Okay, I have to admit… I’ve been known to be one of those pain in the ass people who occasionally feels it necessary to inform VOX of my thoughtful suggestions to make the site better (even though the more I use it, the more I realise how much it just kicks ass). Well, I think I may have posted ± three separate ”feedbacks” complaining about how Apple’s Safari’s incompatibility with VOX has been a source of frustration for me.
As per VOX’s suggestion (every time I try to compose a post in Safari) I finally decided to try Firefox. While it does allow most/all of the composing features one would need to successfully compose a post in VOX, it is thoroughly less pleasant to deal with on a regular basis… it's clunky… it doesn't do really some really simple things that you get spoiled by over in Safari.
For example…
When you go to type in the address in the URL bar it will auto-complete the entry with your most visited site with the same spelling AND provide a pull-down list of all other options — in order of most visited by ME. With Firefox you are presented with a pull-down list of the most recent places you’ve been which rarely includes my most visited places.
In Safari, I can choose to block or un-block pop-up windows from the FILE Menu or by simply pressing a keyboard shortcut… same for emptying the cache… and deleting history can be done from the HISTORY menu. There is no need to open the preference panel every time you've visited your online bank and you need to empty the cache of your personal information or delete history… novel ideas, I know.
The tabbed-browsing feature has the “close tab” button on the tab itself as oppose to the other side of the screen so you can close a tab in the background by means of this little button. Plus you can toggle from tab to tab using key-commands. With Firefox, you either have to highlight the tab then go click the button to close, or you have to right-click the tab and choose close from the pop-up menu… both ways take three to four times longer — I know, I know, we're only talking seconds here but they add up to frustration and interface friction.
Of course, you can install various extension to Firefox to increase its functionality including ones for closing the tabs and adding key-commands to allow for tab-toggling but the interface is still clunky.
In Safari, one of my favourite interface features is the Address Bar which is also the Progress Bar. So, as soon as you’ve entered your destination URL and pressed enter, the blue progress bar travels along the back of the Address Bar giving immediate feedback that things are working to get you where you need to go. In Firefox the progress bar is a bout an inch wide and tucked down in the bottom corner where you have to go searching for it every time…
ANYWAY…
Following another “suggestion” from the VOX team (more like a “swim at your own risk” statement than a suggestion really) I installed the latest nightly build of Webkit which promptly crashed Safari… brilliant. After restarting, however, I was pleased to find that I can now at least use some of the basic formatting tools. Specifically, the following: bold, italics, underline, left-align, centre-align and right-align. Colour me excited…
Oh well, it is getting there, slowly but surely… just too slowly for my liking.
BTW, for any one who cares, this entry was composed entirely using Safari with the latest nightly build of Webkit, except for the hyper-links and spell-checking, which were done in TextEdit.
Goodnight all.
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steelie
[UPDATE]
I did a bit of searching and it turns out that you can also download an extention that will allow Firefox to combine the Address and Progress bars and it can be found here. It is way more intuitive than Firefox’s default Progress Bar so I (personally) highly recommend it.
I guess the personal goal for this will now be to try and make Firefox as Safari-like as possible.
I’ll start a running list of all the extensions I find to make life more Safarifox and bearable.
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steelie