Safari: First impressions

Okay before I start I should say this is not a full review, I’m just gonna state a few points that I like and a couple that I don’t.

Likes
Ergonomically
Text rendering, I love it. The text is much more dense, its similar to Photoshop’s text rendering, it’s way way way easier on the eyse, especially with large chunks of text like blogs, it’s much easier to read and you don’t get a double vision feeling, which I do sometimes when looking at large chunks of continuous text.

Visually
The tabs looks better than Firefox an IE but that’s subjective.
Search bar looks better, again subjective and not something the average person might notice.

Dislikes
Functionally

• No mouse gestures,
• No middle button scroll (I’m not talking about the scroll wheel, I’m talking bout clicking down your scroll wheel and then moving the mouse up and down. – same complaint I had with Opera) It’s much easier if you wanna scroll all the way up or down a page really quickly. I know some of you don’t use this function at all but I do.
• Creating new tab is a hassle, the easiest way to do it is Ctrl + T which means you have to reach for your keyboard, not very elegant at all. (relates to next point)
  
• Opening a bookmark in new tab, you can’t just middle click it like Firefox. It’s a hassle you actually have to right click and then create new tab or create a new tab then open the bookmark.

Unsure
Speed? What speed. Seriously all these rendering speed thing is bull crap marketing gimmicks, with a dial up connection it’s slow as fuck anyway. With a broadband connection its fast as hell already, and a 1/2sec page rendering time doesn’t matter. It’s like all these camera lab tests, pointless crap that very rarely(99.99%) matters in real life.

I’m not sure if I like the RSS implementation in Safari. It’s not that I don’t like it or it’s bad it’s just I’m so used to how Firefox does it. I can see some advantages in the way Safari does it and can understand why some people like it. The best way to explain it is a screenshot.

This is how Firefox does it, it shows the sites that you’ve RSS in you bookmarks sidebar, each site is like a folder when you open the folder it shows you the headings for each new posts, and from there you can decide if you want to read it.

When you click on the article it opens up the actual site. And this is where middle clicking works best in Firefox, middle click on an article and it opens it in a new tab. Simple, easy, elegant, functional.

I like how Firefox implements it because theres less clicks involved. It uses less space across the screen and so you don’t have to move your mouse left to right, which for me personally is a better work flow.

Then you have how Safari does it. On the side bar is however you organise your bookmarks sidebar from there you select the appropriate folder and you see your list of RSS feeds you’ve subscribed to. However from this view you can’t see any hints of articles headings or abstract you have no idea what new articles/post there may be.

So from there you double click on the feed you want and it opens up the page below. This is where the lack of middle click in safari is such a pain. To open it in the same tab is easy just double click, but to open it in a new tab you have to right click to bring up the context menu then select open in the tab. Too much hassle just to open an RSS feed in a new tab.

Opening the feed then opens this page which is where the articles are displayed, so that was already how many clicks just to have a rough idea of the article’s content.

This page itself is well designed it’s elegant as you’d expect from Apple and you have the controls you need to display the full article or just an abstract or even just the heading. From there clicking on the headings of an article will bring you to the website itself. Finally! After all that.

The downside to Safari’s implementation is that sometimes you don’t want to read every single article. Firefox allows you to select the articles you want to read by simply clicking on the article headings on the sidebar. In Safari you will have to scroll through articles you don’t want to read.

In the end though the different RSS implementation is a personal preference and I’m sure some people swear by Firefox, while others Safari. My personal pref. is obviously Firefox.

Overall my personal pref. is also Firefox due to way I work and the plugins that I’ve installed to improve my work flow, I realise however Safari does have it’s own plugin system, and while it’s not as big a Firefox’s, it has quality. Until I can find replacements for these extensions I’ll likely stick to Firefox.

Filed under: Tech