PURVEYOR OF FINE WORDS

June 4, 2005

June 4 2005

Safari Sucks

Coding for Apple’s Safari browser is like having to work with the CEO’s son: it does a shitty job and touts useless features like snapback, but you have to deal with it because if you decide to criticize it, you’ll really hear it from the frothing-at-the-mouth Apple digerati.

Pre-1.3 Safari was just a joke. I can only imagine that the Gmail engineers were cursing it for months while trying to make it play well with their engine. 1.3 brought a bunch of much needed bug fixes, but then managed to break the onload handler six ways from Sunday. The Acid2 test is a quaint merit badge to slap on Apple’s sash, but have you actually looked at some of the test cases? Nobody actually codes tables 37 levels deep with deeply disturbing border settings, so it still doesn’t address some basic needs. My big peeve right now is that XSLT is not available as a service to javascript — it’s only callable as an initial XSL transform with the page load.

This brings me to a more general rant against the state of the OS X browser: Safari is impotent; Firefox is ass-slow; IE is more stale than spam. God-damnit.



19 Comments »

  1. Don’t forget, Opera 8, the newest version, breaks on half of the pages I have tried, and IE, although it will always suck, is still retaining a ridiculous amount of the market share. It is hard to write content for IE garbage, knowing there are browsers that can do a heck of a lot better. Firefox, slow or not, seems like the best of the options. Hopefully, when IE 7 comes out, and only XP users can install it, there will be a greater exodus to something else. Keep up the cool creations!
    ak

    Comment by ak — June 24, 2005 @ 11:15 am

  2. What about camino ? It’s faster than Firefox no ?

    Comment by lanu — July 26, 2005 @ 1:13 pm

  3. Hi and thanks for you interesting bloggings.

    I’m surprised didn’t mention Opera, although mentioned by ak… there seem to be some kind of conspiracy trying to avoid it’s presence.

    Personally I stick with Opera when surfing the web. As far as coding JavaScript and such, I’m a designer not a programmer, but still think Opera is giving me the least trouble.

    GEMiNi LXXIII

    Comment by GEMiNi — July 27, 2005 @ 7:10 pm

  4. IE works the best all you mac people…get over it…it will remain the best and have the highest penetration. Get our from your $6,000.00 juke box and Stop your self righteous MAC crusade to find the “latest” browser and use what works…simple…you are the reason we have to design for 7 other browsers for less that 7 percent of the population.

    Comment by Dick Goesinia — August 18, 2005 @ 5:30 am

  5. Wow!!!
    I am an idiot but you can ask me two quesions in a row UNLIKE Safari. First search is what it is. Second search kills Safari. What a great feature!
    Is this the new face of technology? Not slow - just ineffective.

    Comment by Brian Duncan — August 25, 2005 @ 3:22 pm

  6. Safari was my browser of choise until the updates that came with tiger. Now safari suck so bad as to be unusable. It only loads half the pics on any given web page. tried to reinstall but the insatller says it is not compatible with my system. Safari sucks, firefox is slow, IE is what I have had to revert to but really really don’t like it either.

    Comment by Doug Radcliffe — September 1, 2005 @ 6:11 pm

  7. I run a few sites based on Drupal and Wordpress and with each subsequent update, Safari’s sucking grows more and more. It was tolerable, but since the most recent update a few days ago, it’s become unuseable. I’d love to see what kind of QA they’re doing on this stuff in terms of application compatibility.

    And Firefox is slow… but it works. I’ve tried out Camino, but it’s on par in buggieness as Safari is. Of course, before it was worse… so, keep on going Camino!

    Comment by Darrel — November 12, 2005 @ 7:23 pm

  8. I retract my previous comment about Camino. I was using the multilingual version which hasn’t been updated, but found the standard version was at 1.0b1.

    After downloading and installing it, I tried out my sites and am very pleased to report that all the javascript WYSIWYG editors worked, everything loaded and rendered quickly, and I’m a happy camper.

    So long Safari!

    Comment by Darrel — November 12, 2005 @ 8:28 pm

  9. Opera 9 has too a great XSLT engine, but there’s only now a preview.

    Dick Goesinia, all other browser respect standards so you only need to use w3c recommendation, while IE only supports M$ extensions, and it’s damn slow. Look at the example at http://johnvey.com/features/deliciousdirector/xslt-filter-sort.html . The script sniffs for standard support, and gives IE the js hack it supports.

    Comment by mors — November 16, 2005 @ 8:37 am

  10. how about omniweb: it saves workspaces/projects and opens everything exaclty as you left it b4 it crashes. fair nuff u have to pay.. but free trial lets me enjoy it for a bit. its everything i could hope safari could be.. but they would put a better apple design to it.. like what Hicks has done: http://www.hicksdesign.co.uk/tag/omniweb/

    Comment by anon — April 19, 2006 @ 1:47 am

  11. “and IE, although it will always suck, is still retaining a ridiculous amount of the market share”

    That’s about as biased as you can get. That tells me, no matter how fast, cutting-edge, and superb it gets, people like you are going to hate it just because it’s a Microsoft product.

    I think IE7 is a great improvement, although Microsoft are going to have to keep up with competition if they want to keep hold of their monopoly. They are falling behind.

    Comment by Jackson Capper — September 6, 2006 @ 6:10 pm

  12. Safari sucks. Yea it does. I tried to make a vertical menu that opens on mouse move and closes at mouse out. It worked on each and every browser except safari. So my conclusion is SUFARI SUCKSSSSSSS !!!

    Comment by Solver — October 7, 2006 @ 6:29 pm

  13. Coding ?……… I pay my money and i expect something that works…. I came into the world of Apple when OS10.1 was released and that was the biggest learning curve i had ever experienced in my life. Searching out workarounds and fixits just to view sites around the web. With Safari now 1.3.2 i’m using it’s like ive suffered an Apple timewarp and i have to keep switching browsers.

    Well no longer am i going to suffer Safari.. It’s being deleted after i post this and i’m going with Flock… It works and isnt as fussy as Safari choosing what content around the web i’m going to be able to view today…

    Grab yourself a download and give it a try…

    Comment by Flock user — October 27, 2006 @ 4:37 pm

  14. Not what I read…. I.E. has lost a great grount ot Firefox.

    Safari was my browser of choise until the updates that came with tiger. Now safari suck so bad as to be unusable. It only loads half the pics on any given web page. tried to reinstall but the insatller says it is not compatible with my system. Safari sucks, firefox is slow, IE is what I have had to revert to but really really don’t like it either.

    This happens to operator error. Funny all 10 of my machines that have the Safari, not one of them exhibit the problems you mention. So you must be doing something wrong. Firefox is slow? Wow you right! I’m running DSL at 6mps and it loads just as fast as I.E. (I have timed this with a stopwatch, and know what you are saying is absolute bunk. What this person is saying? He is running the latest Safari which runs on 10.4.3 and guess what, you can’t load I.E. on a Mac because it is not made for 10.4.3.

    You see folks, people like this lie like sh*t, becasue they don’t know sh*t like the person above who made these alleged claims.

    Dude, if your going to lie, make sure you tell the facts right, because someone out there will catch you in telling a lie.

    Tootles….

    Comment by dan — October 28, 2006 @ 2:25 pm

  15. “Safari is impotent; Firefox is ass-slow; IE is more stale than spam. God-damnit.”

    Wow, that’s concentrated wisdom right there,a d your whole post, actually. I’ve never seen someone with so accurate opinion about the major browsers (I’m not kidding). I’m especially sick of people calling Firefox “faster than IE”… when in practice it hangs and sits there for almost any action I perform on it (on a 3Ghz/1GB RAM machine, modest but not quite).

    Comment by SV — June 12, 2007 @ 7:00 pm

  16. Both Safari and Internet Explorer suck! Both browsers render CSS coding in a very f-ed up way. The only browser worth my time is Firefox, unless it’s a Web site that wasn’t made for Firefox (ie, poorly coded).

    I wish all these damned browser makers could get together and decide on some standards in regards to how each browser renders CSS, XHTML, PHP, etc. code.

    Comment by Mark — August 27, 2007 @ 3:01 pm

  17. Safari SUX iBALS
    Internet explorer 7 rules over safari,firefox,opera,netscape and all the others!

    Comment by Ben — August 28, 2007 @ 11:18 am

  18. I honestly hate safari and will always be a PC girl anyway. Mozilla is far better.

    Comment by Nancy Fingley — March 11, 2010 @ 4:25 pm

  19. Do schools actually use safari in their labs? I need to know for a project.

    Comment by Preschool Mom — March 11, 2010 @ 4:27 pm

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