The Brunch Table

Apple certainly gave us an action-packed keynote today. Among other things, they finally unveiled their much-rumored native web browser, Safari. First impressions are below:

The Good

• It is fast, and minimalist.
• The integrated Google-bar, with its “SnapBack” to search results feature and search history, is handy. My favorite googling interface was the old Google sidebar for IE on Windows, which let you flip through the results quickly, but the SnapBack feature provides a decent approximation of the functionality.
• The requisite popup killing.
• Auto-denying third-party advertising cookies (as far as I can tell, Chimera didn’t have this yet).
• The “Report Bugs” button. Every piece of software (especially betas) should make it this easy to report problems and submit suggestions. The option to submit the code and screenshot of what you’re looking at is an excellent way to tighten the feedback loop on rendering bugs. I haven’t seen it crash yet, so I don’t know if it has any TalkBack-like crash reporting functionality.
• Forcing you to name and categorize your bookmarks as you save them is a great idea, though I’m not sure I’d call it “rethinking the whole notion of bookmarks”, as Apple does.
• It’s smart to use open-source infrastructural components these days. Although everyone was expecting them to use Mozilla code, they ended up going with khtml as their layout engine, supposedly because it was lighter-weight.
• The download manager is much less troublesome and cluttered than Chimera’s. It shows all the files in a list (like Mac IE does), each with a “cancel” button that turns into a “show location” button when the download is finished.

The Bad

• Update: Apparently, it can delete your home directory on a whim.
• Rendering bugs–it’s a beta for good reason.
• No tabbed browsing–hard to do without after using Chimera for so long.
• It doesn’t save usernames and passwords in the Keychain, as Chimera does.

The Odd

• The default font is Lucida Grande 14. Not surprising, considering Apple’s tastes.
• The combination address/progress bar. This one threw me for a loop the first couple times I loaded a page–the address field fills up with blue from left to right as the page loads. It’s nicely space-efficient, but I’m not sure how I like it from an aesthetic and usability standpoint yet. Update: I think I figured out why it bugs me. Unlike every other progress bar in OS X, it doesn’t pulsate–which makes it tend to look like some kind of weird text highlighting glitch when the bar isn’t changing size.
• The SnapBack button in the address bar, which brings you back to the last time you typed an address or clicked on a bookmark, is an interesting idea–I haven’t used it enough to see whether it’s particularly useful in practice.
• When I read early reports that Safari used an “iTunes-like” bookmark interface, I was expecting it to include a slick dynamic search function. The address bar does auto-complete URLs that are in your bookmarks, but not names. In any case, I’ve pretty much stopped using bookmarks beyond those on the “favorites bar”–Google is often at least as effective these days.

I’ll update this entry as more stuff turns up.