2010-06-12
post/691580154
Jim Lynch, in Safari Reader: Apple’s Weapon of Mass Destruction (via, via)
This chap can’t have been around when Load Images was a browser setting. Or have read the CSS spec, and the assumption that users would be able to apply styles.
Of course, given he’s forced his rant over three pages (each of which are incredibly short and smothered with ads), and because I haven’t installed Safari 5 yet, I’ve only read the first third of his article, so perhaps he covers all of that. Somehow, though, I doubt it. And I’m not going to give him the satisfaction of page views to find out.
post/691580886
2010-02-11
A short list of Chrome issues (beta 2)
An update on the issues listed in December:
- You can’t invert open behind - on Safari command shift click opens in a new window behind the current one with command click opening in a new window in front/focus, whereas Chrome is hard-wired to do the opposite (and with tabs to boot)
- Tab moves between all link and form elements, not just form elements (Gmail does this on Safari now too. Boo!)
- There are no command key shortcuts to open bookmarks in the toolbar
- The combined text/title/URL completion in the “Omnibox” means you have to go too far into a URL to easily work around the lack of command key shortcuts
You can’t set a default font size, so sites that honour relative fonts (like delicious, and (in places) Twitter) now have Huge Idiot Typefaces- fixed, in Preferences > Under the Hood
While Chrome sensibly uses the keychain (so, like Camino, it can share usernames and passwords set up in Safari) it doesn’t offer to complete the username part, meaning more typing- this seems to be fixed too
- Crashes on pasting a rich text post from Tumblr back into Tumblr
- Crashes on importing my (admittedly huge) Safari history
On the other hand, I am pleased to see that a request for the zoom button to instead maximise has been rejected as “Invalid”.
2009-12-08
A short list of Chrome issues (beta 1)
… most of which are actually due to me being stuck liking the way Safari does things, or a consequence of it being a beta.
- You can’t invert open behind - on Safari command shift click opens in a new window behind the current one with command click opening in a new window in front/focus, whereas Chrome is hard-wired to do the opposite (and with tabs to boot)
- Tab moves between all link and form elements, not just form elements. (I can’t remember if Safari picks this up from the system-level preferences or not, but it does what I want, and Chrome doesn’t.)
- There are no command key shortcuts to open bookmarks in the toolbar¹
- The combined text/title/URL completion in the “Omnibox” means you have to go too far into a URL to easily work around the lack of command key shortcuts
- You can’t set a default font size, so sites that honour relative fonts (like delicious, and (in places) Twitter) now have Huge Idiot Typefaces
- While Chrome sensibly uses the keychain (so, like Camino, it can share usernames and passwords set up in Safari) it doesn’t offer to complete the username part, meaning more typing.²
It’s been a nice evening, but despite being rock solid, Chrome goes back in the “for emergency use” box for a while. Sadly, given the team’s approach to customisation, it might be quite a long while indeed.
¹ Camino also gets this wrong, in a very odd (yet explicable) way: if the bookmark bar is visible, it works, but if it’s not, it doesn’t. The developers seem to believe that an invisible option is confusing. I believe that twenty vertical pixels on a laptop display are more precious than feedback. Sorry.
² Probably this is sensible from a security point of view but it’s annoying me, so I’m listing it anyway. I’m sure you’re sensible enough to make your own decision.
2009-06-23
post/128758333
Mobile Browser Battlemodo: Which Phones Deliver The Real Web
I did wonder whether I was being too harsh on Windows Mobile in my post about phones on Saturday. Well, this rendering effort from Mobile IE (of YouTube, in case you can’t tell) which is actually more reminiscent of net.art circa 1997, is the sort of thing that persuades me that, no, I wasn’t. At all.
2009-03-02
post/82930091
Wait, this isn’t an issue, this is a feature!
2008-09-02
Google Chrome for developers?
In all the commentary about Google’s new browser, I haven’t seen any note of a feature that’s becoming central to many other browsers - development tools.
After all, Firefox has the pack-leading Firebug, and Safari’s (bundled) Web Inspector is getting more capable with every release. Given Chrome’s process manager, at least a profiler for developers (to make sure their web applications don’t kill it) wouldn’t go amiss. As it is, though, nothing’s been mentioned, and I haven’t seen any notes on extensibility, either (meaning a third party can’t write something like Firebug (although presumably the recently-improved Lite cousin will work)).
On the other hand, it’s not even out yet. Maybe I should give Google a little time.
