Just a Thought...

In a couple words? Advanced color management. What does this have to say for the way the web has evolved? It’s something we all knew inately, something so simple yet so profound. Looks are important. Magazines, catalogs, and product placement people have spent thousands on making sure their pictures are beautiful and accurately show the product they are selling. Then along came the web. Sure it’s convenient, but this picture they spent thousands on getting just right for press now suddenly looks dull and lifeless on the web. It sure makes advertising less slick, and it presents harsh realities for web designers. Have you ever designed a graphic to blend in with a color only to have the browser change it on you? You can tell the difference between the graphic and the web elements pretty easily.

It only goes to show how powerful the pull is for visually appealing graphics. I haven’t spent a whole lot of time with the new Safari, so I don’t know if it addressed any of my gripes. As a photographer, I am quite happy with this turn of events. Black and white is not always just black and white. There are toners out there to provide some color and make the picture even more interesting. These subtle changes are lost without good color management.

It’s not surprising that something like this would come from Apple. Apple has always catered to the creative professional. It’s the one market that has supported them through the years. However, it is somewhat surprising coming from Firefox. What would geeks have to know about color management and what it can do for you? I’m sure it has to with the fact that they are supporting several different platforms and the web pages look different on each one. It’s not just the default gamma level (for Macs it is 1.8 and for PCs it is 2.2, and Linux depends). It’s the whole color management thing.

Assuming IE 8 follows suit (it’ll be IE 9 if it isn’t 8), this will help make the web a more appreciated place. It’s easier to look professional when you can expect a standard way of showing off your work to everyone around the globe. The web isn’t just about text. It’s also about looking good.

Now that I have a Mac at home, I’ve had a little more experience with Safari. For the short review: I had to install Firefox as well. Safari is a nice little browser, and for most things it looks and works quite well. However, it does have a major failing if it wants to unseat Internet Explorer and Firefox from browser dominance as Jobs desired. Not all sites work with it—even those that work in both IE and Mozilla based browsers. That’s not good, because sites that don’t work include the likes of WikiSpaces and Aurora Loans. WikiSpaces gives you reduced functionality, so you have to know Wiki markup to format the page properly. However, Aurora Loans won’t even let you log in. How can you pay a bill if you can’t get in the site?

What’s the cause of this failure? More than likely it has to do with some JavaScript that isn’t supported in Safari but it is in the other two browsers. Perhaps the DOM is not consistent? I can’t be sure. However, I’m almost positive (without popping up ‘View Source’) that Aurora Loans has some JavaScript evoked on form submission. If Safari is going to unseat its competitors, it should at least match what Firefox’s JavaScript support can do.

I’ve installed Firefox so that I can use some of the sites that I can’t use properly on a Mac. But here’s the rub, some sites apparently don’t work properly with Firefox. I’d have to look more into it, but my wife was more than frustrated at the time so it just wasn’t going to happen. The site she was using sends e-invites for jewelry parties and such. For now we have to use two browsers, but that’s just not fair to us the users.

First, Apple needs to test and fix its browser against sites that work in Mozilla and IE—giving more attention to sites that seriously impact users such as banking and loan sites. Perhaps the ECMA Script and DOM standards should have test suites to validate the JavaScript implementations on all browsers. I don’t know, but something needs to be done.

Second, for the rest of us designing sites to be consumed on the internet, we need to include Safari in our cross browser testing. It’s easier to build upon cross-platform support from the ground up, rather than retrofitting libraries to include browser support. However, by the same token, there needs to be a way to test the libraries in the browsers. That way you can know what does and doesn’t work simply by running those tests. Simple things like Prototype work without any problems, so I’m unsure what Aurora Loans is doing that doesn’t work.

I don’t have anything against Safari, and it’s a decent browser. I personally still prefer Firefox, but then again I am used to it. When I put my user hat on, I just want things to work. I’m pretty confident in Firefox’s ability to work, but not so much for Safari. Let’s just make things work—whatever it takes.

As a matter of fact, I am writing this article in Safari on my Windows laptop right now. It’s a beta application, which you can download from Apple any time you want. Apple has its sites on expanding the browser war a bit, and leveraging the good will from iTunes to get people to switch to Safari. That’s an interesting move. In Steve Job’s Keynote introducing Safari on Windows (about an hour into the video if you want to skip ahead of the OS X Leopard announcements) they replace Firefox and “Other” browsers’ market share instead of encroaching on IE’s market share. My opinion? That 2% not using either IE or Firefox will likely continue using what they are using, particularly if this Opera fanboy is any indication. I also doubt they will put a serious dent in Firefox’s share.

There’s some impressive numbers thrown around by the benchmarks, but benchmarks only show a part of the picture. More than one person is very skeptical about the whole proposition. But is Safari all that bad? Sure it has it’s rough edges, and its a beta, but are these just haters speaking? You know me, I’m not satisfied until I get my hands dirty and form my own opinion. I believe there are some features not fully funished yet, and things can only get better.

The Good

Safari is not the complete loser that some people make it out to be. First, the text rendering is better than either IE or Firefox on my laptop. Firefox needs the most improvement in this area, although it is better than it used to be. The tabs work pretty well, although moving them around is really not that important to me. The user interface is pretty clean, and the RSS feed and bookmark features are pretty nice. If you are familiar with Firefox, you’ll be familiar enough with them. Big text areas like the one I type into to write this article has a little handle on it so I can resize it the way I like. That comes out of the box without any issues whatsoever. Many sites render better in Safari than in either IE or Firefox. It’s like there is some magic voodoo done on the images (maybe like gamma correction done properly) where they seem to look a bit better. There’s a few very subtle things throughout Safari that are nice, but difficult to talk about. Have fun playing around with them.

Now, if you really want to bowl me over with an Apple unique browsing experience, give me that page flipping thing you do with your finder in Safari. That would be really cool! Sometimes when I’m browsing along with several tabs open because I saw something that caught my eye but I want to get back to it, I have a number of tabs open. The little bit of text in the tab title doesn’t always give me an idea of what’s on that tab (and many times that’s the fault of the web designers not giving a decent and succinct title in the page header). I looked, after all this is an Apple product and they have it in iTunes for movies and TV shows. Why not here? Note to Firefox: if you want to add a killer feature give me a way I can quickly go through the things I have open in my tabs. Opera has the thumbnail view, Apple may take my idea (or come to the same conclusion themselves), so this is where you can do something cool.

The Bad

There are some definite quirks. First, despite the hype over the speed, I haven’t seen any real improvement over many of the pages I frequent. My blog takes longer to render than Firefox, and some things just don’t work. For example, I can’t upload files to Typo with Safari. Typo uses AJAX to give me a progress bar, and Safari gets one refresh and stops sending the file. Also, the WYSIWYG editor in Wikispaces doesn’t work in Safari. It’s a problem because I use Wikispaces at work. I’m sure they’ll fix this. I mean if they are serious about taking market share from either Firefox or IE. Another major issue? My OpenID has a feature to install a certificate on your browser for authentication purposes. Unfortunately it does not work with Safari because Safari does not send a certificate request, or a properly formatted one. Again, if you claim to be standards compliant, you have to be completely standards compliant.

There is a feature in the “Edit” menu under “Spelling” to check spelling while typing. Well, its not working and not selectable. I can type something obliviously wrong and it won’t be flagged or corrected. Firefox takes care of this really easily and nicely. I’m sure there are other features that are not working, but I’m probably not going to look into and find them all.

I don’t know what happened yesterday, but Safari became unstable. It just started churning away, eating up all my processing power as it tried to load even the simplest pages. It would churn along for about a minute or so and then render the page—very slowly. I uninstalled and reinstalled Safari and it is working now. That’s OK for a beta, but don’t let it happen in the final release.

The Ugly

I’m not a fan of the blue progress bar behind the location text. It took a few pages before I realized what was going on. I find it distracting, but not a deal breaker. It’s just how they chose to show how things are moving along. I’m also not a fan of the non-standard RSS badge in the location bar. IE, Firefox, Feedburner, and almost every RSS generating source uses the orange feed symbol because it is a standard . Again, if you are going to support standards, please do so. Also, if you are going to differentiate yourselves do it on something that matters and not something like this.

The bookmark handling is fairly nice… when it works properly. The link dragging is still a bit too quirky. I had difficulty dragging links into a folder. All that would happen is the bookmarks would rearrange themselves, which is not what I wanted. Please, take a lesson from Firefox on how to do this properly. I mean, if you are serious about taking marketshare from them you have to be better, not worse.

Tabs in Safari are OK when you have a mouse, but they are a pain when you don’t want to aggravate carpal tunnel syndrom (I don’t have it, but mousing around is a pain) then follow Firefox’s lead with the key combination shortcuts. Ctrl-Tab should move from you to the tab to the right (and wrap around when you are at the end), and Ctrl-Shift-Tab should move you to the tab to the left. In Safari they just move you further down the page. That’s what the Page Up and Page Down keys are for.

The location bar has autocompletion help for you, but I’m curious what selection criteria they use. I started typing the URL for Technorati and the first option was Them Anime Reviews and I haven’t been there in this browser. I typed in the URL for BH Photo Video and one of the first options (before I actually went to BH) was Bleach Portal . I’ll admit I do visit all of these sites on occasion, but it makes me wonder what kind of fanboys are working on Safari :)

The Verdict?

For now I’m going to stick with Firefox as my main browser, but I’ll continue to keep my eye on Safari. Despite its quirks, it has some big advantages over IE, but it doesn’t match Firefox at the moment. I won’t talk about Opera because I don’t have it, and people who are willing to pay for a browser are going to be really happy with what they bought. I think that it is really telling that among the Mac visitors I get, most of them use Firefox. I can only guess that they use it because it is better for them than Safari.

Please, Safari developers, fix the spell checking, the tab quirkiness, the outright malfunctioning things, and give me page flipping. That would rock.