Gordaen’s Blog

I noticed a few headlines lately about Apple receiving flak, particularly from Mozilla, for slipping an install of Safari onto people’s Windows machines. Personally, I find that Apple products work well with Apple products, but they rarely work as well on Windows. I wanted to give Safari a quick try on my laptop, which can boot into Windows XP for that once a month that it is needed, so I thought this would be a good chance to test out what this “sneaky Safari install” is all about and give Safari for Windows an initial spin.

I downloaded, installed, and ran Quicktime. Wait, I almost forgot. Thing, from Fantastic Four, was in a screenshot and looked depressed as hell to be viewed in Quicktime. Anyway…

From Quicktime, I went to the help menu and picked Update Existing Software… The dialog box that came up looked like this:

I clicked “OK” and then saw this:

Both of the options that came up were really to install software that I did not have (not exactly an “update [of] existing software…”); it’s worth noting that I specifically downloaded Quicktime without iTunes. I unchecked both and quit the dialog box. When I brought it back up, both were checked again, leading me to believe the same behavior would be expected when the dialog came up automatically. In other words, it doesn’t remember that you do not want to install new software so you have to manually tell it every time not to install the software.

I saw comments online where people essentially said, “So what, it’s just a checkbox.” So what? First, this is not an update. If it was, then having it checked by default would make sense. Second, there were two checkboxes for me; at what point is it too many? If there were fifty checkboxes every time, would that be ridiculous? Another comment I saw more than once was along the lines of “big deal, it’s just 20MB.” Well, it was 60MB for me and “it’s small” doesn’t really seem justified if every single program you download starts installing additional stuff unnecessarily. I think Apple could have easily split the update tool into two sections, one of which would be “Install free new software” and include iTunes, Safari, and whatever else Apple wants people to download.

That being said, I did actually install Safari (but not iTunes) to give it a try for a few minutes.

Initial good impressions: Safari is snappy. Pages loaded very quickly. It remembers form data fairly intelligently (so you can browse back to a form and maintain what you had typed). It has a grammar checker… which appears to be absolutely terrible, but it’s a start and it’s disabled by default.

Initial bad impressions: I have to turn on the status bar? I hovered over a link to see which post ID it had and… I realized I didn’t have anywhere to look to see where the link actually takes me! I guess this supports that same blind jumping that is encouraged in the software update/install windows. I picked to upload an image to my blog and the starting point was the Safari folder (rather than a reasonable default like the desktop); that’s not a big deal, but when I clicked back on the main window and tried to type something in (before selecting a file), I found the page mostly disabled. Basically, clicking was disabled, but the cursor still changed to a hand when over a link and :hover effects were activated. If a sub-window removes the functionality of the main window, shouldn’t the sub window stay on top? To be fair, a similar problem happened to me in GIMP on Linux when a dialog box opened on the wrong monitor, making GIMP appear to be unresponsive. The strange thing was that after I picked the file and the dialog closed, focus didn’t return to the Safari window. I had to click the window twice to return focus. I’m not sure if this is a Windows or Safari issue, but it sure isn’t expected behavior.

In Firefox I have various keywords set so that I can use the main location bar to do all kinds of searching. Doing “wiki planck units” will jump to Wikipedia’s article on Planck units. Similarly, “gi crazy people” does a Google Images search for crazy people. That feature is awesome, but sometimes I use a computer that doesn’t have that setup and Firefox intelligently does a search, returning either the obvious domain or Google search results. You can type “Mozilla Firefox” into the location bar and get where you want to go. What’s it do in Safari? It tries a few domains and then fails to open the page http://mozilla%20firefox/ because it can’t find the server “mozilla firefox”.

Overall, it looks better than IE (obviously) and is quite possibly a good choice for people who just need a good browser, but I think it would supplement—not replace—Firefox for developers due to all the invaluable extensions. Of course, if they make a Linux version, I’ll give it a more thorough rundown *hint hint* …