Safari 3 vs. Firefox 3
A few things I've noticed:
Safari 3: Beautiful new Find command. SVG support. Send to Dashboard capability. Drag and drop tabs, including to new windows. Better standards support.
Firefox 3: Better appearance which (unfortunately) highlights that Firefox doesn't act like a Mac application. Looks like you can move the window from title bar, tool bar or status bar, but only title bar actually works. But where does the title bar end? Nice new security screen, which was implemented in a way that breaks one click URL selection. Improved standards support. Drag and drop tabs can't be dragged to new window. But non-modal password prompt almost makes up for all its flaws.
You say you want a revolution?
You say you want a revolution? Well, you know, I'd rather have a browser that worked.
"Revolutionary" is not how I'd describe this. I've seen installers crash before. No doubt I will see it again.
Firefox vs. Safari comparison: revised
I saw an episode of Yes, Prime Minister today. I haven't seen this series in years, but it's quite possibly both the most talky-talky and brilliant British sitcom. Whenever I see YPM, I'm reminded of Sir Humphrey demonstrating to Bernard how survey results can be cooked.
With this thought fresh on my mind, I ran into the Firefox vs. Safari link on Daring Fireball Obviously, feature charts are the same: The person developing them arranges it so their product gets the most checks. I decided to generate a more balanced feature comparison chart that would give Firefox and Safari an equal number of checks.
Firefox fan? Well, you probably won't find this as funny as I do. You might even be deeply offended. But the thing is: I'll still find it funny.
And for the record: I found Firefox 3 to be an improvement over Firefox 2 in most areas, but a major step backwards in complying with Mac behavior. I know they tried, but the closer (but definitely not perfect) appearance makes the poor behavior all the more jarring. But that's starting to read like a review, and I'll save that for a later post.1
- Or more likely never: the subject will probably be beaten to death by the time I get back to it. [↩]
Arguable, subjective.
A coworker posted on Firefox 3 and Mac addicts, and mentioned:
Other than background windows looking like foreground windows, all of his issues are either extreme power-user features (AppleScript support), things that are easily arguable (clicking on the URL bar selecting the URL), or things that Firefox could quickly steal from Safari and should make everyone happy (submenus with additional history items in the History menu.)
I started this as a comment there, but I wanted to expand it more. Now I know what he meant, but I don't like the word "arguable" in that sentence. He suggested "subjective," but I think that makes it worse.
Interfaces are thought out or not. Interfaces can be made simpler or more complicated, in one aspect or another. Often simplifying one aspect will make another more complicated. But interface design is neither arguable nor subjective. Instead, the effectiveness of an interface is something much simpler: measured or not.
In user interface design, the impact of an interface can be measured across your prospective user base. It may not be practical for you to do so1, but it can be done. That means it's not subjective. Don't write something off as "arguable" — if it matters, determine the truth.
This is not to say you can determine the perfect interface by measuring, but you can determine the superior of two interface designs.
If it's something your users will feel strongly about and there's significant disagreement, make it an option, but that should be reserved for cases where it's really important to the user. But that's tangental: User preference for interface varying for a particular user doesn't mean interface design is subjective. And I think a good first pass is to default to least astonishment — which in today's world, will mean consistency with the spirit of the platform you're targeting.
- In fact, this is probably the rule rather than the exception. [↩]
Still not moving to Firefox!
After my last post, Firefox fans are probably wondering why I'd bother. The truth is that even with the annoying bugs present in it, I still find Safari the least offensive browser, given Firefox's window focus drawing bug, inability to be dragged from the status bar, the botched spellchecker integration, slow launches, etc, etc.
I'm sure most of these will be fixed, but Firefox is a well of platform integration problems. The well does have a bottom, but we're probably not near it yet.
Poor auto updating in action: Firefox
I've written before on bad update mechanisms, but it's worth noting that Firefox has the worst.
After several clicks and long waits, I finally made it to this screen:
And things just stopped there.
It's a good thing I had Safari so I could, like, browse the web.
You can go ahead and blame sqlite manager if you like, since it was probably that website that was down. However, it was Firefox's development team that made the decision that updates should block, require multiple clicks and application restarts to install, and not have a useful Cancel button. The server being down merely made things slightly worse.
↩ in URLs
Background information: Daring Fireball linked to my previous article about the missing ↩ glyph in the iPhone and iPod touch. Thankfully, mx gave me a heads up1, and I switched a few settings on my site to better deal with the extra attention.2
Watching the log, though, I find one thing interesting:
[19/Oct/2007:12:12:37 -0700] "GET /wp-content/themes/pyilewptheme/iphone.css HTTP/1.1" 200 355 "http://pyile.com/2007/10/i-want-my-%e2%86%a9/" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/419.3 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/419.3"
[19/Oct/2007:12:12:37 -0700] "GET /wp-content/themes/pyilewptheme/iphone.css HTTP/1.1" 200 354 "http://pyile.com/2007/10/i-want-my-%E2%86%A9/" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.8.1.5) Gecko/20070718 Firefox/2.0.0.5"
It looks like Safari and Firefox encode the ↩ differently in URLs. I'm not sure which, if either, is "wrong3," but I found this interesting. When I was testing the ↩ in the URL, I only checked that it worked in Firefox and Safari. I didn't think to check that they requested it the same way. I imagine Apache is doing the conversion here, but would other web servers do it as well?
- Actually, it was Allen, but his email had a brief stay in purgatory. [↩]
- It looks like the particular Dreamhost server I'm on is being slammed, and from the load, it definitely isn't just this that's doing it. Although I can't imagine I'm helping much. [↩]
- I'm sure it's in the HTTP spec, but I can't be bothered looking it up right now. [↩]