| Tuesday, February 3, 2004 |
15:25 - Glory glory hallelujah!
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Safari 1.2 is out! And it has a feature that I've been hoping (and asking) for for months: keyboard type-along navigation of drop-down menus!
In other words, you open the menu, and then just start typing the text of the item you want. We're talking about menus with hundreds of entries in them, not necessarily alphabetized; but if you know the item you're going for, just type it, and Safari selects the first matching menu item for the text you've typed so far. As you keep typing, it keeps narrowing it down until you've got the one you want.
IE on the Mac did this, but until now it was the only browser I knew of that had this behavior. (And since it's being EOL'ed, I was starting to despair of ever seeing this feature again.) Netscape/Mozilla has the irritating Windows version of the feature: you can type the first letter of the menu item, but it only jumps to the first item beginning with that letter-- and if you type subsequent letters, it jumps to the first item beginning with each of those letters. In other words, you can type-navigate, but only on the first letter. (Keep tapping that same letter, and it scrolls through all the entries beginning with that letter-- which is ludicrously tedious on large menus that aren't alphabetized.)
But now it's implemented, and the right way. And opening long menus is way faster, too! Woo-hoo! Now the only thing missing is tabbing to drop-down menus and pressing Down or Space to open them, but that's much less of a pressing issue for me. (Tabbing between links and editable form elements now works.) I can now dispense with IE, because the last unique and useful feature it had is now in Safari. Huzzah!
UPDATE: Matt corrects me that the Mozilla-based browsers actually do have this same menu navigation behavior. I guess I misremembered the last time I checked this. It's good to hear...
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Brian Tiemann
