Reasons I cannot use Safari

Reasons I cannot use Safari

Major Issues

  • I can’t make it so that a normal click on a link opens in a new tab. In Firefox I have every link open in a new tab behind my current tab.
  • Floating window search box
  • No incremental search
  • Only one search engine built in
  • Lack of useful plugins (most are 3rd party hacks 1)
  • Aqua widgets make web surfing a painful experience 1 2
  • Not cross-platform
  • Poor bookmark import
  • Close buttons on every tab. Not a big deal; I deal with this in Adium and Colloquy but when you’ve gotten so used to the tab closing button being in the same place all the time, using Safari’s system is tiresome at best.
  • (Had a stupid 60-second timeout bug that persisted for at least a year) Fixed in 10.3.6
  • No Ctrl+Z (undo) in form fields
  • There is a bug in safari where if you are typing something long in a textarea and you’re essentially scrolled to the bottom of the field and you switch to another tab and come back, Safari will have placed your cursor back at the top of the textarea. I do a lot of forum posting and this is more aggravating than you can imagine.
  • Can’t search your bookmarks
  • Can’t search your history

Minor Issues

  • WTF is up with that “View” menu??
  • No syntax highlighted “View Source” (although I do like how Safari’s view source window refreshes when you refresh its associated browser window).
  • Modal bookmark view. I’m not quite sure what they were thinking they were accomplishing when they invented this. I cannot simultaneously look at my bookmarks and something in a tab without opening up a brand new browser window (I am a single browser window type of person).
  • No image scaling when viewing images that don’t fit in the browser window (even IE6 has this one! :) )
  • A button that duals as reload/stop. A neat idea, but it causes problems more often than it saves space on the toolbar.
  • No support for white-listing domains for pop-up blocking/blocking images and no fine-grained control of Javascript restrictions, its either On or Off with Safari. You can choose to only turn off the annoying stuff if you want in Firefox.

Mac Users often bring up a few things they don’t like about Firefox:

  • A hidden floating window that persisted for a while that showed up on dual-monitor machines when you Exposéd all your windows. Fixed for months
  • Ctrl+M doesn’t minimize the application Fixed for Weeks
  • Doesn’t use Aqua widgets,services,blah blah. Platform specific integration was never planned for 1.0. This is a feature complete release. Now that 1.0 is out of the way, platform specific enhancements will begin to work their ways into the branch. I’m not sure how I feel about using Aqua widgets in the browser, seeing as how they don’t comply to most web-standards (you can’t really style them which can be argued as something necessary or REALLY bad), but if they do it in a way that works well/can be disabled then I can handle it ;)
  • Integration of services? I can’t really think of one I’d ever use that much beyond spell checking and I really only find myself needing that once or twice a month, but I can see how someone might need spell check or some of the other services (I never anything besides spelling, personally)

Hopefully some of those will be fixed in whatever version of Safari comes with 10.4, but I seriously cannot see it pulling me away from Firefox. If anything its better than IE for OS X ;)