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January 7, 2003

safari

scene from Jungle Hunt I just spent a few minutes trying out Apple’s new web browser, Safari. It’s fast, the interface is clean and elegant, and it blocks pop-ups, but the rendering engine is distressingly buggy. I don’t care for it. A new browser with a (more or less) new rendering engine brings with it an entirely new and vexing set of quirks, bugs, and idiosyncrasies for web authors to discover, catalog, and work around. I especially don’t care for that. (I’m thinking specifically of the trouble I just had getting the comments display code here to work in IE6; it worked in Mozilla on the first try. More pertinent to Safari, though, I’ve found that the links on the right side of remake/remodel’s front page are unclickable in Safari unless the DOCTYPE declaration is removed from the page source. Even then, Safari renders the sidebar incorrectly.)

Read a review of Safari by a web designer, and read another review by one of the authors of Movable Type.

Incidentally, if you use Windows or Linux, consider giving Phoenix a try. It’s only at version 0.5, but I’ve been using it as my default browser for quite some time, and would never consider going back to Internet Explorer.

I like it just fine.

posted at 4:30 PM | nerdy

comments

  1. a speedy browser for OS X was badly needed; as i have yet to find a non-buggy browser (chimera is great, but the unusual rendering on some of my favorite pages had me go back to IE) i may happily stick with buggy safari as my home browser. i know it only means a new pain for designers, especially in its beta state, but as a home user, i appreciate its look + speed, and clicking on the little bug.

    posted by chomi on January 8, 2003 9:28 AM

  2. It’s telling that they put that little bug there, isn’t it? I used it to submit a bug report yesterday, in fact.

    posted by jacob on January 8, 2003 9:50 AM

  3. My complaints are just short-term complaints, though. In the long run, once the browser has been through a few more releases, it’ll be a good thing.

    posted by jacob on January 8, 2003 11:40 AM

  4. i dig the dhtml comments, j. i agree with your assessment of safari but i also consider more browsers a good thing. mozilla seems like the natural core for an apple browser in many ways but the code base is anything but light. html has been lauded for being elegant and at least trying to be standards compliant. it only claims to support html 4 and it does seem to do that. it starts to choke on transitional and falls apart when you venture in to xhtml territory. the bug-reporting tool should, if they pay attention at the receiving end, accelerate the development. i’m pretty confident that it will ultimately raise the browser bar (which is more than i can say for either moz/ns or ie in the past few years). i do take issue with the brushed metal appearance of the browser, though. apple has developed a bad habit of breaking their own rules. (see http://developer.apple.com/techpubs/macosx/Essentials/AquaHIGuidelines/AHIGWindows/Textured_Windows.html#CHDHHBGJ for details on this particular rule.) basically they tell developers to only use the brushed metal (textured) appearance on applications that either interact with or emulate a physical device. from the company that literally wrote the book on human interfaces it’s pretty disappointing.

    posted by gabe on January 8, 2003 4:06 PM

  5. that’s funny about the brushed metal look (microsoft breaks its UI rules all the time, but that’s less surprising). appearances aside, the interface has a lot of little touches that are subtle and nice (like the reload button that turns into a stop button) that I appreciate. the bug reporting button is in general a good idea, but it’s not going to be that productive for them if they end up with ten thousand poorly written bug reports to sort through.

    I think ultimately Safari is going to be a good browser, but a part of me feels that releasing a beta browser with an immature rendering engine with such fanfare amounts to browser pollution for web developers. like with every other browser, old releases of Safari are going to be floating around well after 1.0 is released. but I’m just rambling. that’s just the nature of these things, though. I could easily complain about browsers like Opera and Netscape Navigator, too, but they’re not interesting, and the fact that Apple wrote a browser is.

    and now it’s time to drink on the porch!

    posted by jacob on January 8, 2003 8:22 PM

  6. browser polution does suck but i’ll bet safari will be updated via software update. i’m also assuming the bug database is sorted by number of reports… so your site will be fixed first, then yahoo, then mine. if it’s not then you’ll be right.

    posted by gabe on January 8, 2003 9:15 PM

  7. well, they should fix my problem first, because it’s self-evident that i’m very important. also, i’m drunk right now , so i could easily embarrass a great number of people, and no one wants that, least of all Apple.

    posted by jacob on January 9, 2003 2:40 AM

  8. the chimera guy that apple hired is keeping notes on safari development here: http://www.mozillazine.org/weblogs/hyatt/ …looks like they’re addressing issues really fast.

    posted by gabe on January 9, 2003 9:32 AM

  9. okay, a year later, i think you mac people are right.

    posted by jacob on February 5, 2004 12:13 PM

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