Safari again

The fallout for Safari’s uber-beta-ness is beginning. Many recent articles have centered on security vulnerabilities. I will for now assume these have a high priority within Apple and will be largely plugged. Usability issues are more problematic, and are the major blocks for adoption by the vast target userbase, who are not necessarily power-users, but more powerfully are creatures of habit.

Ryan Paul of arstechnica had a great read on Safari beta here. As for usability, I’ll cite two of his gems:

1) Safari’s window resizing is, like OS X, only by the bottom right corner only. Apple, don’t highlight the quirky limitations of your OS!

2) Moving through tabs is not adjustable, and is permanently mated to the idiosyncratic CTRL-SHIFT-] and CTRL-SHIFT-[. I really dislike this on OS X, and I dislike it in Windows Safari as well. Why not use the now-standard CTRL-TAB? At the very least, let the user set it.

Anyways, read Ryan Paul’s article, he has an incisive commentary on Safari’s stubbornly alien use of anti-aliasing technology as well.

And why is Safari on Windows now anyways, furthermore why is it such a barely-developed version, unlike OS X for Intel which was polished on launch because of years in development? For the record, my money’s on the hypothesis that the decision to port Safari was a recent one– actually the FULL measure of the decision was to sell Apple computer hardware with Windows pre-installed, but with Apple apps instead of bloatware. If true, the engineers in Cupertino are currently scurrying in secrecy to cobble together an iLife for Vista: iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD, Garageband.

This entry was posted on June 13, 2007 at 3:19 pm and is filed under OS, Safari. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.