So Apple released Safari 4 today. I’ve tried it at work and at home (both Windows and Mac) and it gets a big FAIL from me.
I tried it on Windows first. I run XP with the Classic theme. That’s the one that looks like Windows 2000. Safari looks terrible and out of place. The window decorations are indeed native, except for those horrible tab things getting all over the title bar. The rest of the window has some horrible pastel shading with plastic-looking widgets. I’ve seen a screenshot of what it looks like on Vista and it’s not too bad there, it kind of fits in. It may also fit in with the XP theme but the Classic theme? No.
Open up the preferences app and you get a strange mix of standard Windows widgets and Mac widgets. I’d rather see all Mac widgets or all native widgets than this mixup. It’s quite jarring.
I found a bug too. Click on Customize Toolbar and the whole app just hangs.
When I came home I installed it on my Mac. I run 10.4 because that’s what came with my machine and I don’t see anything particularly compelling about 10.5 (10.6 looks interesting though, bummer about the 32-bit CPU in my MacBook Pro). Anyway, Safari actually managed to look respectable here. Mind you, I have UNO installed so that may have influenced the look a bit. I’ve noticed that newer apps have a Leopard-ish colour scheme that doesn’t really fit with 10.4, that’s why I installed UNO in the first place.
I found a bug here too. Opened a bunch of tabs at once then the UI just froze. Pressed Cmd+W until the tabs had closed (the UI did not reflect this though) and the window went away.
Lets talk about the tabs. They don’t fit even on Mac OS X. They’re clearly modelled on Chrome but there’s something that Chrome has and Safari doesn’t and that’s a title bar. Sure, Chrome makes it seem almost as if it’s not there but it is there and it works like you’d expect. That’s important and worth the extra pixels required. Even the Mac Chrome version in development keeps this separation of title bar and tabs (though it strangely avoids putting tabs underneath the window management buttons).
So Safari 4 is one big FAIL to me. Buggy and ugly. If I wanted faster JavaScript and ACID3 compliance, I’d install a WebKit nightly.
Update 2 March 2009
So I’ve tried Safari 4 with the XP theme and as I suspected, it looks much better. In fact, I’d say that with the XP theme Safari 4 for Windows looks nice. It’s still hamstrung by the lack of a title bar but it doesn’t look ugly.
I’m posting this update from Chrome. It seems to look the same no matter what theme you’re using (though obviously, the controls take on the appropriate appearance). If I used Windows as my primary OS I’d definitely consider using Chrome (I’ve already done some tweaking of Firefox to make it more Chrome-like).
Chrome also (correctly) puts the close tab button on the right side of the tab. Sure, on a Mac you can put it on the left but on Windows it goes on the right.
Update 2 March 2009
Here’s some more Safari annoyances (not specific to Safari 4).
Why does Safari insist on creating the default window at the full height of the screen? This is so annoying!
Why is the status bar disabled by default? Chrome shows how to have no status bar while displaying everything that would normally be displayed on the status bar (ie. a temporarily-visible bar).
Why is the (useful) bookmarks toggle button only available on the bookmarks toolbar? IE gets this right. Chrome gets it half-right (no easy way to see bookmarks without opening a new tab).
Why is the main toolbar becoming less customizable? First it was the Google search box (you could remove this in early versions). Now I can’t remove the Add bookmark button? The search box is redundant because the location bar can be used for searches (or at least it should be able to do this, all the other browsers have this functionality).
Back to the tabs. I took some screen shots. This is what tabs at the top should look like.
See how easy it is to see that there are tabs and where they are? See how obvious it is that you can still click above the tabs to move the window? Here is what Apple did instead.
Yuck.
For completeness, here’s Safari with the XP theme.
And Safari on Vista.
Hey, what happened to “Top Sites” on the Vista machine?
