It’s been a while, but since I was last here I’ve changed house and changed jobs, so that’s my excuse. Oh and I’ve also changed laptop, I now have a new, if slightly hot, MacBook Pro. Apple make it very easy to change computers thanks to their Migration Assistant utility. I just plugged my new laptop into the old and all my data, settings and applications were copied. Getting a new machine however did make me once again decide to give Apple’s own Internet apps another go. Last year I switched from using Mail and Safari to using Thunderbird and Firefox instead. But now, I thought, new Mac, another chance to give these ago. I have to say I like the latest version of Mail, and I’m continuing to use it for the time being. I like the clean simple interface and the search system is second to none.


Safari however is still a big problem. It’s still fast and nice to use but why does it have to be treated so different from the other browsers? Almost any site I try to use that employs Javascript, especially all the new Ajax-driven sites, don’t support Safari. Why is that? Is Safari still broken or are scripters just being lazy? If Safari is broken then why haven’t Apple fixed it after all these years. A neat trick Safari hackers can use is to turn on the usually hidden debug menu . This allows you to make Safari appear to be another kind of browser to the outside world. In that way sites that automatically screen fro Safari and bounce you to some kind of unsupported browser page get fooled into thinking you’re really using Firefox, for example, and let you in. So far using this masquerade I’ve found few problems, though some functions in heavy Ajax sites like writely.com don’t work. So is Safari really always the problem or do webmasters need to update their browser compatibility list?

Anyway on the subject of writely.com, check it out, it’s perfect for many routine word processing tasks and have some powerful collaboration features built-in. It can even be used as a weblog post editor. Because it has a spell checker built-in too it makes editing posts using Firefox a pleasant experience. I may never use MS Word again. And if Apple’s listening, unless they fix it I may never use Safari again either.



2 thought on “So what's new”
  1. It’s Safari. I have a standard response to complaints: “Nothing works on Safari.” This is close enough to true. In my view, only Internet Explorer 2.0 vies with Safari for the title of Worst. Browser. Ever.

  2. Hey! Good to have you back.

    What’s the new job then…?

    I’m still using Safari, mostly, but the JavaScript isse bugs occasionally. It would be good to know for certain if it is a Safari or bad scripting issue.

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