| Wednesday, June 10, 2009 |
06:47 - Bungled Safari
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This does not thrill me:
Okay, I get that Apple has responded to widespread criticism of the new inconspicuous progress bar in the Safari 4 betas by releasing the final product with this weird button-bar thing that provides a much bigger click target for stopping page loads than the little "X" icon that they were toying with. That's great.
What isn't great is that this solution doesn't do anything to make the "refresh" button any easier to get to; it's still a teeny little hieroglyphic tucked away in the right end of the location bar, hardly giving the impression of being a clickable control at all:
Gone forever, apparently, is the old full-size reload button that I'd come to appreciate, not least for its ability to be placed arbitrarily in the toolbar using the "Customize Toolbar" function endemic to OS X apps. Now it's hard-wired into the location bar, and in a stupid way.
But that's not the worst part. The worst part is that the blue progress bar that fills up the address field from left to right—as we've been accustomed for so long—is still, and seemingly forever, gone. Apple doesn't seem to want us seeing an activity indicator that shows actual progress anymore; they'll give us a little spinner, sure, but no more progress bar. And never mind that Safari on the iPhone still has the blue progress bar; now it's just there to mock us on the desktop, who now have to pretend it's 1995 again with the functional equivalent of the Pulsing Breathing Blue N in the upper right corner of our Netscape window.
But that's okay; they'll probably helpfully get rid of the progress bar in Safari for iPhone OS 3.0.
Feh. This is not an auspicious day in the world of Safari. Sure, the 4.0 enhancements are nice, and I already can't get along without the Top Ten screen. But it's at the expense of too much, and pointlessly so. Besides, in watching the Schillnote coverage from Monday, we're all to understand that Safari will be so much the better in Snow Leopard, because now it'll be sandboxed such that all plugins will crash in their own little areas and not destabilize the browser itself.
That's nice; but funnily enough, I don't think I ever remember Safari crashing, whether because of Flash or no.
Since installing Safari 4.0 yesterday, it's crashed twice. Abruptly, right in the middle of work. Both times it helpfully told me that "this may have been caused by the Flash plugin."
Swell.
UPDATE: Oh, and that's not all! I have since discovered that Safari no longer lets you open Flash files by dragging them into an open browser window! Now, if you drag one in, it kicks it into a Finder window instead of opening it natively.
Well that's just super. Do you guys know how many Flash files I have to open daily in order to accomplish certain administrative tasks I do? Enough that I've written whole AppleScript programs to facilitate it. And now they won't even work! Fantastic job, guys.
What else do people use to open .swf files, anyway? QuickTime Player briefly did it, like in the Jaguar days, but they put a stop to that years ago. I could at least always count on Safari, even if it didn't open them with predictable dimensions or allow you to screenshot it natively or anything; because whatever else a browser might be, you at least could always trust that it would understand how to open and render Flash files. But not no more. Now what do I have to use? Firefox?
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Brian Tiemann
