07 Feb 2003

He’s a brave man

In a rash fit of openness, Dave Hyatt has encouraged people to comment or trackback to his blog to suggest what the GUI of Safari should be like. There are 231 comments and 12 trackbacks as I post this. That’ll keep him occupied.

My tuppence on the matter:

  • As many others have suggested, some form of tabs would be great. As many have observed, tabs themselves aren’t ideal, as they take up too much vertical browser space and the names get truncated if there are a number of tabs. Dave’s probably already seen this, but I think that some form of interface like this one—developed by Look Designs—would be a great solution. And of course, you should also be able to turn it off: people either love or hate tabs, and we should have a choice.
  • Support for alt tags as soon as possible (I find this rather irritating, as I use alt tags quite a lot when browsing). I know this isn’t a GUI suggestion, but he did say we could comment on priority CSS matters.
  • I haven’t yet found a way to directly add a new bookmark by typing it in rather than visiting the site and choosing “add bookmark”.
  • More integration with the keychain – it seems a bit patchy at the moment.

Keep up the good work! Safari is already a great browser, and eminently useable. It just needs a few rough edges smoothed off to be the best browser on MacOSX.

  1. 1

    I have many suggestions compilated from many Apple users I know who have rejected Safari on account of the following missing features. Tabs have probably been suggested thousands of times, so I won't go into that (although it would be nice if the tabs were anchored to the browser window). One of the most important ideas of mine and of many other Apple users is a drawer, just like the one that slides out from the main mail viewing window in "Mail", being anchored on the browser window. In it, the Download Manager, Tabs window, Bookmarks, and other things can be viewed at any time. A useful feature to the Download Manager would be the ability to view the files downloaded, like movies and pictures in column view in the finder. All you would have to do is just highlight the downloaded file, and a preview of it would show in the drawer. For the bookmarks library, a useful idea would be to have a searching feature, so that you could find the website you want without having to remember the web address, just the name you labeled it as (for example, searching for "apple" would send you to www.apple.com). Another necessity is an Autofill feature, similar to that of Internet Explorer. Those are our main ideas. Here are the more trivial suggestions. First of all, the appearance of the browser window seems very cold (I know many Apple users who prefer other browsers because Safari looks ugly and too formal). A very Apple-like look would be that of white plastic. A white frame has a much more friendly feel than one of brushed steel. Also, a trademark animated progress icon would be nice, too. Possibly, it could adopt the swirling look of the Internet Explorer "E" and the globe, but with a compass and the apple icon. Otherwise, I personally love Safari. It's so fast, and I know you will find lots of other ideas than we have suggested. Thank you.----- Personally, I really like the brushed steel. I also find it very quick and surprisingly stable.

    by jonty @ 07/02/2003 10:02 pm • Permalink •

  • 2

    I like brushed metal as well. I'm open to non brushed metal but the icons need to be perfect for it to work.

    ? I would like tabs as well, like the way System prefs uses them. ? I would like a print button ? I would like a view source button ? Buttons should look like the buttons in iPhoto, the light grey slightly embossed. The grey glossy aqua down state buttons just don't match anything. ?Google search is cool, but what about being able to choose different search engines as well as Google Image search. ?Status bar should have percentage of file size progress (5k of 300K). It would be nice to know the fiel size and how much I'm downloading at what speed. ?A download manager. I can not stress how important this is. As a web designer, I download content form the net almsot daily, and with dozens of clients, I need to be able to download it to many directories and even in directories I create thru the open/save dialogs. ?Mail button would be cool ?(maybe) a downlaod manager button

    Non gui ?Spell check to work correctly ?Autofill ?Scrapbook ?Edit/add plugins and file helpers (wait, we need browser plugins too, MWP, real, etc)

    Otherwise, it's the best browser for the mac and I look forward to deleting IE.

    by Kid Red @ 07/02/2003 11:02 pm • Permalink •

  • 3

    East Coast MacUsers Group 1. Safari stops processing pages when the mouse button is held down.

    1. There is no way to find a link's address by hovering the mouse arrow over it as in IE.

    2. History link is annoying as a Menu item. It needs to be tabbed as in IE. Please separate into days as in IE.

    3. Keep the header of Safari trim. Too many docks eats up reading space.

    4. Tabs are good but keep them trim. This also eats up window space.

    5. Less is more. No more buttons for functions other than back, forward, refresh, add bookmark. The rest can be put in menu lists.

    6. Dock that damn downloaded files list. Make it a tab with appearance of iTunes list. Also make a way to re-download a downloaded file.

    7. Floating windows suck.

    8. Instead of having windows behind windows, all unused windows should automatically minimize to dock to keep them neat. WinXP does this nicely so that there aren't thousands of web windows floating around.

    by APPL @ 08/02/2003 4:03 am • Permalink •

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