Why I Use Safari Instead Of Firefox
jwz.org
jwz.org
Do people really not know who jwz is or why it might be notable that he doesn't use Firefox? Generally when a personal rant like this is upvoted, the reason isn't the content alone.
jwz was one of the principle programmers of Netscape Navigator. He coined the term mozilla. He spearheaded the effort to get it open sourced. If you learned to program in the 90s the only hacker that was even comparable was Carmack.
... and further more all of you youngsters need to get the hell off of my lawn.
I thought Jamie's essay was pretty reasonable. It highlights the open vs. closed debate that's been going on for decades. I doubt that open systems will ever be able to provide the end-to-end consistency and integration that an Apple-style walled garden can provide (if done right). You have to decide what's more important to you.
Unless the walls get too high. And of course there's the argument that the walled gardens are built on land fertilized by open systems; they can't survive alone.
I can't live without tree style tabs, noscript, ghostery, firemacs, facebook purity and especially adblock plus, which is why I have stuck with Firefox for a good part of a decade. Does Safari even have plugins?
What, besides allowing you to turn off tabs and being the unchangeable default on Mac, does Safari have going for it? In my extremely limited experience, it seems to fall short of even IE, let alone Firefox, Opera or Chrome.
I misread. According to jwz, it is the unchangeable default on iOS, not OSX.
It's still slow. But you can do all the stuff you can with the other browsers. I use it for developing mobile stuff, the ability to switch user agents is built in and it's at least slightly similar the iOS Safari.
But in this case, the inconvenience is too great. Apple's approach is resulting in a product that is just so much more usable than Mozilla's (and especially Google's) product that using it all day, every day would be just too much of a pain in the ass."
This seems to be a wee contradiction, you don't mind inconvenience when it's for political conviction, however, the inconvenience stops at tabs in your browser and your browser's UI. Luckily there are the many, many, many political beliefs that do not touch on the unsurmountable problem posed by UX/UI for which one could live with a bit of inconvience.
I don't mind some inconvenience to take to the street and partake in a demonstration, but my sofa's user experience is just so much better. I'm certainly willing to inconvenience myself for my political beliefs, though.
Now, you can argue with his metrics if you like (I happen to like Chrome a lot, though not so much Firefox or Safari these days). But that's just an opinion, it doesn't make what he says a contradiction.
I like how the author scoffs at this as if it is self-evidently preposterous, yet Google is one company whose UI design elegance is consistently competitive with Apple's.
I can't think of a single UI design choice in Safari that I prefer over how Chrome does it.
Have you used gmail lately? The new UI is a mess.
Is that such a terrible way for things to be though? To me, a well designed interface is one that invites you to play with it and learn its ins and outs, while making the experience memorable so that you'll find your way more easily in the future. It's best for the interface to be informative while doing this, but if you spray text all over everything, it does impede exploration.
I still don't like it as much as the old gmail.
I hadn't realized - thanks. It makes a difference.
I still want the old look back.
I don't have anything _against_ Lion, just that I hate upgrading unless I really need to.
EDIT: So, therefore, it's very difficult to make claims across toolsets. I am an Apple/Emacs guy from back in the Stone Age, so what I think of as "elegant" is going to be very different than someone who has a different history. YMW truly V.
I use Safari instead of Firefox because the swipe gesture to go forward and back works so much better. I love that I can swipe away half the page, get a peek at what I'm going back (or forward) to and then return to the page I was on without triggering a reload or anything happending. It breaks some sites a little bit (GitHub especially) but it looks cool on most of the Internet so I'm fine with it.
In that case, both MDI and tabbed UIs remove the capability of the WM to manage that specific rectangle of content, and require you to use in-app controls, which may not even exist.
This is especially pronounced for those who use non-standard window managers, say Ion or Awesome window manager which let you tile new windows rather than having them appear whereever they choose.
Dunno if that's jwz's reason, but it's one good reason that I've had in the past (although not for browsers, the number of tabs I keep grows too rapidly to manage nicely alongside long-lived windows)
The Apple 'our way is best' approach is often great, but when it fails, you're stuck without easy (or even hard) ways of fixing it.
You can also switch between windows with the Command-backspace key and with Expose (if you are on Leopard or Snow Leopard) or Mission Control (if you are on Lion), but those are pretty lame IMHO.
>The difference is that, on the Mac, for jwz, it works well with Safari and not with Firefox.
Not true: on the Mac, switching between the windows of Firefox works the same way as switching between the windows of Safari.
Seriously, I was pretty huge Opera fanboy - but then I switched over to Safari to check out some page that was just broken in Opera and I was blown away. If you don't have Mac with multi-touch trackpad, it might not be that big of a deal, but boy, does it make difference.
I hate almost everything else in Safari (no ability to pin tabs, that ridiculous "yeah, we won't resize tabs so we can show you more, just hide them in this stupid little >> menu" thing, I could go on and on...), but the way it scrolls outweighs anything else for me.
"Anyone who truly understands UI design realizes that every preference option is an admission of defeat: it's there because you couldn't just get it right the first time."
Yet Safari offers tabs and gives you an option to turn them back off. Seems to directly contradict his issue with Firefox not giving him that option.
There is a fix for that, which I have been happily using for the last month: Switch to the "Extended Support Release" version of Firefox.
Since Mozilla makes it slightly difficult to get this version, I will provide instructions: go to ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/ and download and install the latest version with "esr" in the name. If you make a mistake in identifying the latest version, it will upgrade itself to the latest version when you run it.
My eyes hurt after only a few seconds.
It's not 1996.
Manual shifts for cars. The IBM model-M keyboard. Unix. Green on black text.
That said, he does have the contrast turned up a bit too much for my taste.
1) When I copy the url, it adds the prefix into the paste buffer. This is the opposite of what I expect from an application -- "Do what I ask you". Even if you select just the hostname of a non-ssl site, it still prefixes the `http://`. This is a constant irritant when I try ssh'ing to a host or pasting a hostname to someone/something that only wants the hostname.
2) It displays some prefixes (https) but not others (http). I would prefer to be shown all prefixes. There was even talk of hiding https prefix for a while as I recall.
3) Location bar history completion always seems to show me the worse possible result. It often omits things that I want, and I find no way to complete to them. Sometimes it shows the result only if it type the full url.
4) Choices that make sense if you are trying to make the browser an OS, by ignoring OS functionality -- native printing dialogs/previews, native dns caches, tabs (custom window management), task managers, etc. Not all of them are choices I like (printing, custom dns cache). Some I like (tabs).
5) I am not sure how I feel about bundling flash. I have 'click to play' enabled, and the only thing I use flash for is the occasional youtube video someone sends me to view.
No, it's there because "getting it right" is subjective. If you're happy with Apple's defaults, the only thing it means is that your ideal of UI happens to coincide with Apple's idea of UI, no less, no more.
If you would like everyone to respect your subjective preference of one browser over another (and there's nothing wrong with that), let's keep it all consistently subjective and avoid using moralizing phrases, okay?