Why I hate Safari

That’s right, I said it. I hate Safari.

Gasp! Boo! Hiss! Go on, get it out of your system.

There are many things that this brilliant iMac sitting on my desk does that I absolutely adore. There are many apps that I run on a daily or almost daily basis that I also think are quite keen. Keen enough to remember their name so I can fire them up in QuickSilver or that they have earned a place in the all mighty dock.

Safari is not one of them.

It’s not the way Safari looks, because it is a good looking app. And, it’s not because of how it displays websites. It is the way Safari works with a few websites, sometimes, stability and how tabs work.

In Firefox (all versions, all operating systems) and Internet Explorer v7 & v8 and Google Chrome (and, quite possibly Opera, although I never use that) you can close a tab 2 different ways using the mouse. You can either click on the ‘X’ (which, on all of these browsers is on the right, Safari is on the left) or you can press the middle/scroll wheel of your mouse anywhere on the tab. That might sound niggling, but it really slows me down. Having the use the CMD key with a mouse click has never worked for me. I’m either using a keyboard shortcut or the mouse, not both.

Then there is stability. I have recently discovered that by not keeping my cache and history tidy and neat, Safari does nothing more than crash while trying to start. Not only does it crash repeatedly when trying to start, it will sometimes crash altogether with the only fix being a complete system restart. And, since there isn’t an internet options in System Preferences (like Windows), there is no way that I’m aware of to correct it. In all of the other browsers, having a messy cache or lots of history just slows things down a bit.

Another minor thing is the lack of a status bar by default. I always check where links go in the status bar, and not having it seriously annoys me. I shouldn’t have to do a google search to find how to turn this on. Sure, it’s a hold over from my Windows days, but better safe than sorry, right?

And, finally, there is Gmail. And also, there isn’t Gmail. But, it is. Gmail is my email application. While I don’t live in there all the time, it is what I use to send and receive email (since replaced by Mailplane, more on that later). And with Safari (or Webkit, but not Chrome oddly enough) it just acts weird. And, only sometimes.

For example, on occasion when replying to an email, I click reply and start typing. Normally, the text just shows up in the email box like it is supposed to. Sometimes, and again, only with Safari, the reply window fails to grab focus, so when I start typing, the Gmail keyboard shortcuts kick in and do everything from deleting the message entirely to opening my task window. The annoying part is that it is hit or miss. If it did this consistently, I could work around it. But that’s the problem. It only seems to happen when Safari is having a bad day.

For the record, I have been using Google Chrome since it was released for the Mac and, at least for me, it’s been fantastic. It’s been my default browser for more than a month and so far so good. On occasion I do have to duck into Firefox for something specific or to use an extension, but for daily browsing, Chrome is it for me. Bonus it’s fast. Fastest on my Mac by a long shot.

Comments are open. Go ahead, do your best!