Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Humor
Dear Steve, Fix Safari
This is the first in a series of posts in which we, your friendly neighborhood TUAWers, pen little missives to his Steveness asking him to cast aside his mercurial nature and listen to some common sense (which, of course we here at TUAW are known for). The item we wish to bring to Steve's attention could be a feature request, a gripe about an Apple policy, or some new vegan milk substitute. Here's the first:Dear Steve,
I really enjoy using Safari, in fact it has been my browser of choice since the day it first became available. When I am using a Windows machine, I long for the metal window of Safari, its simple and clear bookmark management system, and the nifty progress bar.
However, all is not right in Safari land. Let me paint you a picture: imagine you have just spent several hours surfing the web looking for tasty morsels for your blog (you are blogging, right?). You have them all lined up like good little soldiers in Safari tabs. Suddenly you need to get an item on your desktop, so you minimize Safari. Well, you meant to minimize Safari but instead you closed the window. Gone are all 87 tabs! With nary a warning to let you know of what you do!
This makes little to no sense. Safari, in cases like these, should warn you that you have several tabs open, and do you REALLY want to close the window? I shouldn't have to plunk down my hard earned cash for Saft (which is a wonderful little application) to give Safari such basic funtionality.
For crying out loud, Safari RSS doesn't seem to have a problem warning me that every .dmg I download is an application (duh!) and am I sure that I want to continue downloading?
This is a no brainer, Steve. Heck, even Firefox does it!
You Brother in Macness,
Scott
P.S. Do they sell those black turtlenecks in XXXL?
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
_victor said 4:17PM on 6-16-2005
Scott, you're aware of the History menu, right?
In all seriousness, this IS a big problem. Not only is the Min button too close to close without a warning (ala Firefox), but Cmd-Q is RIGHT NEXT TO Cmd-W... Again, sans warning. Seems like there's an engineer out there who worked at Apple in 1983 or so who might be getting a shiver right now.
While you're at it, want to mention one other tiny detail that would be an innovative feature: the ability to EDIT your history.
Let me paint another picture for you. You'd like to check you're Yahoo! email (for some strange reason). Instead of typing Yahoo you type Yahoi or something and are taken to one of those stupid "landing pages" for some idiot holding yet another domain hostage. Now, since Yahoi comes alphabetically before Yahoo every time the address bar tries to auto-complete, you're more likely to wind up in the wrong place!
Wouldn't it be nice to be able to purge that nasty useless URL? I don't care if that functionality is buried three prefs deep in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet with a sign saying "beware of the Tiger" on it-- just do it!
Time for my meds. Thanks.
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Cyberwhore said 4:17PM on 6-16-2005
Steve would say don't try and minimise Safari, just hit F11 to instantly see your desktop.
I see your point tho.
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Dave Martin said 4:17PM on 6-16-2005
Ummm... Well, while it'd be nice if Safari did do this unto itself, Saft solves this nicely, and is available for the tidy sum of $12US. It records your last state before closing, whether intentional or not, among a host of other things.
The Tiger version is presently available. http://haoli.dnsalias.com/Saft
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Brian said 4:17PM on 6-16-2005
The workdaround I use currently is open History, drag the 87 links into a folder, drag the folder to the bookmark bar, then use the "Open In Tabs" feature. It's pretty quick to do.
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tom said 10:21PM on 6-16-2005
my problem is similar, except that I don't have to hit minimize for all of the tabs to close and be gone forever. sometime it happens just because I try to open one more tab. Maybe Safari RSS will fix this, since I won't be opening the tabs from an external reader any more, but somehow I doubt it. I'd also like to see better management of the history...
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Zon Wakest said 8:56PM on 8-18-2005
The first thing I did when I installed Tiger was change the keyboard shortcut in Safari from command q to command option q, its easy to do in "Keyboard & Mouse" in System Preferences.
It fixes this problem right up, no downloading or Saft needed
someone could create a "virus" that did this and somehow make the change right inside of Safari.
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Scott-O-Rama said 4:17PM on 6-16-2005
While your at it, would you mind asking his Steveness if they could add a "New tab" button in Safari? I HATE not having one. I know I can accomplish this thru some third party plug-ins, but I hate using plug-ins. Safari should have this button as part of it's standard feature set.
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Mark H said 4:17PM on 6-16-2005
#7, you can use the key combination command-t adds a new tab (so long as you've enabled tabbed browsing in the Safari preferences), though it would be nice to have a button option too.
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Dogger said 10:26AM on 6-18-2005
That 'open History' workaround is pretty useless, unless you open all your tabs up consecutively and NEVER navigate within your tabs. With 87 open tabs, once you have fully explored, say, the first 20 of them, it's going to be pretty difficult to locate the remaining 67 in the history. Plus, if you're like me, you'll initially open about a dozen tabs, and the list will keep growing as my interest is further piqued with each reading ... you would never find those 87 sites grouped together in my history, you would find them interspersed without about 100 other sites that I completely discarded. When I accidentally quit Safari, I usually just shut off my computer and never end up reading any of the stuff that I was interested in. And I refuse to pay any amount of money to any other computer for what is essentially a third-party bug fix when there are other highly functional browsers out there with a clue about user experience available for free -- so use *my* workaround. When I'm likely to care about what is in my tabs, I 'work around' Safari altogether.
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DonIncognito said 4:17PM on 6-16-2005
Here's another bug I accidentally happened upon:
I was downloading a "safe" file, you know, one of those that Safari now nags you about. Except I forgot about the nagging feature and closed the Downloads window before the dialog box came up. I then double-clicked the .dmg file on the Desktop, and it didn't mount. I tried to mount it through Disk Utility, but it didn't mount. I reopened the downloads window and couldn't do anything there. Not until I re-downloaded the file could I mount the image. Three cheers for Safari's new nagging bug, er, feature!!!
On another note, Victor, if you click on the Bookmarks button, open History, and delete the "yahoi" entry, it will never come up again.
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DonIncognito said 4:17PM on 6-16-2005
Hmm, what I described above may have been a rare bug since I couldn't reproduce it. But I still think the new "safe" files downloading design is responsible.
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PXLated said 4:17PM on 6-16-2005
So you want his Steveness to protect you from yourself...hmmm
I guess if I had 80 important tabs I'd be a little more attentive.
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Stephen Waits said 11:12AM on 10-26-2005
Well.. ugh..
Opera would have restored all of your tabs on your next start (even after a crash).
Firefox won't by default, but will with the ReloadEvery extension.
Welcome to 2005..
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Matthew said 3:31PM on 8-01-2005
Since you're such a power user why not Apple-M to minimize?
Or for the power-power users, Apple-H. Apple-Tab to restore it.
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Andy Staines said 9:10AM on 7-01-2005
I'll get burned for this but you said it yourself.... use a better browser. Firefox is an obvious choice. For me though Omniweb is even better. I can save those tabs to a workspace, close the browser completely and still get them straight back again - even days later if I needed.
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gr33n said 7:19AM on 6-17-2005
i'm sorry guys but i'd hate if closing a window will greet me with one more dialogue and OK clicking ... bad enough that pages that do not load needed OK pressing - as i understand that is gone in Tiger ...
but yeah - i'd hate if what you ask would be implemented ... i never ever have closed Safari window full of tabs ... probably because i use keyboard shortcuts and don't mouse around too much ...
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Gary Menszyk said 4:17PM on 6-16-2005
Don't understand the comment about editing history. Just open the history display and delete URLs you don't want.
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Brian said 9:40AM on 10-29-2005
And while they're at it, how about an option to "Bookmark all Tabs" like Firefox. This comes in very handy for me when I have several tabs open and need to either restart the browser due to it slowing to a crawl or restart the OS during an update. When I come back I just select the bookmark and open it in tabs. Saft does this, but it really should be built-in.
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Russ said 4:17PM on 6-16-2005
Its not Apple's fault you don't use Expos?
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john said 9:01PM on 7-09-2005
Consider adding Windowshade to your system. It collapses the browser window to a nice tidy titlebar and you need go nowhere near the close button to activate it.
I've always hated collapsing a window to the dock, the icons just get smaller and smaller making the whole thing hard to use. . .
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