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Andrew Stephens · Feb 1, 2004, 12:27 PM

When Safari came out it was wizzo, esp compared to ie but now I find it annoying the number of sites that it has trouble with.
Seberal of my favourite sites have forums that Safari just hates and I have loads of problems with ebay!
What's the best browser to use, a few people have pointed me at Camino?

Synotic · Feb 1, 2004, 01:50 PM

Originally posted by Andrew Stephens:
When Safari came out it was wizzo, esp compared to ie but now I find it annoying the number of sites that it has trouble with.
Seberal of my favourite sites have forums that Safari just hates and I have loads of problems with ebay!
What's the best browser to use, a few people have pointed me at Camino?

What sites are these exactly?

Dale Sorel · Feb 1, 2004, 02:45 PM

Originally posted by Andrew Stephens:
Is it me or is Safari getting less compatible

No doubt about it, it's you

ghporter · Feb 1, 2004, 04:28 PM

It looks more like site builders are getting lazy and not that Safari is less compatible. It's easy for a site to ask "what browser are you," rather than "do you support 128 bit SSL" and then "are you configured to use 128 bit SSL." So a lazy site developer saves one HTML transaction, and browsers that are fully capable of doing what their sites require don't get to.

There's a hack for Safari that exposes a debug menu. Near the bottom of that menu is an option for selecting the "User Agent," which is shorthand for what browser you claim to be. IE for Mac and for Windows are two of the options. If you select either one of them, you should have less problem with those troublesome sites.

Andrew Stephens · Feb 2, 2004, 06:28 AM

What hack is that and how do I do it. It might make things easier.

The site I find worst is e-bay uk which should be inexcusable for such a high profile site.

Also the forum software on two of the site I visit hate safari so if I can disguise myself as IE that would be great.

ghporter · Feb 2, 2004, 10:11 AM

Look here for details. This has worked on 99% of the sites I've had problems with-the other 1% is a particular server that has other "issues."

I agree that eBay anywhere should be as receptive as possible, and I can't figure any reason for it not to be, except for using a shortcut such as the one I described.

Andrew Stephens · Feb 2, 2004, 12:05 PM

Great! And I can turn the brushed metal monstrosity off too!

thanks

A

Cadaver · Feb 2, 2004, 02:12 PM

Various incompatibilities and rendering issues are my reasons for migrating more and more to Firebird.

Daracle · Feb 2, 2004, 02:47 PM

Sweet

Daracle · Feb 2, 2004, 03:10 PM

Although it still does not work for one of my Message boards...Which sucks...

ah well I guess, Just have to keep hitting the refresh button after my replies to see them updated

Andrew Stephens · Feb 2, 2004, 04:32 PM

Yeah

Now my safari looks much better without its brushed metal look but its still sucky on the forums and e-bay. Firebird?

Cadaver · Feb 2, 2004, 09:31 PM

Timely thread... Perhaps the freshly released Safari 1.2 will help!

OptimusG4 · Feb 2, 2004, 10:34 PM

Too bad my mailblocks account doens't seem to render now with 1.2....

Mike Pither · Feb 3, 2004, 02:18 PM

I have a feeling that Safari is worse in non English language countries. Here in Italy everyone seems to use explorer on Windows (most people don't even know that there is a choice) and I have never ever met another mac user or even someone who knew one.

I do however belong to an Italian mac forum (where all the mac users that I have never met hang out) and the lack of Safari compatability with sites is always one of the main topics there.

My bank is a perfect example. I can log in, but a part of the next screen, buttons and all is missing, and I don't even mean invisable, I mean not there! The smarty pants who suggest mozilla/Firebird/Camino or iCab can forget it as well because they don't work either. Only Microsoft explorer. Changing the browser ID does nothing either. Whats really worrying is that the latest mac version of explorer doesn't work very well either, rendering the pages quite badly (text overflowing buttons etc). To see the pages properly I need windows.

My local comune also has a couple of pages which render okish in Safari but choke completely on Firebird and Camino which is in a certain sense even stranger.

I have tried writing to the companies on occasions but there point of view often seems to be that if it works with windows explorer IT IS CORRECT which is certainly not necessarily true but they don't care as they have covered 99,9% of the market as far as they are concered.

Do other people living in Germany France etc etc etc have the same sort of problems??

eevyl · Feb 3, 2004, 02:42 PM

Well I am from Spain and my bank online site works wonderfully well (www.gruposantander.es) with Safari.

Mediaman_12 · Feb 3, 2004, 06:05 PM

Originally posted by Mike Pither:
I have tried writing to the companies on occasions but there point of view often seems to be that if it works with windows explorer IT IS CORRECT which is certainly not necessarily true but they don't care as they have covered 99,9% of the market as far as they are concered.

Non compliant code is going to be the death of the WWW. I would suggest running the pages through the W3C's own HTML validator and hitting them with the results.
These are the people who say what HTML code is (not Microsoft) Compliant HTML (or XHTML) is going to be increasingly important as more devices get 'Web enabled' (do these people really think that a fridge freezer, TV or a Phone with a web browser integrated is going to be running full IE6). You could also hit them with disability accessibility arguments, If they didn't think about good code they more than likely didn't consider this ether.

Mike Pither · Feb 3, 2004, 06:36 PM

mediaman 12 - I will give a go and see what the results are

Mike Pither · Feb 3, 2004, 06:42 PM

Well I tried it and it gave me a total of 239 errors of every sort imaginable. I will send it to the bank but I think the answer will still be the same - IT WORKS IN INTERNET EXPLORER SO IT MUST BE CORRECT ha ha ha

voodoo · Feb 3, 2004, 06:53 PM

Originally posted by Mediaman_12:
Non compliant code is going to be the death of the WWW. I would suggest running the pages through the W3C's own HTML validator and hitting them with the results.
These are the people who say what HTML code is (not Microsoft) Compliant HTML (or XHTML) is going to be increasingly important as more devices get 'Web enabled' (do these people really think that a fridge freezer, TV or a Phone with a web browser integrated is going to be running full IE6). You could also hit them with disability accessibility arguments, If they didn't think about good code they more than likely didn't consider this ether.

www.apple.com is wrought with 34 errors according to the validator and forums.macnn.com... well

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=ht...tern+Europe%29

Take a look.

www.microsoft.com was unreadable by the validator (the irony

)

CheesePuff · Feb 3, 2004, 07:00 PM

Hell 1.2 now works with Sprint PCS so it's all good.

Mediaman_12 · Feb 3, 2004, 08:11 PM

Originally posted by voodoo:
www.apple.com is wrought with 34 errors according to the validator and forums.macnn.com... well

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=ht...tern+Europe%29

Take a look.

www.microsoft.com was unreadable by the validator (the irony )

The problem is that many web-designers today cut there teeth during the 'Browser Wars' of the last few years, and so relay on lot's of ugly 'hacks' to get pages to both look good and display consistently.
Modern browsers no longer require such hacks, but lots of designers are stuck in there ways, and continue to use these outdated methods, and the validator is very strict, bet the MS site didn't even have a 'doc type' to report what version of HTML it is in.

Synotic · Feb 3, 2004, 09:04 PM

Originally posted by Mediaman_12:
Non compliant code is going to be the death of the WWW. I would suggest running the pages through the W3C's own HTML validator and hitting them with the results.
These are the people who say what HTML code is (not Microsoft) Compliant HTML (or XHTML) is going to be increasingly important as more devices get 'Web enabled' (do these people really think that a fridge freezer, TV or a Phone with a web browser integrated is going to be running full IE6). You could also hit them with disability accessibility arguments, If they didn't think about good code they more than likely didn't consider this ether.

While I appreciate compliant code, doing this is most likely pretty pointless. Most sites are probably created by a designer and then turned over to the client. They're not going to hire someone to recode their page for the standards, especially when supposedly 99% of their market uses Windows IE. In cases like this Safari and other browsers will just have to work around the sites.

Speaking of that, Mike, do you have any examples of these badly rendering sites? Perhaps I can take a look and see what the problem is and send it through Safari's bug system.

Also, with regards to all the errors the forums and apple are experiencing, the vast majority of those errors are improperly encoded ampersands within links. While I suppose it's syntactically incorrect, I don't think there's a browser out there that fails on them. So a site like MacNN Forum's front page, which relies on vBulletin and has hundreds of links is obviously going to get a ridiculous amount of errors. Most of the rest are deprecated markup errors, like using marginheight=0. The decision to make use of things like this by Apple were made long before CSS became popular, and all browsers still support them, deprecated or not. Luckily since Apple hired Zeldman and Bowman they'll probably get taken care of soon. On most of the new pages you can already see their contributions.

Goldie · Feb 3, 2004, 10:32 PM

Well, I'm probably one of the few with you. I use netscape. It is as fast as any browser. It works with every site. Haven't come across one it hasn't. I like the 'save form info' because there are a ton of sites that just won't store login info. Firebird is my second choice then safari. With every safari update nothing ever changes for me.