log

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.]