Windows Safari Bugs

Well I downloaded Apple’s new Safari beta for Windows on my XP box, and first of all I’m happy it’s there. Second, note the “Bug” button on the navigation bar, it’s there for a reason. Safari for Windows is still Chock Full O’ Bugs. I’ve submitted 5 or 6 already, and I found them in my first 10 MINUTES of browing:

1) The videos at NHL.com (e.g. here) and wmv samples at Amazon.com (e.g. here) don’t play, and almost always crashed Safari into quitting on both of these. Admittedly, I haven’t done a clean OS install of XP, so there may be something corrupted running around, but I found some more things:

2) The keyboard shortcuts for Cutting (CTRL-C), Pasting (CTRL-V), and Select All (CTRL-A) very frequently don’t function at all in the URL portion of the nav bar, although the menu bar pulldown equivalents (e.g. Edit->Paste) work fine.

3) Another nav bar bug: Go to any page, then navigate to a second page, and you’ll see an orange circular “Back” button to the right of the URL. If you highlight the URL from just next to that button, then nothing works: You highlight, but can’t delete or edit by starting to type. To reproduce this bug try:
a) Launch Safari beta for Windows. Then pull the bottom right corner of the window to the top left to make the browser window as SMALL as it will let you.
b) Go to http://www.apple.com/
c) Click on STORE, which will be barely visible. Now that you’ve navigated a link, you’ll see the circular orange “Back” button by the URL. The URL itself will be cut off because it’s too long.
d) Carefully position your pointer to the left of the Orange Back button, but to the right of the rightmost portion of the visible URL. The click, and drag upward one line, thereby highlighting the text.
e) Press Backspace, or type any letters. Nothing happens, whereas the highlighted text should be replaced by what you type.

4) Download menu: There is a bug related to the download window being the last one open; it won’t let you. To reproduce:
a) Launch Safari beta for Windows.
b) In the only open window, begin downloading some big file, for example the Unreal Tournament 2004 3369.2 update at Macupdate. <-- click on this link, then cilck "Download Now". This opens a "Downloads" window.
c) Now close the main window. The result is that Safari up and quits completely. It should continue downloading as it does in OS X, but at the very least if it must quit, it should give you a dialog warning you that you have active downloads in progress.

Note that this last bug is related to why I wouldn’t use Firefox for OS X (although I love it for Windows XP). There was a similar download bug where if the download window was your last remaining open window, FF disabled the opening of new windows. In short, if you were downloading, then closed your browser windows (except your download window) you were stuck downloading, but not being able to browse. It’s finally been fixed in FF 2.0 for OS X, which was a long wait indeed. Jaded now, I’m not waiting around to see what bugs are left on FF for OS X, and am sticking to Safari. Hopefully the same tardiness to bug fixing won’t happen on Safari for Windows.