tewha.net

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.

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

1. Or more likely never: the subject will probably be beaten to death by the time I get back to it. [↩]

Safari 3.1 still eats cookies, although it seems to do so much less often than 3.0. I just hit it for the first time since updating.

So what do you do when your cookies all disappear? Well, you can actually use Time Machine to restore them. The cookies are stored in ~/Library/Cookies in a single file called Cookies.plist. Trash this file, then use Time Machine to restore one from a couple hours previous.

A few days ago I re-added a search field to this site. I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was; the CSS was a little fussy, but that’s more of a fun puzzle than a hard problem.

However, it took a long time to get the search field itself (which uses <input type="search"/>) working nicely on the iPod touch. Of course, it turned out to be my fault: My CSS had an extra } in it just above the entry that limited the field’s width. So the width is properly limited to something reasonable now. On the other hand, the search field doesn’t seem to get a different appearance from the text field or the search history. I can live with that.

It seems to degrade fairly nicely on other browsers. Of course, it doesn’t get the grey “click here to search”-type text, but I don’t really feel that’s worth adding. Hopefully, this will be adopted by the standard and end up in other browsers, too. In the meantime, I can live with this limitation, too. It certainly makes the code cleaner.

More on the input tag another time…

This will surprise no one, but Mobile Safari is not exactly like desktop Safari. Most of these differences are limitations, but one stands out in my mind as a feature.

Namely, that’s the ability to zoom out to get the big picture of a web page.

It’s true that this is a lot less necessary on the desktop due to the large screens on many systems, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t necessary at all. On my PowerBook, a lot of things scroll. Even on this iMac I’m using write now, the “New Post” screen scrolls.

A large image is already zoomed out in desktop Safari, so why not a large web page? I should be able to hit, say, F7 and have the page fit my window and click to zoom in on a part of the page.

While Apple is at it, they can add some indication that you’ve been zoomed out to images.

Here’s an example of the current view, using Macworld’s website:

You see a bit of the page, and can scroll for the rest.

But here’s what the zoomed out look would look like:

(In reality, this might be zooming out too much.)

Now imagine that scrubbing with the mouse pointer shows the area in more detail:

We haven’t got an obvious win yet, but we’re well on the way to something useful. I bet Apple’s engineers could make this an obvious win.

I’ve written before about how much I dislike Safari 2’s find. The Safari 3 beta really improved things by doing a much better job of highlighting matches. Actually, it was really good:

Safari 3 in Leopard still does a better job of highlighting than Safari 2, but it introduces a new problem. The highlight now looks like a mere background color change, and the fact that it actually blocks out some of the surrounding text is no longer obvious.

Before, finding “mac” in “machine” produced mac with a strong border around it, obviously blocking out something. Now, it produces something that looks like “mac ine.” Yuck.

If there’s going to be a border there, it needs to be obvious. If Apple wants subtle, I’d suggest removing the border entirely and doing a gradual alpha blend like the System Preferences spotlight. The important part is really the brightness change.

However, it’s worth noting: Find shouldn’t be subtle. It should be as in-your-face as possible about what it’s found and where exactly it is. (And I can’t quite describe how, but the animation seems to have been made more subtle, too.)

Overall? Not much better than Safari 2.

Rob Griffiths posts some tips for turning off Safari 3’s more annoying warnings over at Macworld.com. My favorite? defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugConfirmTossingUnsubmittedFormText 0. When I quit out of a form, it’s because I want to quit. Warning me there’s unsubmitted form text in other tabs might be useful, but the current tab? No.

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?

1. Actually, it was Allen, but his email had a brief stay in purgatory. [↩]
2. 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. [↩]
3. I’m sure it’s in the HTTP spec, but I can’t be bothered looking it up right now. [↩]

Curiously, the iPhone and iPod touch are missing the ↩ glyph¹. I’m sure it’s missing because Apple never thought anyone would use it, but it’s being used as a footnote return character by John Gruber, Allen Pike and mx, among thousands² more.

Apple does respond to feedback, so it’s worth asking. If you’ve got an iPod touch, file feedback here. If you’ve got an iPhone, the feedback site is here.

1. If you see a box it’s still missing [↩]
2. ten thousands? [↩]