“It’s been almost two years since I’ve looked at Apple’s Safari browser in any official capacity, and for good reason: Safari simply isn’t a good option for Windows users. It never has been. And, I suspect, it never will be,” Paul Thurrott writes for Paul Thurrott’s SuperSite for Windows.
“They’re back this week with a beta version of their upcoming Safari 4 browser, which appears to be Google Chrome with a few UI changes. As an Apple product, it’s immediately interesting of course. But as an Apple product, it’s also uniquely unsuitable for Windows users,” Thurrott writes. “I just wish Apple could get the basics right on Windows. Safari 4, like its predecessors, is just a horrible Windows application.”
“Of course, Apple being Apple, they are promoting Safari 4 as if it were the second coming. It’s ‘the world’s fastest, most efficient, and most innovative’ browser, according to the humble folks in Cupertino,” Thurrott writes.
“Apple’s worst decision in this browser is the way it handles tabs. Most browsers dedicate a row somewhere between the top of the browser window and the page rendering area for tabs. But in Safari, tabs are integrated into the title bar area… Apple claims that moving the tabs to the title bar saves space. But it only saves space because Safari now uses a native-like title bar: In previous versions of the browser, there was no true title bar, so the tab row didn’t really add to the height of the UI,” Thurrott writes.
“Apple also claims that the new Tabs on Top reduces clutter, but the truth is, on Vista and 7, it looks horrible and cluttered. The problem is that that glass title bars allow stuff behind Safari to peak through. And because the title bar in Safari can be split up into multiple tabs, each with their own little UI controls and text, the title bar area gets very messy, very quickly. It looks horrible regardless of what’s behind it: A solid color, a desktop background photo, or other windows,” Thurrott writes. “It’s cluttered and ugly.”
“Apple fanatics–you know, those idiots who would buy anything with an Apple logo on it–will get all giddy and clap like little girls at a Hannah Montana concert when they see Top Sites, the new default Safari 4 home page. But these people are missing the point (what else is new?): Top Sites’ curved, TV-like display would look wonderful on, well, a TV. But it’s pointlessly visual in a tool that, by nature, is used to find information online… The nicest thing about Top Sites is that you can turn it off,” Thurrott writes.
“And speaking of pointless visual effects, allow me to point out the most recent and most egregious use of Apple’s Cover Flow display… it makes absolutely no sense at all in a browser. Naturally, Apple added it to Safari,” Thurrott writes. “Cover Flow is used in Safari to browse Bookmarks and browser history in a manner similar to which you can flick through album art in iTunes. Well, not so much similar as identical. It’s the same thing. There are so many problems with this UI paradigm, it’s hard to even know where to start, and of course we’ll have to discuss it over the giddy clapping of those easily-impressed Apple geeks in the corner… Since Apple stole so much of Safari from Google’s Chrome, they should consider going all the way and adopting that browser’s less-is-more philosophy. This stuff is pointless.”
Thurrott writes, “Internet Explorer (7 or 8) and Firefox 3 are better Windows Web browsers than their WebKit-based competitors, and that has nothing to do with the underlying Web rendering technologies involved and everything to do with functionality. Both browsers are simply better in day to day usage… I suspect most people who excitedly try Safari 4 will very quickly move back to the more comfortable confines of IE or Firefox. I already have.”
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MacDailyNews Take: Paul sure does love his “confines.” We love just the opposite — along with the smell of fear in the morning.
