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My Gripes With Safari
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l008com
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Dec 7, 2014, 07:57 PM
 
I originally posted this to the Apple support forum, under the Safari section. But they took it down! I was a little surprised that they would take it down. I'm not just aimlessly bashing safari, I have very specific, reasonable complaints about it. Oh well, I figure I'd repost it here and at least it won't get taken down... hopefully.

Safari has been driving me crazy more and more lately. It has design flaws that just make my blood boil. I shouldn't get this upset over a web browser, but I do. First of all, let me say that I have NEVER been a fan of the unified address/search box. These are separate things and I there was no problem having them separate. Now, we have one unified box, that is surrounded by blank grey space on either side. Its not even like we put the space taken up by separate boxes, to better use. It's just merged for no reason and now we have headaches. 
  • The first, and possibly most annoying... Sometimes, for no reason whatsoever, safari will mistake search terms for a hostname, and try to go to a url that doesn't exist. It doesn't always do it. It tends to do it a lot for the same words. It used to do it all the time when I searched for "camaro". It would try to go to http://camaro and of course, would give me a server not found error. I just typed a street address into the box, to bring up a google map. It encoded the spaces into %20's and tried to do the same thing, load the search terms as a hostname. After searching again, it went back to normal. But often times, repeating just does the same wrong thing over and over, it doesn't uses correct itself like it happened to just now. 
  • If I do a search in the unified search/url bar, let's say I search for "whats my ip address" ... So, I get a google result page, with my search terms in the search box that is part of the web page, AND my search terms are still in the search box built into the browser. Lets say I then copy those search terms out of the browser's search box. The text I select is "whats my ip address". I choose copy. What's in my clipboard? Is it the text I selected? Nope, it's the full google search url: https://www.google.com/search?client...-8&oe=UTF-8 I can certainly see how from time to time, you might want to copy a search URL. But not when you are copying the search terms. You copy the terms because you want the terms. This makes no sense. Another simpler version of this very annoying behavior, is when you try to copy the domain name out of the url/search box. The "http://" is no longer displayed, so again they add it into your copy text automatically. When I copy text I selected, I want THAT TEXT and nothing else. All these terrible behaviors would easily be remedied by simply separating the search box back out from the URL box again. Then we can treat search terms like search terms and URLs like URLs, and deal with this annoying stuff. 
  • I also really hate that you no longer see the full URL, only the domain name of the site you are on. You can change this in preferences, so you can still see the full URL. And this is what I have done on my Macs. But still, I don't like that as a default setting. Yet knowing apple, being a preferences that defaults to off, is your last step before no longer being an option at all.
  • Safari used to use the standard developer tools that chrome still uses. And life was good. Then apple rebuilt safari's dev tools and made them absolutely terrible. It is PAINFUL to use. Gone is logic and common sense, in are random, nondescript buttons that do god knows what. Thankfully, the "Open Page With..." menu item is one click away, and its very easy to switch to chrome or firefox when you need to do a little javascript debugging without pulling your hair out.
  • While I do kind of like the app-style website bookmarks that come down from the search bar, I hate how awkward the search bar is in general. You used to be able to drag a url out of the bar by dragging the favicon. Now you have to click in the bar first to get the icon to show up, after waiting for the url to slide over. But when you click, don't accidentally click on the lock or you'll bring up the SSL info sheet. And its easy to accidentally click on the lock because it is directly to the left of the centered text that is the domain name, in other words the lock moves based on how long the website url is. 
  • PAGE TITLES ARE VERY IMPORTANT TO A WEB PAGE! If you use the new Safari and you don't use tabs, page titles are no more! Page titles are very important to organize browsing, or as a developer, to relay important or relevant information to the viewer. Or just to distinguish similar looking web pages. But Apple saw fit to remove them entirely!! Well, unless you use tabs. And I know, many people use tabs. But many do not. Particularly people who use Expose/Mission Control heavily and/or are on desktops with big and possibly multiple displays. With that sort of setup, tabs don't speed you up, they slow you down. They render Expose useless. On my 13" laptop, yes I will use tabs, they're a great way to deal with limited screen real estate. But when you have lots of screen real estate, tabs lose their purpose. But this isn't about tabs, it's about the missing page title when you choose not to use tabs. 
  • Apple introduced a feature to override a websites option of "don't remember this username and password". It was great to finally be able to log into all websites quickly and easily, without having to look up secure notes in keychain access. Yes, it is technically not as secure remembering your banks username and password. But given that the alternative is to have that username and password somewhere handy so you can read it and type it in, I'd argue that NOT remembering is less secure. Also, again not everyone uses laptops. Some of us have desktops that live deep in our homes, and are not in any reasonable dangers of growing legs and walking away. I would love this option back. Along with a real reload button that is a separate button again. Look at all the space on either side of the url/search bar. Just add reload as an option in the toolbar customizer. It would be so easy, it's insane that you can't do it.

Ok, I'm sick of writing about how much I hate Safari. I've thought about switching to chrome or firefox, but i'm not a huge fan of either browser's interface. But, given how I get more and more unhappy with Safari with every update, I may yet end up switching. 
( Last edited by l008com; Dec 7, 2014 at 07:59 PM. Reason: more formatting)
     
Ham Sandwich
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Dec 7, 2014, 11:25 PM
 
It definitely sounds like many of your grievances with Safari concern the functionality and design of the navigation bar area of the browser and developer workflow. While I can't comment on aspects related to the developer workflow (not being a developer myself), I have observed many of the behaviors that you noted, though I passively get used to them. This version of Safari seems to have moved a lot of the buttons to key commands, e.g., Command-Option-2, Command-A, delete to clear History, and Command-R to reload. I tend to like little nerdy key commands if they speed up workflow (they usually do).

My biggest gripe is that if you open and close tabs over the normal course of browsing, the bottom edge of the display window keeps growing, and growing, over the course of the week of use... I have to keep manually shrinking it before it grows too much.
     
Curiosity
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Dec 8, 2014, 01:34 AM
 
I really do not see the point of showing just the domain name and not the whole address. I want to know exactly where I am browsing. Is it impossible to emphasize the domain name without making the rest of the address either disappear or become so transparent it is hard to read?
     
Spheric Harlot
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Dec 8, 2014, 03:51 AM
 
It's anti-phishing and anti-fake website.
     
l008com  (op)
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Dec 8, 2014, 03:53 AM
 
But it's also dumbing down the whole browsing experience. There are other ways you could have done it. And as always, they could have an option in preferences to revert back to the old way that us "advanced" users would prefer. But apple hates doing that.
     
sdp4462
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Dec 9, 2014, 04:16 PM
 
If there are any Safari extensions developers out there, I've designed a GUI for a new RSS interface. I'd be happy to work with you to get it implemented.

I do, of course, echo the complaints here. Safari seems a little lost in the jungle these days.
     
ADeweyan
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Dec 9, 2014, 07:22 PM
 
I also prefer to use Safari -- even though it has adopted many of the "features" (AKA "interface disasters") that drove me from Chrome and Firefox.

In general think it comes down to this -- and this is what always frustrated me about Windows, and more and more in the last few years, frustrates me about OSX: software being designed to make your life easier by anticipating what you want, and what you want to do. That's great as long as it anticipates correctly, but as often as not, it gets it wrong, and then it makes me break my rhythm, take a step back, and dig out what they've hidden for no good reason.

Sure, my mother or grandmother would rather not see the full URL of a web page. Shoot, I've seen people get rid of their address bar altogether, set google as their home page, and just use the google search box to get around. But I'm not them. I like to know where I am. I like to see directory structure. I like to see file names. I'm a web developer, I often need to see these things. And even when you change the setting in the preferences, the new unified search/URL bar is so short that much of the URL is often cut off. I like the point about all the extra room up there. What are they trying to preserve?

Mac OSX circa Snow Leopard and before was virtually transparent, I could do what I needed to do, see what I needed to see without thinking about it, without the operating system (or browser) getting my way. No more. Now it feels like it feels with Windows, where I have to work against my computer to get information that has been hidden as a service to me. It feels like I'm being nibbled to death by ants. It feels like it's been designed by the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation. They used to have just the right balance of technical detail and control, and clarity and ease of use. Hiding important information is not clarity -- it's hiding information that will often need to be manually revealed. The only saving grace for OSX as far as I'm concerned, is that Windows is still even worse (and that was before Windows 8, which is off-the-chart bad).

Here's an example from another realm. I HATE car windows that automatically roll all the way down. This is for convenience when paying tolls. I rarely need to pay a toll, but I want to roll my window part of the way down virtually every time I get in my car. Sure, if I touch the window control in just the right way, for just the right amount of time, I can get the window to roll down part way -- but it's much trickier than it needs to be, and much too tricky for someone who is also trying to drive his car safely. So this little feature, designed to prevent me from having to have a hand off the steering wheel for four more seconds when manually paying a toll, causes me to take my mind off my driving and keep my hand off the wheel much longer because after seeing the window roll all the way down, I have to roll it back up to where I want it. And this happens almost every day.

When I'm driving my car or operating my computer, I want to work with tools, not services. I don't want my computer trying to serve me, I want it to do what I tell it to do, and show me what I want it to show me. The more it tries to do for me, the harder it becomes to use. That's not counter intuitive when you realize that "use" is an interaction, not a transaction. It calls for a back-and-forth relationship, not a one-time function. When one side of the relationship is hiding important information because it doesn't think the other side needs it, it's like a bad marriage where communication is the problem. OSX has become much worse as a partner over the last few years, and if there was a way I could take it to counseling, I would.
     
Spheric Harlot
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Dec 9, 2014, 08:31 PM
 
Most car windows I've used have a "first click" to roll down as you hold the lever, and auto-roll all the way only when you push beyond that first click.

Very simple.
     
DarkStarRed
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Dec 10, 2014, 06:08 AM
 
[QUOTE=l008com;4302795]

Safari has been driving me crazy more and more lately. It has design flaws that just make my blood boil. I shouldn't get this upset over a web browser, but I do. First of all, let me say that I have NEVER been a fan of the unified address/search box. These are separate things and I there was no problem having them separate. Now, we have one unified box, that is surrounded by blank grey space on either side. Its not even like we put the space taken up by separate boxes, to better use. It's just merged for no reason and now we have headaches. 
  • The first, and possibly most annoying... Sometimes, for no reason whatsoever, safari will mistake search terms for a hostname, and try to go to a url that doesn't exist. It doesn't always do it. It tends to do it a lot for the same words. It used to do it all the time when I searched for "camaro". It would try to go to http://camaro and of course, would give me a server not found error. I just typed a street address into the box, to bring up a google map. It encoded the spaces into %20's and tried to do the same thing, load the search terms as a hostname. After searching again, it went back to normal. But often times, repeating just does the same wrong thing over and over, it doesn't uses correct itself like it happened to just now. 

    That's strange I don't get the same results searching camaro, I get my List of Search,
    Bookmarks & History, Search History/ Go To Site & Search on this Page.
    I have all checked under Safari>Pref's>Search except for Include Suggestions!

  • If I do a search in the unified search/url bar, let's say I search for "whats my ip address" ... So, I get a google result page, with my search terms in the search box that is part of the web page, AND my search terms are still in the search box built into the browser. Lets say I then copy those search terms out of the browser's search box. The text I select is "whats my ip address". I choose copy. What's in my clipboard? Is it the text I selected? Nope, it's the full google search url: https://www.google.com/search?<br />...-8&oe=UTF-8 I can certainly see how from time to time, you might want to copy a search URL. But not when you are copying the search terms. You copy the terms because you want the terms. This makes no sense. Another simpler version of this very annoying behavior, is when you try to copy the domain name out of the url/search box. The "http://" is no longer displayed, so again they add it into your copy text automatically. When I copy text I selected, I want THAT TEXT and nothing else. All these terrible behaviors would easily be remedied by simply separating the search box back out from the URL box again. Then we can treat search terms like search terms and URLs like URLs, and deal with this annoying stuff.


    Ok this works as meant to be: When pasting search term back into Safari you'll get a list of choice Search For or Web History. If you set your preferred Search-Engine in Spotlight
    then when using it for quick search will give you the results.
    Also if you first click to the right then drag the Search Term from the ULR you'll get the term saved as a weblog.

     
  • I also really hate that you no longer see the full URL, only the domain name of the site you are on. You can change this in preferences, so you can still see the full URL. And this is what I have done on my Macs. But still, I don't like that as a default setting. Yet knowing apple, being a preferences that defaults to off, is your last step before no longer being an option at all.
  • Safari used to use the standard developer tools that chrome still uses. And life was good. Then apple rebuilt safari's dev tools and made them absolutely terrible. It is PAINFUL to use. Gone is logic and common sense, in are random, nondescript buttons that do god knows what. Thankfully, the "Open Page With..." menu item is one click away, and its very easy to switch to chrome or firefox when you need to do a little javascript debugging without pulling your hair out.
  • While I do kind of like the app-style website bookmarks that come down from the search bar, I hate how awkward the search bar is in general. You used to be able to drag a url out of the bar by dragging the favicon. Now you have to click in the bar first to get the icon to show up, after waiting for the url to slide over. But when you click, don't accidentally click on the lock or you'll bring up the SSL info sheet. And its easy to accidentally click on the lock because it is directly to the left of the centered text that is the domain name, in other words the lock moves based on how long the website url is. 

    You don't have to do this on a Website Page you are on just Click on the NAME & drag-up saves to your desktop as Internet location.

  • PAGE TITLES ARE VERY IMPORTANT TO A WEB PAGE! If you use the new Safari and you don't use tabs, page titles are no more! Page titles are very important to organize browsing, or as a developer, to relay important or relevant information to the viewer. Or just to distinguish similar looking web pages. But Apple saw fit to remove them entirely!! Well, unless you use tabs. And I know, many people use tabs. But many do not. Particularly people who use Expose/Mission Control heavily and/or are on desktops with big and possibly multiple displays. With that sort of setup, tabs don't speed you up, they slow you down. They render Expose useless. On my 13" laptop, yes I will use tabs, they're a great way to deal with limited screen real estate. But when you have lots of screen real estate, tabs lose their purpose. But this isn't about tabs, it's about the missing page title when you choose not to use tabs. 

    Yes Apple choose to fold Page Title & ULR into One, clicking on gives full ULR/Title

  • Apple introduced a feature to override a websites option of "don't remember this username and password". It was great to finally be able to log into all websites quickly and easily, without having to look up secure notes in keychain access. Yes, it is technically not as secure remembering your banks username and password. But given that the alternative is to have that username and password somewhere handy so you can read it and type it in, I'd argue that NOT remembering is less secure. Also, again not everyone uses laptops. Some of us have desktops that live deep in our homes, and are not in any reasonable dangers of growing legs and walking away. I would love this option back. Along with a real reload button that is a separate button again. Look at all the space on either side of the url/search bar. Just add reload as an option in the toolbar customizer. It would be so easy, it's insane that you can't do it.

    Ok If you've saved Password/Usernames with Keychain then this are available via Safari>Pref's>Password then Check Show selected ULR/PW then you can copy Website, Username & Password.
     
ghporter
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Dec 11, 2014, 08:15 AM
 
I changed automobile brands about a year ago. The "user interface" between the previous brand and the new brand was different - audio controls on the steering wheel are on one side with the old brand and the other with the new brand, that sort of thing. Funny, but it only took me a short time to get used to where the controls and switches were in the new car...

Safari's interface is not nearly as different from before as what Microsoft did with Office several years ago. And somehow everybody using Office managed to adapt pretty quickly. I really don't like that new Office interface, but I can get by...

I think "common sense" and "logic" in terms of how development tools are set up are semantically equivalent to "the way I'm used to doing it" instead of "fundamentally universal principles." Big difference.

Glenn -----OTR/L, MOT, Tx
     
Ham Sandwich
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Dec 12, 2014, 05:07 PM
 
I just updated to Safari 8.0.2, and Apple still has not fixed that one stupid annoying bug in Safari, under item 2:

http://forums.macnn.com/90/mac-os-x/...e/#post4295983
     
   
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