Tag Archives: safari

Safari: Review

There’s a new version of Safari available. I’m going to try it for a week, to see if I can switch to it from Firefox. I’m going to keep a list, and publish this in about a week when I’ve been using it long enough to have an intelligent opinion.

Update: Turns out that I don’t really notice much of a difference in daily use, but here’s the list so far:

Things I love

  • Holy cow it’s fast!
  • The “open bookmark folder in tabs” feature works the way I expect it to – closing all open tabs, and opening just those tabs in that folder.
  • The “auto click” feature on a bookmark folder is very handy. (Not new with version 4.)
  • Search highlighting.

Things I hate

  • The tabs across the top of the window. Who thought this was a good idea?

Missing features that I am used to having in Firefox

  • Type to search – Firefox starts searching for something as soon as I start typing. (Note: This is not default behavior, but you can turn it on somewhere in the menus. Default behavior is to start searching when I type a slash / and then start typing a word.)

FF3 and Safari

Looks like Firefox 3 was the motivation I needed to switch entirely to Safari. The thing that pushed me over the edge was the “open all in tabs” feature.

I use the “open all in tabs” feature to reset my workspace. I make a bookmarks folder, and put in there my 9 or 10 sites that I use most frequently, or perhaps a folder of all the work-related websites. I then click on that folder, and “open all in tabs” to get my workspace where it needs to be to work on it. I do this dozens of times per day.

In Firefox 3, instead of resetting the workspace – that is, closing existing tabs and opening the new ones instead, it opens the new ones in addition to what’s already open, giving me a growing number of tabs, rather than my desired workspace.

In Safari, not only does it open just the ones I want, rather than adding to the existing, but it’s got this cool single-click feature, where I can mark the folder as a one-click workspace, and it just does what I want on one click.

So, this morning I imported all my Firefox bookmarks into Safari, and set Safari as my default browser. What with the theme change in Firefox, it seemed like a good time to do that – the new Firefox theme is no more strange than switching to Safari.

Strangely, the new Firefox didn’t noticeably improve anything, or provide any shiny new functionality (at least that I noticed), and broke a feature that I rely on all day, and didn’t address any of the things that make Firefox so annoying to me (bookmark management being one area where Safari is worlds better than FF). So I really would have been better off just sticking with the old version. So strange.