I used Safari as my primary browser for a little over a week. Disclaimer: I was not a fan of Safari before this and have used Chimera/Camino as my primary browser for several years. This post has my notes from the experience.
The transition to Safari was pretty easy. LaunchBar already indexes my bookmarks, so I just had to set Safari as my default browser and those bookmarks (accessed via LaunchBar) now open in Safari. I had to enable the status bar as well.
- I finally took the time to find the keyboard shortcut to put focus in the search box: Cmd + Option + F. This key combination doesn’t work properly on the left side of my keyboard.
- Geesh, the
label
property still isn’t properly supported to check/uncheck a checkbox or radio button. - Oops, need to uncheck that “open safe files after downloading” options. Can’t believe that is checked by default.
- I see that the form element text-sizing is still non-standard:
- I think this is the only app I really use that has a metal interface. I may have to turn that off. Much better.
- I think Safari does render pages a little faster than Camino/Firefox. Hmm, seems to do worse with other pages though. All in all, I think it’s faster.
- Where is the ‘close Downloads window when downloads are complete’ setting?
- It seems like most of the “it should work this way” or “it should have this option” features are available for Safari if you’re willing to resort to 3rd party mods and add-ons. However, doing this on every machine I use is a real pain in the arse.
- This sucks:
- I really wish Safari was smart enough not to open new tabs in little pop-up windows that other web pages have spawned (note: Camino does this right).
- Spellchecking in text areas seems to
work
only intermittently, so I can’t rely on it. It’s a feature I’ve come to need badly too. 😉
- How annoying – I go to some effort to put the useful part of the page title at the beginning of the page for this very purpose and Safari chooses to use the end of the page title for the tab title instead:
Strange, seems to only happen on certain pages.
- The auto-complete behavior is really bugging me – it keeps auto-completing just a split second before I hit enter so that I go to the wrong place or enter the wrong information.
- Wow, it loaded a rather large page in phpMyAdmin much faster than Camino does.
- Dec: 28th – I’m really looking forward to going back to Camino.
- The auto-complete/auto-fill behavior, including prompting to access Keychain entries, is too slow. I look at my keyboard when I begin to type, and in the time it takes to look down Safari finally decides to do the auto-fill. C’mon Safari, do it right away or not at all, but this delay just bolloxes everything up.
- Jan 1, 2007 – back to Camino. Ahhh…
The end result: if Safari were the only Mac browser, I could use it and survive – especially since cursor aware JavaScript support landed – but it just doesn’t feel good to me. And since it isn’t the only option out there and I’m back to Camino, with a slight edge taken off my dislike of Safari as a result of this experience.
I’m sure I’ll catch more flak for my opinion on Safari in the comments. Feel free to spout off, my history with Safari is well documented. 🙂
Have you ever tried using an optimized version of Firefox. I use BonEcho provided by BeatnikPad and its amazing. I am thrilled with the speed improvements it gives on my iMac G5 and Macbook.
If you haven’t checked it out its worth a look. I switched from Camino to it.
Zach
I really like Firefox as a development/debugging browser. I guess I need to figure out how to set up different profiles or something if I make it my primary browser.
If the keyboard shortcut for Google Searches in Safari bothers you, change the shortcut to something similar to that found in Firefox.
Go to System Preferences > Keyboard & Mouse
* ‘Add’ Application (using the plus button)
* Select Safari (from the drop down)
* Menu Title “Google Search…” – … is Option + semi-colon
* Keyboard shortcut CMD+K (or whatever else you want)
Restart Safari and enjoy. That’s usually the first thing I tweak on my machines.
That problem was with my keyboard, not Safari. I actually dislike making customizations like this because it’s a hassle to keep all of my machines working the same way once I start tweaking things.
Just thought I’d make a point about how Safari displays only part of the title. When two tabs are open whose titles start with the same (case-sensitive) words, Safari eliminates the words that are the same. This is useful for when you are, for example, browsing a forum where every page title starts with the same words (like the forum title) before getting to the post title. You wouldn’t be able to tell what the pages are by just their tab title. However, this well-meaning feature goes wrong because Safari can’t discriminate between two completely unrelated pages where you would want the whole title. For example, you could have tabs with page titles that say “American Hi-Fi” and “American cheese”, but their tab titles only say “Hi-Fi” and “cheese”.
[…] – I’d like to give Safari another try, but I need someone to build a PwdHash extension for it before I can really use it. Besides, I […]