Quarter Life Crisis

The world according to Sven-S. Porst

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No surprise

1394 words

To keep my predictability up, I'll join in to the numerous voices on the latest and greatest beta version of Safari. Nothing surprising happened and I'll just write down the points I haven't seen elsewhere yet.

Tabs: They're there now, officially. Having done an increased amount of surfing with Safari recently, I didn't really miss them much anymore. Still, it's nice to have the option. A couple of things to observe about tabs:

Language: At a package size of only 10,2MB Safari is now localised translated to French, German and Japanese as well. When doing size comparisons, people should take into account that each language costs about 1MB. Still work to be done for a proper localisation. Why not use German Google in a German browser?

On moving to the German version, my old bookmarks bar/menu bookmarks appeared in folders with those names, rather than their German counterparts. This suggests that Safari's bookmarks file format isn't/wasn't language independent. The same may be true for the History file, which still lists English dates for me.

Cunningly, Apple has changed the keyboard shortcuts for Back/Forward to Command-Ö/Ä in the German version. This maps them to the keys in the same places as [/] on English keyboards. I still think that having non-uniform shortcuts is a bad idea. And of course (a) it is inconsistent with every other application, even Apple's own 'Finder', and (b) everyone's using the arrow keys anyway. And keeping in mind that the 'argument' for not using the arrow keys for Back/Forward navigation was that they're already used for text navigation, makes you smirk/choke when seeing that Command-Shift-ArrowKeys seem to be appropriate shortcuts for switching tabs.

Find: It's only support for Google still with the little popup menu offering a history rather than a choice of search engines. With that narrow support for one search engine only, however, it should be feasible to have the search field be aware of other searches you make in Google using the on-page field. I often make my initial search using the Google field in Safari and then refine it using the field on the results pages. If I want to re-do that search later, it won't be in the Google field's history.

Bookmarks: While I still like the idea of in-browser bookmarks, I do find Safari's way of handling bookmarks a bit confusing at times. My recommendations which people are surely eager to hear:

Other:

Seen on Quarter Life Crisis:

Enough for first impressions, I guess.

April 14, 2003, 21:26

Tagged as zapfino.

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