After my earlier post, and after my exam, I installed Safari to check it out. I must say, I am impressed by the rendering speed. It does come pretty close when you modify your Firefox to render a bit faster (Firefox has a paint delay to wait for more data first before actually drawing the page, it seems Safari doesn’t do this).
However, I am a bit disgruntled by a few things. For one, why doesn’t Apple feel the need to follow Windows UI guidelines? True, they moved the menu bar inside the window, but that seems to be the only visible change. It looks just like it belongs on the Mac. Probably good reason for it (so then you instantly recognise it when you go through your computer shop), but still if Microsoft can be bothered, then surely Apple can.
My bookmarks menu doesn’t appear to show me all my bookmarks, just some. What the criteria is I do not know. Annoyingly, the bookmark browser loads up in the same tab that I’m surfing in. Sure, I may be surfing away, but what if I just want to open up another bookmark in the background while I finish reading the current page? If I click the bookmark browser icon again, it reloads the page. I’d hate to be a 56k user. Tabs are indistinguishable from one another, except for the text which is gray, on gray.
By default, there is no status bar, which I have some issues with. In Opera, it doesn’t have a status bar but you can easily hover over links to see where you are going. In Safari, no such thing. Mozilla had planned turning off the status bar by default, but shelved it citing security worries - which I fully agree with. Sure, people probably don’t compare address, but there are people that probably do. The status bar doubles in annoyance, once you turn it on, it is a really thin bar. Just thin enough to fit the text, which once again is gray and on a gray background. I thought Apple were masters at UI? Why do they fail so badly with this?
There doesn’t seem to be a thing called a “tool tip” in Apple land. I mouse over the little orange arrow figuring out what it does, but the developers seemed to have taken a “leap-of-faith” approach by not telling me anything about it. Yes, it’s called “snap back,” but what to?
Close buttons are to the left, which in Windows land is the wrong side. Middle-clicking seems a bit hit-and-miss. For example, I can middle-click a link on a page to open a new tab, but can’t middle click a bookmark to open that on a new tab. Dragging a button from the bookmarks toolbar onto my tab bar doesn’t open it in a new tab (or the current one) - it deletes it! There is no new tab button and you can’t double-click the tab bar to open a new one. It also seems very hit and miss when dragging. Sometimes it doesn’t quite get when I am moving the position of something and actually moving something off the bar.
Mentioning close buttons, can someone tell Apple about Fitts’ Law? In Windows 95, it had broken it with the close button as you moved your mouse right to the edge and clicked yet it didn’t do anything. Same with the Start button. These days, you can fling your mouse in both corners and be guaranteed to hit the close and Start button. Not in Safari! Due to the nicely rounded corners, your click actually affects the window below! I’ve had this problem in iTunes too. It’s highly annoying.
That’s a bit off my chest. The cool things - you can actually drag tabs out of the window and into their own. Mozilla have been working on this for Firefox, I don’t think very hard enough though. And, ummm. I guess I haven’t had a long enough play around. Maybe they’ll improve it in the future, maybe they’ll just stick to the same formula they used on Mac OS X. Thing is, I don’t think that will work. Safari is a Mac app through-and-through and that doesn’t transfer well. iTunes worked, it was a media player, they always tend to break UI guidelines and no one cares. A web browser is a different beast.
At least Mozilla can take the effort to make sure their apps follow at least some of the guidelines on each OS - in Firefox on Windows the Options appears under Tools, but on the others it appears as Preferences under the Edit menu. They also took the time to make a separate Mac OS X skin for Firefox 1.0. Do I sense ulterior motives?
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