One week of Safari
One week ago1, I decided to give Safari 3 a shot at becoming my primary browser, as I had planned. As great as Firefox 3 is, a lot of people love Safari a lot, and Firefox does have some rough edges. I was able to enjoy enjoy some of its unique features, but two main things kept me from being able to ditch Firefox.
Obviously the big win for Safari is its aesthetics. The theme is consistent with itself and the operating system. For example, Safari gets OS X 10.5′s context menus with their (shoddily) rounded corners and (beautifully) blurred transparent background.
Safari’s Find feature is great, although it is missing one thing from Firefox. When your term is not being found, Firefox’s search field turns red and has an audio cue with each keypress, whereas Safari just puts up a little grey label “Not found”. This makes the Firefox one a bit quicker to use, if less zen-like.
Overall, Safari was more stable than Firefox, although its lack of Tab Restore meant that when things did go bad, they went really bad. The speed was good2, although my machine is fast enough that my connection is generally the limiting factor in either browser.
The most painful part of Safari, for me, is the location bar. This is the command line of the browser. To relegate it to only accepting URLs in 2008 is criminal. It’s akin to what only accepting URLs qualified with “http://” was in 1998: behind the times. The Firefox location bar accepts four kinds of input: URLs, keyword searches, jump-to-first-Google-result, and full-text as-you-type search into your recent browsing history. Over time I’ve kept less bookmarks and remembered less URLs, and just relied on these features to get where I’m going dead fast. I have some thoughts about this for a later article, but all in all they were painfully missed.
The second most lacking thing about Safari is its tab handling. If you open more than a dozen or so tabs, they overflow into a dropdown. This isn’t tragic, and used to be how Firefox works. Once it overflows, though, it’s very difficult work within your mess, or even clean it up. Without icons on the tabs or the ability to scroll through them, they’re hard to juggle. You can’t even see the active tab if it’s one of the latecomer overflowed tabs, which it’s likely to be. This motivated me to be more aggressive in closing tabs, but in Safari you can’t un-close a tab, which can hurt pretty bad. Especially when your open tabs can represent to-do or to-read items, it sucks to lose one by accident.
In between the elementary location bar and simplistic tab handling, Safari just couldn’t keep pace with me. That said, I don’t think it needs to be as featureful as Firefox to be the better browser. I could survive without a lot of the nifty things Firefox has3, but a browser has to be able to get you places quick and handle open tabs deftly.
- Not including my one week of computerlessness for visiting family. [↩]
- One of the design issues people mention about Antipode is that scrolling with the transparent footer eats CPU cycles. In my test, Safari took less CPU to scroll with the mouse wheel than Firefox did, but way more than Firefox when scrolling by dragging the scroll bar. Intersting. [↩]
- Although I must say: where the heck is Safari’s full page zoom? Even IE has this now. For those who haven’t tried it out yet, it’s a lot more useful that I expected, albeit more so when I don’t have my glasses on. [↩]
Jan 3 2008
9:02 am
for me, the ugliness, lack of polish, performance problems and fundamental bugs that simply shouldn’t exist in Firefox more than make up for it being able to do a few things in the location bar that Safari can’t.
Oh, and I greatly prefer “Not found” to red. What does red mean? What is this, a 1970s science fiction movie? :)
Jan 3 2008
12:28 pm
Red is noticable. It gives you feedback about an error. It’s not very Apple of course; a subtle flash, a beep, the appearance of an icon… anything more noticeable than two little grey words appearing in a corner could work.
If you want to see ugliness, lack of polish, and fundamental bugs you should try The Gimp. I’ve been trying to use it as a Photoshop replacement this week, and the lack of polish actually made it very hard to be productive, rather than just reducing the zen of the product. I mean, sure control-c instead of command-c works in theory, but the cognitive pain is too much when you’re switching between other apps that use command-c.
Jan 3 2008
4:32 pm
You can restore tabs through History-> Reopen all windows from last session
Jan 7 2008
12:42 pm
I have no problem with Safari’s “not found” feedback, because instead of being obnoxiously bold Apple instead wisely chose to improve the “found” feedback to the point that you can’t possibly miss it. Firefox is still far too subtle about this.
Jan 7 2008
12:44 pm
Oh, and where’s Firefox’s full page zoom? I found Zoom In and Zoom Out, but that’s not the same thing at all. I want single key zoom out, single click zoom in.
Jan 7 2008
3:34 pm
I totally agree that bolder found feedback would be good, but that bold not found feedback is also important. One isn’t a replacement for the other.
Firefox 3 (betas and trunk) have full page zoom, overriding the text zoom from Firefox 2 on Command + and Command -.
Jan 8 2008
2:58 pm
I disagree slightly on not found feedback. It would be fine if a way was found to do it right, but the way Firefox currently does it is not an advantage over Safari, and simply ugly.
I have tried the “full page zoom” you are talking about. It’s useful, but I do not consider that a full page zoom. It is a zoom, but “full page” to me means it’s a single click or keystroke to a zoom level that shows the entire page. That would be a killer feature and one that would make me switch permanently to Firefox (if the horribly slow smooth scrolling was fixed).
Jan 8 2008
7:11 pm
Well, the not found feedback makes me stop typing and go back to work as soon as I’ve typed a prefix that isn’t found, rather than typing my whole phrase and noticing it’s not found, so there is at least some objective advantage, even if it isn’t pretty.
I can see why you would find the term “Full Page Zoom” misleading in that way. Ideally sites are engineered in such a way that you wouldn’t need to see the whole page at once on a normal monitor, but since using the iPod touch I can see how it could be useful.
Mar 3 2008
9:14 pm
I’d just like to mention that the Safari plugin Saft fixes almost all of these problems and improves several other things about the browser. I can’t stand using Firefox and not having native Cocoa text boxes and interface behavior. I have so many useful key combinations set up in Cocoa text entry that I’ve gravitated away from anything that implements its own text entry behavior.
What I would really like to see in Safari is the level of keyboard control that Opera gives. I don’t like being forced to use the mouse.
Mar 4 2008
2:21 am
Thanks for the tip Dazmax, I’ll have to check that out.
Firefox 3 now has Cocoa UI controls, but they don’t always look “exactly right(tm)”.