look like web pages, than Exchange server support. (Well, the ONLY thing good about Exchange servers is not getting winmail.dat files. But I don't have an Exchange account, so I have to put up with winmail.dat files, too.)Anonymous
July 13, 2009
There are dozens of themes for Firefox that greatly improve its looks. (takebacktheweb.org) You can get a progress bar (Safari 3 style, for example), close buttons on tabs and a nice awesomebar. (Hope I don't sound too much like another Fx nutjob trying to win somebody over)Anonymous
July 14, 2009
I know that Firefox is essentially infinitely customisable, and I honestly don't want to put in the effort to find all of the plug-ins and themes and so on to make it a reasonable experience. And I have absolutely no idea what an "awesomebar" is!Anonymous
July 17, 2009
The only issue that still trips me up - the reload button the right side. All other browsers have it on left, and I still move the cursor there. I like top sites probably the best. And it is much faster than previous incarnations.Anonymous
July 18, 2009
Like your blog but that proxy excuse about FF is about the lamest one I've heard this year. SystemProxy - systemproxy.mozdev.org makes FF act exactly like Safari does on Mac. period.Anonymous
July 18, 2009
That's great, but Safari works with no need for digging through plug-ins. I have pretty much zero desire to mess about with that. Why take the hassle of getting Firefox to be usable for me when there are options that work without the hassle?Anonymous
July 20, 2009
Shall we start a thread called "Things I dislike about messenger"? Nah, I don´t think so... I don´t have that much time to spend.Anonymous
July 22, 2009
I found the same shortcomings but also found Glims - http://www.machangout.com/ - that allows you to some extent customize the way Safari tabs behave. It also makes it a lot easier to use Bing as your default search engine :-)