“Antoine de Saint-Exupéry once wrote, ‘perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away.’ To make sure perfection doesn’t slip through its fingers, Apple always errs on the side of taking away a bit more than some people think is necessary,” Iljitsch van Beijnum writes for Ars Technica.
“Although Mountain Lion doesn’t ruthlessly excise big-ticket items the way Lion did — such as compatibility with PowerPC binaries — there are still many smaller features that have gone away,” van Beijnum writes. “After living with Mountain Lion for a few weeks, we’re really starting to miss some of these.”
Here are 10 of the ones we miss the most:
10. Non-smooth scrolling
9. Automatic document locking
8. iChat
7. (The GUI to) Web sharing
6. The Safari search box
5. Displays in the menu bar
4. Using a laptop with the lid open, but with just an external display active
3. Battery time
2. Safari’s Activity Viewer
1. RSS in Safari (and Mail)
Read more in the full article here.
While I don’t miss none of those features, I do have a problem with the scrolling (and Snow Leopard too).
When you at at the bottom of a folder, every time you try to reach the last folder, the scrolling bar (to move left or right) shows and it won’t let you click in the last file at least you do it slowly or scroll up with the mouse while clicking on the file.
It is not painful but could be great if they fix it.
Have scroll bars shown all the time and the problem disappears
Good call, I have done that, thanks!
Now I don’t miss anything from the other versions 🙂
Stable wifi and usb functionality!!!
I no longer have access to any of my usb thumb drives after upgrading, and wifi is very intermittent.
I’ve noticed a delay in mounting USB thumb drives, but have not had any difficulty in getting access to them. Perhaps you are a tad impatient.
I’ve waited an hour, and then got impatient. They don’t show up in Disk utility either. They work fine in Lion and SL. There are threads about it on the apple support pages.
Seems intermittent though. Some have problems, most don’t.
How about setting SNOOZE times for reminders and iCal events!!
How about setting notification periods (1 day, two days in advance) the same between OS X ML and iOS? The lack of longer advance times in iOS is maddening!
Yup! Varios SNOOZE times to delay events & reminders is BY FAR the #1 thing taken away from me in Mountain Lion! They’re almost unusable now! Completely retarded Apple! WTF!?!
Please send your comments about this to apple.com/feedback. I absolutely agree – for business use, this change makes Notifications worse than useless.
Absolutely! This is imperative to me. I was hoping that Mtn Lion would give us the ability to customise snooze times – instead they’re gone. Not a good move Apple. 🙁
Yes, that drove us crazy too, so we wrote a menubar app to have control over snoozing the Apple Calendar alerts. Check out “SnoozeMaster” on the App Store. Hope everyone likes it?
Thanks! I downloaded Snoozemaster last night and so far so good. I was actually considering buying a not-too-cheap Calendar replacement just for that feature.
I miss autofill in Safari for the websites I use the most. (Because of iCloud — I think — autofill also stopped on my iPhone for the same sites.) Bummer.
Really? I have the opposite, too much auto-fill! Safari insists on filling login fields with e-mail addresses I don’t use anymore (gmail)
Haven’t figured how to turn it off yet. Maybe we can swap for a few days 🙂
I’ve had problems with using my MBP with an external display and wanting the laptop display off since Lion.
I’m not very happy at all about Activity Window being gone from Safari 6.
I miss the activity bar too, but there is a workaround: Use Develop -> Show Web Inspector. It’s not quite the same, but you can dl al the hidden flv, jpg, and other things they try to hide from you
Holy crap! Activity monitor is gone?!? I used that all the time to download porn clips that were in Flash format and not downloadable from the site.
I still miss the RSS screensaver, I always had it show macdailynews on it
Apple is getting so many things wrong, it is getting very upsetting.
When I try to turn off iCloud backup for any item, it tells me it will delete the iCloud backup data AND THE DATA ON MY IPHONE.
WTF!?$&@&$
I turned iCloud off after it doubled every contact on my iPhone when I first tried it.
You need to turn off iTunes syncing of your contacts if you want to use iCloud syncing. Using both causes problems.
Sticking with 10.6.8 myself. Glad I bought before things started dumbing down.
My main work machine is still on 10.6.8 with Safari 5.0.5 because I can’t stand the new Safari auto-fill.
me too. while my objectivity has attracted scorn of the rabid Apple fans, I have long pointed to Apple’s increased blunders these last couple of years. And yes, i do blame overcompensated leadership who have lost touch with Apple’s legacy of providing the user the best possible experience. Removing features and forcing iCloud down our throats is not progress, and it will cost Apple a lot of good will and perhaps a lot of potential sales if the company continues down this path.
Well said sir, well said. Apple is clearly on a downward spiral and getting worse. Mountain Lion is VERY disappointing. Like you I am on 10.6.8. I had strongly hoped that the clusterfsck of Lion would have been fixed by 10.8, but that appears to be wishful thinking. I want power out of my Mac, not idiot childlike iOS “features”. Apple has dumbed down the Mac to unthinkable levels and it has GOT. TO. STOP.
I agree this dumbing down seems to have become a trend for Mac OS X. I am currently on Lion, but I am seriously considering wiping my machine and returning to 10.6.8.
Count me in as well. 10.6 will be the end of the line for me as a Mac user if Apple continues their recent trend of dumbing their products down. It’s especially hard to swallow seeing Apple kowtowing to Windows Vista users while simultaneously refusing to support their own paying customers; they easily could, (billion$ in reserve) but just don’t want to.
dittos for me as well. In fact, this is the main reason why I have not bought a new macbook pro.
Anybody know what is the last mac book pro model that works with 10.6?
Snow Leopard Forever!
I too have been wary of moving to the “latest and greatest” after being burned by “iMove Pro” (FCP X).
Dumbing down is fine for phone and tablet users. I fear there will be a tipping point, if they keep it up with computers.
#4 is particularly annoying for my new MBP 13″ (though it’s already missing in Lion, it’s not new to ML).
Turning backlight off doesn’t cut it; without a discrete GPU, it’s using up RAM to draw the built-in screen even when I’m doing everything on the external.
The built-in screen does shut off if I close the lid (so OSX drives only the external display), but it must stay closed… which reduces heat dissipation. Instant Catch-22 if I’m playing resource-intensive games.
I used to laugh at Windows laptops because their external screen switching and mirroring vs extending deskop is STILL a mess, but I’m very disappointed in Apple for removing this option entirely.
Oh, and I’ve read they removed the Activity window from Safari 6 too, so you can’t easily identify and download stuff off of say Youtube anymore.
Glad I didn’t update to v6 under Lion.
The customer is always right…except we don’t care.
I miss the 3.5 inch floppy drive. Bummer.
I know whatcha mean, I still miss the 5.25″ floppies, even though I never actually used them. 🙂
i miss punch card support. Damn that apple for pushing those keyboard things.
Dropping the Activity Window in Safari 6 is not a customer-friendly decision. Why take away a feature that is useful?
Also, the Empty Cache feature in the Safari Menu was axed. At least you can get that one back via the Developer Menu.
I am getting the feeling that Apple is making it harder for users to download streaming content with every version of Safari.
I’ll have to spend an hour tomorrow returning to Safari 5 using my Carbon Copy Clone. Sucks.
Safari’s Activity Window. And no, the Web Inspector does not give you access to everything the Activity Window did.
Definitely it’s the changes to Safari that I notice and am annoyed by the most. I don’t mind the combining of the address and the search fields but I mind the loss of functionality and the increase in errors. Two examples:
– The search field used to have the back arrow that would take you to your place in the search results regardless of how far you navigated away. This was one of my favorite features and why I used the search field and not a search site exclusively. I know I can click and hold on the back button and then jump back in the navigation history but it’s not nearly as convenient.
– I type in a URL and instead of going to the address I get search results for that address. WTF? I haven’t looked closely at the behavior yet but, based on other comments, I suspect as I type it’s the search suggestions coming up at the top of the menu and I’m getting that selected instead of an address match.
Bottom line, if you’re going to combine multiple controls into one, the new single control needs to be even smarter to understand context and do the right thing at the right time.
Also it looks like the bookmark button disappeared. Am I not seeing it or is it really gone?
Has anyone tried downgrading back to Snow Leopard? I’m thinking about doing it next weekend. I have backups, but I’d prefer to just replace the OS on while leaving my user files and settings in place, and only go to the backup as a last resort.
How about Notes?… Since notes has been taken out from Mail and is a stand alone app… Not being able to sync via iTunes (now only with iCloud) with my iPod Touch!
I prefer they go back to this.
RSS was the main reason I was still using Safari but with that gone, it looks like I will now leave Safari behind….
On the Safari 6 changes, that’s why it’s good to support open source browsers like Firefox which is what most developers use and some sadly are using Chrome aka “track my every move”.
Glims will restore search functionality to Safari 6.
http://www.machangout.com
But RSS functionality within the browser requires Apple to restore it. If you want to see RSS return, or any other ex-Sfaari feature, send feedback to Apple via the Safari Menu>Report Bugs to Apple option. Your message will go directly to the Safari team.
1. “Empty Caches” was moved to the Develop menu.
2. “Activity Viewer” can be essentially duplicated by choosing “Show Page Resources” from the Develop menu.
iChat is not missing. It’s now Messages.
The Safari search box is not missing. It’s combined with the URL address box.
Adapt or get used to the change.
Safari seems really snappy until I open a few tabs and then it crawls to a stop almost. Something isn’t right there.
Each iteration past Leopard takes away ease and functionality.
More insanity infecting Apple software teams.
I miss double click the tool bar for a new tab. And of course all the others….
I was going to say the same thing. What is the point of having tabs elongated to fix the whole window? I liked the tab bar where you could just quickly switch tabs and double click the empty space to create new tabs.
As web developer I miss the Web Sharing GUI from the Sharing system preference. Also, why didn’t they just merge Dictation with Speakable Items, and fix Speakable Items? Speakable Items was buggy, granted, but it was customizable and just needed some polish. It’s gone though.
Really not liking LM 10.8, feels like I wasted $20 on Messages, Notes, and Reminders; features which could and should have been nothing more than a system update for Lion 10.7.