February 25, 2009
Safari 4
Some lovin’ and hatin’ for the Safari 4 beta today. This is just a cursory inspection from consumer and developer angles:
- Nice visuals on the top sites & bookmarks features. Limited long-lasting appeal for essentially a glamour feature though, and it wasn’t immediately apparent how to edit the top sites, where they were stored, and how they came to get in my browser (I had the same data customisation issues with Flock a while back). Opera’s SpeedDial feels much more user-friendly at this stage.
- Tab placement is horrendous on Windows; at least Chrome’s tabs make a pass at being in the browser window’s content area. Stop screwing with interface conventions — treating some tab mouse events as the app title bar is contextually confusing (double-click, dragging). Please stop innovating things that don’t need innovation.
- Each Safari release reminds me how good Webkit’s renderer is. Awesome.
- Thanks for leaving the ability to chose alternate font rendering in — I thought this might be on the chopping block. I hate XP’s rendering of generic web typefaces. Switching between the default and alternate actually exposed the cause of the header positioning bug on my Test Design 26 page, heh.
- Please implement middle-click tab close.
I was surprised to see CSS Animations and CSS Effects mentioned on the Features page — these are Apple CSS specs that (as far as I know) are still exposed in Webkit with the -webkit- prefix. The CSS Working Group site lists these modules as an upcoming working draft (unlinked but available on the w3c dev server). Are they mature enough for use outside of an closed, internal ecosystem? I must admit that I empathise with anyone who tries to get specs through the W3C process.
Speaking of specs in progress, I was delighted to see the Safari site’s written in HTML5 (yes I’m a hypocrit for advocating unfinished specs here and questioning them above, but HTML5 is much more mature). IE demands sacrifice, so the page includes
<script type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8">
document.createElement("article");
document.createElement("nav");
document.createElement("section");
document.createElement("header");
document.createElement("aside");
document.createElement("footer");
</script>
to make non-existent tags be treated as both non-void and styleable. The Safari startup page actually uses the <video> and <audio> tags too, and it sure was freaky to see video without Flash installed.
[Update: eek, the page isn’t valid HTML5. <section>, <header>, <footer> and <nav> are misused. For the <footer> links they’d be better off using a parent UL instead of <h3>s. Not sure what’s triggering the <script> error though.]