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Surfin’ Safari

978 words

Sillily, David Hyatt has asked people for feedback on Safari's UI to rescue himself from constant e-mail harassment. And, apparently, feedback he received, overwhelmingly so.

Apparently, all people did was say they want tabs. To me it seems that tabs are (a) quite useful, sometimes, e.g. when you're doing research etc. and (b) bad UI. So there is in fact a good reason for not having tabs, whether people like it or not. Also, I am sure the Safari people are aware of the fact that people muse about tabbed browsing. It's hard to ignore that, even if you try. However, from my use of tabs in Chimera, I - and from discussion I've read other as well - have the impression that it's not the 'tab' metaphor that's all important here but rather the ability to have some kind of temporary 'instant-on' bookmark that doesn't clutter your desktop with an additional window. Figuring out a good and easy-to-use way to do that would be brilliant. And Apple may just have the people and experience to do that. Even with OSX's UI not being up to the standards, Apples's track record for goo UI ideas isn't too bad.

For me, one of the worst things about Safari is that they wen with the metal look. Even less useful feedback, though, as I'm pretty sure this is more a political than a UI question. Apple wants us to use applications with inconsistent looks and there's litte we can do about their dogmas. For the time being, let's just hope they don't break Demetallifizer and worry about less obvious things.

And then it turns out there's not too much left to worry about in Safari's UI. Inevitably some people won't like the way bookmarks are done within the browser window. Luckily I'm not one of them - though I still find the seperate concepts of the 'bookmarks', 'bookmarks bar' and 'bookmarks menu' sections confusing and impractical. Having bookmarks in two of these places is a pain, since there's no such thing as an alias and moving a bookmark from a folder in one of these sections into a folder of a different one is equally painful as it requires you to drop it at some intermediate stage. One solution to this could be something along the line of spring-loaded-folders in the bookmarks section. Say, you drag the address of a page out of the address bar, hover over the 'book' icon and the view switches to the bookmarks, where, again, you can navigate into the different sub-folders.

Another bug in Safari's UI is that it doesn't support browsing without the tool/address-bar shown too well. Sometimes the address bar will just stick around after having un-hidden it via Command-L and it's terribly hard to hide due to the braindead Command-| keyboard shortcut. Similarly, having a proxy icon in the menu title would be helpful to drag and drop the URL of the page somewhere without having to un-hide the location-field. Talking about the location field -- it could try harder to match whatever you enter to your bookmarks or history. In particular taking into account page titles makes this much more useful. Just look at the way it works in OmniWeb

And Find menu in Mailthen, there's the Google search field. I like it very much and unlike the 'SnapBack' feature for the rest of the navigation which seems quite pointless to me, the 'SnapBack' button there actually makes sense What seems like pretty bad UI to me though is that clicking on the magnifying glass icon will show you a search history rather then search options - as you'd expect to get if you've ever clicked on the very same icon in Mail. It's a bit inconsistent - and personally I tend not think of seach engine searches as something I return to later anyway. The obvious option would of course be to offer different searches in that menu. This might add too much complexity, so I don't know how brilliant the idea is - still I know that I'd love to be able to have my own queries there (even via some manual preference file editing) that would make a Google image search, an arXiv search or a MatSciNet search just a mouse-click away.

So, that's about what comes to my mind, some of these points I've probably spread out in more detail here or here. Sure, having seperators in the boomark menus would be helpful (another simplicity vs. usefulness tradeoff, I guess), but that isn't a revolutionary suggestion either. Perhaps having more distinguishable icon may be another enhancement, but I'm not too optimistic there as marketing may be more important than usability for big bastard companies like Apple in this case.

Another point that I'd like to make is that, in fact, David's call for suggestions leaves open one particular question: Which kind of feedback is actually relevant? There's a bug button in Safari itself and I used it for most of the issues I wrote about above. As usual with Apple, you never know whether your feedback is actually read or just dumped somewhere. Having a more transparent way of handling bug reports/ features requests would be helpful. Just knowing that problem xy is being worked at will keep people from re-reporting it because they think their report never arrived. Similarly, havin a statement à la We won't introduce tabs or use proper Aqua windows will sort that point out and allow people to waste their time elsewhere (plus this will allow /dev/null on Apple's feedback servers to idle a bit).

I just saw that David Hyatt joined in with John Gruber's point about how Opera for Mac is obsolete. Of course they're both right. Looking at Opera, the words ugly, fast and confusing come to mind. You are the weakest link. Goodbye.

February 9, 2003, 16:19

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