entropia

I have three words to describe the Safari beta:  bad, bad, bad.  I was expecting the usual familiarity issues when dealing with a new piece of software — buttons in different places, different icons — but nothing could prepare me for the usability nightmare that is Safari for Windows.

First off, what’s with Apple’s refusal to obey my display settings?  If I wanted a GUI that could be designed by a three-year-old, I would use a Mac.  Ignoring the look and feel that every other Windows application uses is flat-out inexcusable¹ and is reason enough to never use Safari again.

But for the sake of a fair trial, I’ll risk retinal bleeding and continue.  Here are a few of the usability issues I found within the first minute of use:  you can’t get to the address bar by pressing F6; clicking on the address bar doesn’t select any text; pressing escape while in the address bar doesn’t select anything; pressing Ctrl+enter when entering an address essentially freezes the UI until I click the mouse; the back and forward buttons on my mouse do nothing; middle-clicking on a tab doesn’t close the tab; hovering over the resize grabber in the bottom-right doesn’t change the cursor to the resize icon²; maximing the window doesn’t prevent it from being resized; windows can not be resized from the edges, only from the corner; and dialog boxes display a separate taskbar icon.

Now, these may seem like petty Windows vs. Mac issues, but they’re not.  Mac windows can’t be resized by dragging their edges, but that’s no excuse for Mac programs ported to Windows.  Something is usable if it behaves exactly as expected, and Safari clearly doesn’t.

For a deliciouslly scathing review of Safari’s slowness and Apple’s marketing lies, read Joel’s Apple Safari for Windows: The world’s slowest web browser.

Apple is and always has been severely dishonest in all their advertising when it comes to performance. This is the company that spent years telling us that the PowerPC was faster than Intel, only, suddenly, to change their claims midsentence without an explanation when reality caught up with them, in a scene almost exactly like the scene in 1984: “Merely it became known, with extreme suddenness and everywhere at once, that Eastasia and not Eurasia was the enemy.”
This is the company that’s about to release the iPhone on a slow, last-generation data network but is running TV ads that have edited out all downloads and waiting time that network entails.

I’ve considered trying out a Mac in the past because some people won’t shut up about how great they are, but every time I read about how things actually work over there (like the Top 10 Reasons the Apple Dock Still Sucks) I’m glad the world has Microsoft.

1. Excepting for programs like Winamp that are hidden from sight for all but a few seconds [↩]
2. I tried to take a screenshot of this but while doing so learned that Vista doesn’t like displaying the cursor in screenshots [↩]