Est. 2003
The blog of one Michael Heilemann, expatriated Dane coming to you out of New York City. Half machine, half grapefruit, Interface director at Squarespace, design lover, film enthusiast, Star Wars historian, creator of the Kubrick and K2 themes, and holder of opinions, many of which are shared on his Twitter account.
This works with both the simulator, as shown here, as well as actual iOS devices. Though if used with actual iOS devices, plug it in to the computer and go to Settings - Safari - Advanced and turn Web Inspector on. Beyond that, it's exactly the same. And it rocks. Hard.
I love me some Chrome, let there be no doubt about that. On Windows it’s my browser of choice, no contest, and on OS X it’s getting to a point where it’s usable as a default browser. But, there is one thing that is really grating me on OS X.
That’s Chrome’s 100 vertical picels toolbar highrise vs. Safari’s lean 72px. Even with its bookmark bar folded, Chrome is taller than Safari…
28 paltry pixels don’t seem like a whole lot, but considering that all of Google’s web apps also take up at least 25px at the top for links to other Google apps, sign out, help and settings links… Well my 13.3” MacBook Pro’s screen is starting to feel vertically challenged.
I actually ahppen to love Chrome’s ‘oversized’ address bar and on-top tabs, but something’s gotta give.
Update: After some discussion below, it should be noted that Safari actually exceeds Chrome in vertical… eh… chrome pixels if you also turn on the status- and tab-bars.
At work, where I’m forced to use Windows Vista, I use Google Chrome exclusively. And a thing I’ve grown to love about Chrome, is how it handles moving tabs, which is slightly different—and better—from Safari 4b, which I use at home.
In Safari, you grab the small lined area at the top left of a tab to start dragging, something introduced with Safari 4, where before the entire tab was draggable. Once you start dragging, the semi-transparent tab follows your mouse arround until you let go of it, whereupon it either integrates itself into a row of tabs or into a new window. Most annoyingly, Exposé doesn’t work while dragging tabs.
In Chrome, you can initiate dragging anywhere on the tab, and if the tab is the last remaining member of a window, that window will disappear when you start dragging. This allows you to move a tab into a window behind the current, without first rearranging windows; quite nice in Windows’ maxmized windows regime.
Dear Apple: Please steal some of these interface tricks for Safari.
PS: I would switch to Chrome on OS X in an instant, if I could; extensions or no.
In laying down this new design—Kalamari—I decided to try and go with a fluid-width layout for once. Traditionally I haven’t held it in particularly high regard; but I experiemented with it for a few hours, and ended up somehow finding it a natural fit alongside the ‘book-like’ typography.
What’s interesting about fluid-width designs, is that for me, they actually only make sense under OS X. After all, under OS X, no window can be maximized and locked to the screen. Quite the contrary in fact. Not only are windows rarely sized to fit the full size of the screen
Combined, these factors are very significant, as they directly influence the way you work your windows.
Contrary, on Windows, un-maximized windows most often differ in size and vertical position from window to window. And without the menu bar blocking vertical movement and the screen-size dictating the size of windows, it isn’t quite that easy to quickly move and resize a window, while retaining a tidy workspace; and so I most often simply maximize all windows.
Hang on, I’m approaching the point.
Because of this, I work much better with OS X’s windows paradigm. Much better. My work environment simply remains more fluid than when I’m working on Windows, and I often find myself resizing windows to fit whatever content they contain.
In turn, because I do that
So I have to come up with some way of countering that I suppose.
Yay.
I love your work. Love it! Between Gmail, Google Reader, Google Calendar and Google Code, I find the majority of my digital existence in your capable hands. And I honestly don’t see that changing any time soon.
The update of Gmail that is currently being rolled out is also pretty cool. Chat in Safari? Cool. That’ll come in handy at some point, I’m sure.
But, I’m wondering if any of your team members use Safari on a daily basis? Probably not, as it seems some of the more basic features have been left behind. No longer does Gmail auto-suggest the full names and addresses when you type in the ‘To:’ field.
This is, horrendous!
I would trade you back the chat feature in the blink of an eye if it would bring back the name-suggest. It’s the single most used feature when sending mail, and it’s broken…
The alternative is going to ‘Contacts’ and looking up the person manually. A temporarily viable alternative, if it wasn’t for the fact that the Contacts page is even more broken! And you think it can’t get any worse, right? Then you resize the page.
Seriously Google? You couldn’t wait a week or two and get these things under control?
Thoughtfully, you included the means of using an older version which works as advertised. None too pleased, I guess I’ll have to stick with that for now, even if it doesn’t save my choice in a cookie for future use.
Slap me around and call me an opinionated buffoon, but media from on high and way down the long tail need to snap out of their Safari-hatin’ and at least pretend that they understand that the product they are faulting for security issues, instability and various other bugs is in fact, a beta.
I don’t know how many basement-analysts I’ve read since monday, that are ignorantly treating it as a finalized product, despite the fact that it’s a beta. And the first beta at that. Hell, it is the first time this thing has set foot on Windows!
Oblivious to the fact that beta’s are released, because they need testing, these keyboard-breathers haphazardly throw together misinformed opinions and lackluster ‘tests’ (for shame Wired, for shame).
Now if Apple had the reputation of Microsoft when it came to neglecting their browsers, that’d be one thing, but despite the fact that I don’t even use Safari as my primary browser, I will fight Apple’s fight any day of the week on this, as they have managed to craft a damn good browser, which I wouldn’t think twice about letting my mother use.
And not only that, they don’t set it adrift down the river, they actually update it continually and Dave Hyatt has been open and welcoming Safari users on the Surfin’ Safari blog for years!
If you’re not responsible enough to add the ‘it’s still a beta, so there’s still a long way to go’ caveat to your ‘analysis’, you’re not old enough to publish on the internet.
Now go to your room and think about what you’ve done.
Today I read the most curious sentence on Wired:
Safari has never been especially well-regarded as a browser, even among Mac users [...] #
I just saw this article on Digg about how to ‘speed up Safari‘ by reducing the ‘page load delay‘ in preferences. In the comments are many testimonials like “Oh my gosh! Safari is so much faster now!“ This just goes to prove how inaccurate people’s powers of perception are when it comes to measuring the performance of browsers. I say this because the preference in question is dead and does absolutely nothing in Safari 1.3 and Safari 2.0. :) #
