I’m not a Safari switcher
So I hadn’t used safari for any significant period of time in the last year or so, but with Safari 3 all out and buzzing and Robb saying it was a better user experience I figured I’d give it another shot. DL’d the new version and ran it as my main browser (not for some dev work, though) for a couple days. The short answer is that I’m glad to be back on Firefox.
Here’s the thing, there’s a lot of nice things about Safari. The key bit I noticed was that it’s a hell of a lot snappier than Firefox. Let me be honest and say, I’m not a kind user to my browsers. At any given time I’ve got 10 or so browsers open each with a dozen or two tabs. I don’t know how it happens, it just does. Firefox, doesn’t love this - after a little while it starts slowing down… and slowing down.. creating a new tab or opening a new window starts taking time… and then getting to the point where you can type in the url bar starts taking time. With Safari that never happened. It was always snappy to do anything I wanted it to do - and I’m not talking about rendering - maybe it was faster maybe not - they all render fast enough for me. I wish FF had the quickness and footprint that Safari had.
It had a couple other niceties like the inline search feature. It really highlights the word you’re searching for, sometimes in Firefox I have to hunt around for the word it found. Maybe a couple other good touches, but I found many small things that really ruined the experience for me. I’m not even talking about developer-y things but general UI issues.
First off is the old stop/refresh button. I don’t know why they decided to make the stop button an X that looks just like the + bookmark button right next to it. Ugh, that’s annoying. I’m always hitting the wrong one. And the progress URL bar? I hate that, I tend to think it looks like it’s highlighted so I should be able to type in a new url. Nope… they just decided to overload that space with an extra indicator. (UPDATE: fortunately, I just discovered (thanks to daringfireball) that you can change this behaviour to a pie chart! Nice.)
Tabs? They are draggable which is nice, but first off they have a dark grey background with slightly darker grey writing, so it’s difficult to read the tabs. Then they don’t put favicons in the tab so it’s even more difficult to tell apart. And I so hate putting the close tab right on the tab itself (instead of a single close button all the way to the right), I’m constantly closing tabs I don’t mean too. That last one’s a personal preference since I know crazy people who prefer it this way but in FF you can choose which you want.
It also lacks Firefox’s live RSS feed which I really love. Being able to drop down a menu with all the rss headlines off the toolbar is really nice. It makes it super easy to check and see if any particular site has updated something recently. What else, oh right, you can’t increase/decrease font size with the scrollwheel.
As for browser compatibility. Most sites I’ve been to work just fine, Safari did have an issue with a few (this very blog included). The most annoying one was Yodlee since Safari wouldn’t render the page at all. But, if that were the only problem it would not be enough to prevent me from using it.
That’s the list from a couple days of usage. Nothing major, nothing technically stunning, just a lot of little niggles that, to me at least, make Firefox a lot more useful. And that’s just for general browsing, start adding extensions like Web Developer and Tamper Data and there’s no question about switching… (although, to be honest I haven’t really explored Drosera at all - but that’s just javascript, nothing like the glory of Web Developer).
If Apple devotes a lot of engineering resources to Safari (as they most likely will) this could change quickly, but for now it is no contest. Firefox is easily the way to go for me.
June 20th, 2007 at 8:32 pm
so. I know I’m weird, but I run Safari with ALL the bars hidden except status and tab, so I just see the title bar, the tabs and the page. On the address bar I *always* get rid of all the widgets except the address and back buttons. When I need the address bar I just hit command-L to make it appear to grab the url or type one in.
I use quicksilver triggers to add bookmarks to delicious and to add rss feeds to google reader and web archives to DevonThink with a single keystroke. No chrome and everything is behind a keystroke or quicksilver action. For searching and research I use the DevonAgent browser as it has a lot of interesting features. Also: I run UNO against my system to convert all brushed metal everything (even iTunes) into the Unified bar look. It just changes some interface nib settings to achieve this and causes no issues that I’ve ever seen (ie it is not and APE or a hack, just a parameter change.) This fixes the tabs so they are more legible to me. I’m pleased with the lack of famicons, but like I said, I’m weird…. I also use the Universal Access PrefPane to swith the system to monochrome and jack the contrast up a couple of notches when I’m working hard sometimes.
On my 1024×768 screens I use a hack called MaxZoom that can fullscreen, edge to edge any cocoa window (like Safari, but not FF.) I like to write this way with Pages or Mellel with the zoom set to match the page width with the screen width.
I enjoy Textmate’s inputManager widget that lets me open and edit any cocoa textarea (mail, safari, etc) in TM with a keystroke. When I’m done I save and close the textmate window and everything pops back into Safari. I love that.
I use MailPlane for my gmail access which gets rid of the one huge gripe I’ve always had: you can’t tab to the send button and hit return to send a message with gmail and the stock safari… MailPlane fixes that nicely with normal command-key combos for just about any gmail function.
I tend to agree about the missing Safari developer plugins… they are just not there. But I don’t develop for the web. :) But my point is that I don’t like default configs for most things… they are always annoying and filled with buttons I never use (like a button for home, or add bookmark… I’d never in a million years use those.)
June 20th, 2007 at 8:34 pm
MegaZoomer, not MaxZoom. oops.
June 20th, 2007 at 11:28 pm
June 20th, 2007 at 11:29 pm
hmmm. filtered that html. example: http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1041/578725905_467601ee1b_o.jpg
June 22nd, 2007 at 7:44 am
wow! That is way harder core than me. If I had the drive I’d probably give some of those a shot - but since there’s still no web developer it prolly ends up not being worth it fo’ me. I suspect, though, as the iPhone hits the streets and Safari on windows matures that there will start being a lot more safari plugins before long. Then we’ll have to revisit the subject. :)
June 17th, 2008 at 2:55 pm
[...] you can not live with out Tamper Data, Web Developer and Firebug. During some dark FF2 days I tried to switch to Safari but simply could not get work done without those [...]