Journal Entry

:: Safari Ideas ::

Apple has a web browser called Safari. It's for Mac OS X, and is quite nice. One of the lead developers has a weblog that lets the rest of us follow some of the progress he's making on his portions of it. Safari is in the beta stage right now, so it's coming along every day.

Hyatt has asked people to post comments, or use MT's trackback, offering suggestions and comments. The comments on that entry are incredibly full right now, so I'm posting here and trackbacking. Here are my suggestions, Dave.

• I want full and correct CSS1 and 2 support, of course, but I know you're already working on that. KHTML should be at least as good as Mozilla.
• Safari should store all passwords in the keychain. Right now it stores the ones that come from HTTP authentication (and does it well), but ignores login/password fields embedded in a web page. Chimera does this very well, and there's absolutely no good reason why Apple's browser should ignore the keychain.
• Use title attributes in a thoughtful way. They're ignored right now, which is bad.
• Make the browser more navigable by the keyboard. Right now tab switches focus between the address field, google field, and browser view. There should be some reasonable way of navigating at least form controls, but maybe all links too, by the keyboard.
• The bookmark bar should be have more like a menu than it does right now. If I hold the mouse button down and drag across the bookmarks, they should act like a menu does. I should have to hold the command key down to move the bookmarks and folders, just like in any other toolbar. Steven Frank has posted about this, and I've sent a bug report already, but it's worth mentioning again.
• I think Safari should just be aqua. Drop the metal.
• I should be able to turn off image loading, for when I'm stuck on dialup. I always thought that was something every browser should have, but Chimera doesn't do it either.
• It seems like the way Safari cascades new windows is haphazard. New window locations are sort of random--that behavior should be fixed. [Update: This appears to be fixed in the 2-12-2003 update]
• I should be able to view source on a document using the editor of my choice. It also might be nice to have syntax highlighting in the source, but if I had a choice, I'd rather see the ability to open source in BBEdit. Maybe instead of cluttering the preferences with this, since it's only something developers care about, it could be setup so Safari will recognize the source/html mime type, which I can set using Vince or IE.
• Safari should be more forgiving about urls and text bits dragged on it. I can only drag fully qualified urls right now, but Safari can understand single words and pieces of URLs, so I should be able to drag those on too.
• The CSS dotted border should be dotted, not dashed.
• I like tabbed browsing too. Blah blah blah. All the weenies are coming out and whining for it, and I can't help it. It's really useful, but if you all come up with some other way of letting one window do the work of many, I could be perfectly happy.

There is a lot to be liked about where Safari is right now. I using it right now because the Chimera nightly I was using was uncommonly crashy, and it's mostly a pleasure. If all these things were worked on and fixed, I would be a happy camper indeed.

[Update: One of the bugs I filed, which I didn't list here, related to the All Music Guide has been fixed in the 2-12-2003 update. The back button now works on that site; it wasn't before due to javascript foolishness. This is partially the AMG's fault, due to not just using regular links fer cryin' out loud. Anyway, it's fixed. Excellent.]