Quarter Life Crisis

The world according to Sven-S. Porst

« Bratwurst is deadMainiApp Niceties »

Safari Woes

436 words

David Hyatt bravely asks for input on the most-loved problems with Safari's rendering engine. I have some additional comments to make, but let's do the business first:

  1. Reloading frequently fails to re-load properly – style sheets in particular.
  2. No undo in text areas (is that rendering or UI?)
  3. Printing has improved a lot for the final but still isn't perfect. Trying to print more than two pages worth of this page, for example, will spawn an error.
  4. Displaying large pages can take ages. Perhaps this the same problem attributed to 'streaming html' problems by one of the other trackbacks.
  5. Pages with many (a few 100) UI elements, radio buttons, say, are very slow to display and scroll around in.
  6. Font substitution is done do give me a bold standard font when wanting bold Zapfino: Zapfino vs. Zapfino Bold.
Hm, that's not even ten, as for most people who linked to Dave's entry. In fact, considering my recent look at Safari 1, most of the issues I still have with the browser are UI related and not concerned with rendering. This is not to say that Safari is perfect, and for sure there are a few more problems coming from Mark Pilgrim's list, but it's supposed to say that most other problems are not obvious to me.

That said, I have to add that there are more sites which break on Safari than on the 'big' browsers – particularly in the JavaScript department. While I tend to consider that bugs of the site, rather than the browser, it is quite annoying to have to use another browser just fool some stupid web site into doing what it's supposed to do.

To finish, let me add that while I appreciate David's effort and obviously use it, I am a bit confused by the ways in which feedback for Safari can be left: The bug menu item in the program itself, Apple's bug reporter and occasionally with Dave. That's not entirely satisfactory – particularly as it isn't clear to which degree those reports are read and which problems Apple are aware of. Thus it is very hard to find a good balance when trying to figure out whether it is worth to submit a bug and how much time should be put into the bug report. [That's a general problem with Apple's responsiveness, not a Safari specific one.]

Also, it would be very helpful if there were a manual trackback entry field for the post, considering that far from all people use software that is capable of generating trackback pings as John Gruber pointed out.

July 5, 2003, 20:07

Tagged as zapfino.

Add your comment

« Bratwurst is deadMainiApp Niceties »

Comments on

Photos

Categories

Me

This page

Out & About

pinboard Links

People

Ego-Linking