Tag Archives: browser

My Top Sites in Safari

I’m back to Safari. I still love Chrome but Safari’s latest update made it edge out Chrome for speed. Speed, it seems, is the killer feature for me in Web browsers.

Until this latest release the Top Sites page in Safari was too slow for me to find useful. Now, however, it is much faster and I’m liking it very much. I liked Chrome’s New Tab page a lot. However, unlike Safari it wasn’t really all that useful for more than giving you a clickable tile to go to your favorite sites. Safari’s Top Sites page does a bit more.

First, it shows a ‘page-curl white star on blue’ icon to show which pages have been updated since you visited them last. This makes is quick and easy to go to the pages that have been updated rather than checking them yourself. Second, Safari allows you to choose how many sites show up on this page. Chrome does not. Depending on your screen size you can choose between Small, Medium and Large tiles for each site. Small is more, large is less.

Third, but not necessarily specific to the Top Sites page, Safari allows you to search your history in a visual way right from the Top Sites page itself. As you type in your search query a coverflow like window shows you a thumbnail of the Web sites that match it. It makes finding pages you’ve been to in the past much, much easier than in Chrome.

So, for now I’m back to Safari.

My Top Sites in Safari are (from left to right and down) this site, my WordPress admin, Twitter (although I rarely use this because I use Echofon so it may be replaced soon), Facebook, Gmail, Instapaper, Tumblr, 37Signals Launchpad, Flickr, Viddler’s Recently Uploaded page, GitHub and Google Reader.

All Chrome all the time

I’ve been using Chrome as my default browser for nearly six months. It won Best Browser in my Best of 2009 list. I didn’t even realize it had been that long until I went back through some of the things I wrote about Chrome here in First initial, last name. To be more specific, actually, I’ve been using a Chromium nightly build – which is the open source project behind the official Google Chrome releases.

To keep my build of Chromium up-to-date I use Techcrunch’s Chrome-Up application built by MG Siegler and Greg Rosen.

Now that an official release of Chrome for Mac is out there it is being evaluated by some of the Macintosh community. John Gruber recently linked to someone who had tried Chrome for a week before it actually stuck. I can see why – switching browsers from Safari to Chrome won’t win you any new features. In fact, it may even force you to give up a few. But what makes Chrome better than any other browser on the Macintosh, at least for me, is pure foot-to-the-floor speed.

There are a few neat features, for sure. The “New Tab” page, arguably not as nice as Safari’s Top Sites feature, makes it pretty simple to set up a good way to get to what you want. Bookmark sync is nice. Extensions, I think, will play a huge roll in the success of Chrome – especially when it is pitted against Safari. Google has taken the right path with Extensions and how you build them, too.

But that’s about it. Here’s the one-liner for Chrome; it is really fast. Everything else is gravy.

Hidden preferences in Safari 4

Nearly every browser has “hidden” preferences. Options that you can set by running a command, editing a file, or changing an entry here or there. The Safari 4 Beta, which has only been out for a few days, is no different.

Caius, of Random Genius, recently published some of these hidden preferences including:

  • A way to restore the old tab bar.
  • Turning off the auto-complete search bar.
  • Removing Coverflow.
  • …and much more.

I am not sure why you’d want to change some of these preferences (as I feel they are some of the best features of the new version of Safari), but they are there, you can if you want, and Caius shows you how.

Source: Safari 4 Hidden Preferences.

Fluid 0.9.5 released

Fluid, the site-specific browser that I use for things like Google Reader, Brightkite, Gmail, and also named one of The Best of 2008 on this site, has been updated to version 0.9.5.

Reading the changelog you can see that this is a fairly large release when you weigh it against previous versions. You can also see that it has been one of the longest periods of time between releases. This is most likely due to Todd Ditchendorf, the developer of Fluid, taking on the much more challenging task of creating a full-fledged Web browser called Cruz.

On the Fluid blog Todd mentions that “This release incorporates most of the features and fixes that went into Cruz 0.1…”. That makes me happy, since I’m not a big fan of Cruz, but am a big fan of Fluid. At least the work Todd is doing on Cruz doesn’t mean that Fluid is being left behind. Kudos to him for developing in this manner.

Source: Fluid.

You Microsoft Internet Explorer user you!

So you use Windows. I’m ok with that I guess. Oh, you also browse the Internet with Internet Explorer? Version 6? Well, I just can’t live with that. In fact, I doubt you and I would get along at parties.

But, such as it is you are here, reading something on my site, and so I should – at the very least – show you a site that you can read. I didn’t say that I’d cater to you. No no, none of that here. But I will try my best to have my site display just well enough that you can read this – and perhaps switch to another browser.

While at Podcamp Hawai’i I pulled my site up on a screen in front of an entire theatre full of people. There was only one computer available to me that was already hooked up to the projector. I thought “How bad could it be?”. Well, it was pretty bad. My site looked like this. Yeah, that bad.

So today I pulled out a ton of negative margins, a few class specifications that, for reasons I will probably never know, Internet Explorer does not support – and now you can see that the site looks relatively normal in IE.

I could probably do better with my site’s document code and styling to set myself up for multi-browser success. I know this. But, seriously. You could do much better if you’re using Internet Explorer as your browser-of-choice. So there.

The Firefox 3 launch might be more important than you realize

I don’t know how many applications you have installed on your computer but I have enough where there is an update to one of them at least once per week and often times more.

Due to this barrage of updates yesterday’s release of Firefox 3.0 may just seem like another run-of-the-mill update to one of the applications on your computer.  I assure you this just isn’t so.

Sometimes the beginning is the best place to start. Mozilla Firefox, an open source browser, started out as a project within the Mozilla corporation, then named Pheonix, to battle against the feature creep that was happening with the Mozilla Suite of applications.  Do you remember when Mozilla was a huge download with tons of “applications” within one application?  Well, that was why Firefox was originally branched off into its own application, to deal with that bloat.

But, we can go back even farther than that.  Instead of reiterating what is already out there I recommend reading the Wikipedia entry on Mozilla Firefox (which leads to many, many pages of information) as well as watching a video that Andy Baio recently shared called Code Rush.  Code Rush is a documentary that aired on PBS about Netscape opening the source of their browser, calling it Mozilla.

After reading through, and watching the documentary on, the information and history of Firefox, Mozilla, Netscape, and Mosaic you just can’t help but feel that a little bit of history was written over the last few days while millions upon millions of copies of the Firefox 3.0 browser has been downloaded from the Mozilla Web site.

So while you download your copy ((The Mozilla Web site is nearly unreachable because of the attention that Firefox 3.0 is getting.  I recommend waiting a day or two before giving it a try.)), install the software, and use it to view Web pages – realize that thousands of people and years worth of history are behind the application you are using.

Update: Also worth watching is a Google Talk by Mike Pinkerton who was on the original Netscape team and now manages the Camino project at Mozilla.  Found via Andy Baio’s comment thread on Code Rush.

Safari 3 on Leopard is almost as good as Camino

While I await a new build of Camino that works a little better on Leopard I thought it a good opportunity to take Safari 3 for a spin. After using it since my upgrade from Tiger to Leopard I’ve found that Safari 3 is almost as good as Camino and in some ways even better.

Screenshot: Safari on Leopard.

Safari on Leopard. Screenshot by Skitch.

When I jotted down my wishes for Safari in Leopard I quickly mentioned the things I’d like to see changed and/or added in Safari to become my default browser full time.

That was then, this is now

Several of my opinions have changed a little since then, so I’ll go through those really quick first.

My stance has change completely regarding Apple’s decision to place the “Default Browser” preference within Safari’s preference panels. I wrote:

“This “feature” definitely gets on the nerves of many and really I can’t figure out why this resides in here. [...] …but this does not mean that this is the proper location for this preference. What if I uninstalled Safari?”

I now feel this is the best possible place for this preference and I couldn’t see it residing anywhere else. In fact, I think that all applications which rely on being a “default” for any protocols should handle these preferences the same way applications do with regards to filetypes. Photoshop has a preference setting for being the default application for opening JPG files as does Apple’s Preview application. Firefox, Safari, Camino and their ilk should do the very same when it comes to handling the various hypertext protocols that browsers typically utilize. Not only do I now feel that Safari should have this preference built-in, I believe all other browsers should do the same.

Just quickly; Me wanting multiple feed detection might be against spec. I have to do some research on this (not that I wouldn’t mind having the option still) but I’ll report on this in the future. (please see Update #2 below)

Onto features.

One of the things I wanted most was a searchable history. I’m a bit of a pack rat when it comes to my browser’s history (I keep about 120 days worth, see: my history in Camino) and so I like being able to quickly search it based on not just the URL but also the page’s title.

This is something that has been available in Camino for quite some time and I found myself using it a lot.

I’m happy to say that this is built into Safari and works as well, if not better, than it does in the latest Camino build that I was using. I had some people ask me if Camino slowed down the more history items were in it and the answer is yes. Browsing doesn’t slow down but URL lookup does. In Safari I’ve yet to see the lookup slowing down at all.

The other feature, which sadly did not make the cut in Safari on Leopard, that I wanted to see was bookmark keywords. Sure, I could use Spotlight to search my bookmarks but I liked having short words that I could type into the location field without using my mouse to find the bookmark in the menu or typing in the entire URL. For instance: ‘mysql’ was one of my keywords for a bookmark that took me to my phpMyAdmin installation on one of my servers, the URL of which spanned some 75 characters and the bookmark relating to it lies nested about four steps down. This is the thing I miss most when using Safari in Camino’s stead.

I’m not going to do a feature-by-feature review of Safari on Leopard because so many have done it better than I ever could. But I will say this: during my short stint with Safari so far, the only thing I’m now missing is bookmark keywords. I recommend giving it a spin.

Update: Something that I forgot to mention but was just reminded of while I was using Google Reader; clicking on a link from iChat, for instance, which is not currently loaded in Safari will result in a new tab with that URL. Perfect. However, as my friend Kyle Neath said to me last night:

“1. Can’t force target=blank to open in a new tab for some reason”

I never really had much issue with this because I can just “command”+click on a link and it will open in a new tab. Bad part is, this doesn’t work when using Google Reader’s default keyboard shortcuts. So I’m presented with a new window everytime I hit ‘V’ to view the original post.

Does anyone have a workaround for this?

Update #2: November 12th, 2007 – Another thing I had wanted was for Safari to handle multiple feed URLs and I thought this was against spec. I was wrong. And boy am I happy to say that I was wrong and it turns out that Safari does indeed handle this just fine out of the box. My friend Josh Pigford has more on theappleblog.com about this.

Thoughts on the iPhone

Before I begin gushing about the iPhone I have to mention, especially for those of you that do not have one yet, that you can win one of two free 8Gb iPhones that we’re giving away over at Viddler just for doing simple MeToday videos. Each video you do (one per day per person) is an entry into the contest. No, you don’t have to do one every single day. But since each video is an entry one would think that the more MeTodays that you do, the better chance you have at winning! We’ll give someone an iPhone on the 15th and 30th of July. So don’t read the rest of this post! Go get a Viddler account!

MeToday: June 29, 2007

My precious!

Ok. So what do I think of the iPhone? As you might have already guessed, I love it. For the entire weekend I rarely got onto my Macbook to do anything except sync my latest settings of my iPhone to the computer. The iPhone is a great mini-computer for getting most of your core Internet activities done like checking/responding to email, surfing the web for information, or other simple daily tasks like this.

I won’t get into the speed of the EDGE network or how the virtual keyboard is. To me these are non-issues thus far and I don’t have much to compare these two things to since I have never had a cell phone that used the Internet, nor a full sized hard keyboard. I can type pretty fast on the keyboard and the Internet is nearly as fast as being home on Wifi. So again, both are non-issues.

Again, it is the little things

One of my fellow line-waiters John Gruber did a fantastic job giving his general overview of each feature of the iPhone the other day. My impressions are on par with John’s except that I’ve found myself typing just fine. Be sure to read his thoughts if you’d like to catch some of the nice things about each “feature” of the iPhone.

However, I’d like to extend his list a little bit to remark on some of the little things I’ve noticed while using the iPhone that I think make the experience all the more enjoyable.

The weight of the iPhone came as a surprise to some. Yes, it feels heavier than it looks. To me this make the iPhone feel tough and rugged when compared to the way it looks. I think the fact that we’re seeing people surprised at how tough the iPhone actually is, is because it doesn’t look very rugged. It looks elegant, which doesn’t usually mean tough. However the weight of the iPhone makes it feel very rugged to me.

The speed of the interface is something that I was very skeptical about. The commercials led me to believe that the interface was just as fast, if not faster, than switching windows on my computer. In my relatively little experience with mobile phones – the interfaces on these things have never been described by me as “snappy” or “fast”. However the iPhone’s interface, in general, is incredibly fast. When speaking with John Gruber in line, he remarked how the iPhone’s “one app at a time” focus really lent itself to being able to be very fast. The iPhone doesn’t need to show windows inside of windows or multiple layers or even windows on top of windows. The application that you are currently looking at is obviously getting the priority in the Operating System which makes the iPhone blaze.

The sleep, volume, silent, and home buttons are the perfect combination of buttons that were decided to be “hard buttons”. Although one can easily adjust the volume in most applications within the iPhone’s interface, you can also use the hard volume control on the side of the iPhone. The same goes for the silent and sleep buttons – I never have to “turn on” the iPhone to use these options. And the home button is definitely far better than keeping the “doc” visible and having a “desktop” button or something. I’m really glad the iPhone has a home button.

Within each application on the iPhone there are small, hidden gems that you will only find through experimentation or someone telling you that they are there. Like the ability to turn on the caps lock key, or tapping the top bar to auto-scroll to the top of the page in Safari (both tips came from John Gruber’s site), etc. None of these small interface features are handed over, but once you find them you love them.

Of course, I want more

Keeping in mine that, technically, this is iPhone 1.0 which includes all the hardware and software that came in those beautiful black bags on Friday, I have a few things that I’d like to see improved. I’m sure that, internally, this is build 10,000+ of the iPhone’s OS and its applications, but from my perspective it is still 1.0. Being such, I fully expected to have the wish list that follows.

  • Better integration with Gmail. Right now Gmail marks things as “being downloaded” when I look at them either via Mail.app on my Macbook or on my iPhone. This causes some frustration since I’d like all of my email to be “everywhere”. To fix this, I think either Google or Apple will have to update it so that it marks it as being read on the iPhone or not. Either way, the email “works” – but it could work a little bit better. (Side note: On the first day of release, the Gmail integration was wrought with problems ranging from getting duplicate messages to simply not working with Google App’s hosted domain email. These issues have been fixed, presumably by Google, over the weekend. So ++ to them.)
  • Though I haven’t used the “Notes” feature yet, I could see a huge amount of improvement being done here, which might make me want to use Notes on the iPhone. Simply saving the notes saved as RTF files that are synced to your computer into ~/Documents/iPhone Notes/ would suffice for me. Why create notes that you can’t really use? A work around is taking a notes contents and creating an email out of it, which can be done fairly easily.
  • iCal integration seems to work “ok” but I have the same complaints as others. If I have separate calendars within iCal they should also be separate within iPhone’s calendar application. And, when syncing with my Macbook, I shouldn’t have to choose only one calendar that the iPhone can write to. I am not sure why there is this limitation. Something else I noticed is that if I setup an iCal alert on the iPhone it works perfectly but it doesn’t work within iCal. It shows up in the application but iCal never shows me the the alert when I asked it to. Not sure why, perhaps this is a bug.
  • The camera feature should allow a photo to be taken by tapping anywhere on the screen. I think some people would hate this because it would cause a lot of accidental photos to be taken, but taking photos of yourself and someone else with the iPhone is very hard with only a small button to push. Perhaps this could be a setting? Can has Photobooth for the camera? I don’t care about the crazy bulging eyes and stretching chins stuff, but it’d be nice to have the ability to take black and white photos or something simple. Obviously this is a minor, minor update that I’d enjoy seeing to the Camera feature.
  • Small browser cache? From what I’ve been able to tell Safari on the iPhone only caches the current page you are looking at. Reloading a page is fairly quick but the second you navigate away from a URL the cached version is lost. I have an 8Gb iPhone, I wouldn’t mind dedicating even a few hundred megabytes to Safari’s caching if it would mean that hitting the back button wouldn’t reload the page.
  • Normal headphone jacks “don’t work” with the iPhone because the iPhone’s input jack is sunken so low into the casing of the iPhone. Jason Kottke resolved this by actually cutting his headphones a little bit to allow the jack to sink in deeper. There are several add-ons being offered to make this easier, but I am unsure why this was done in the first place?
  • The iPod allows you to update your set of icons on the button of its menu. I think this should be an option in all applications on the iPhone including the home screen. There are a few web applications that are being released for the iPhone that I’d love to create a shortcut to from my home screen. The first button I’d get rid of from the home screen? YouTube followed by Stocks. I simply won’t use those things on my iPhone too often.
  • Google Maps on the iPhone is amazing! But I feel this application will probably receive the greatest number of updates over time. It is perhaps one of the most “complex” applications on the iPhone and using it is a delight most of the time. However, there are a few usability problems when you switch from searching for a location to getting directions to that same location. (I’ve found that it is easier to save locations in your Google Maps bookmarks.) I’m sure these little things will be improved soon and that integration with the rest of the phone’s applications will happen in the future. One of the first things that comes to mind is to tell the camera application where you are using the Maps feature, which would in turn write the Latitude and Longitude to the photos.

I’m going to cut this list short because, as I said, this is a 1.0 release and one that I’m overwhelmingly happy with. I’ve found the iPhone becoming an extension of my laptop in ways I hadn’t considered before. I knew that I’d find the iPhone useful, I didn’t expect to want to use it more than my laptop.

What are your thoughts on the iPhone? Any wishes that I didn’t cover?

I do not recommend installing any Safari plugins

There are quite a few handy Safari plugins out there. Most of them try to help make up for what Safari lacks, and normally I’d be all for trying to get the most out of your software.

Not in this case.

I’ve tried a few Safari plugins over the years and most of them, if not all of them, have ended up making Safari not perform properly in various situations.

I’ve had plugins not load sites because of an installed plugin. I’ve had the user-agent for the browser inexplicably change to something else. I’m also hearing of other’s having upload problems when they have a plugin installed.

I think you will find that almost every plugin for Safari will somehow “break” your install. Perhaps not in anyway that you care about, or that you may even notice – but overall Safari plugins really do not perform well and are unstable.

As such – I can not recommend installing any Safari plugins. I know some of you will disagree, and that is ok with me, we can all agree to disagree on this particular issue.

[tags]safari, plugin, plugin, apple, macintosh, browser[/tags]
[slug]no-safari-plugins[/slug]

10MacApps

Merely days after saying that I never get invited to do memes, here comes one from Zach Hale.

Here is a list of my 10 13 favorite applications for the Macintosh.

I was supposed to stop at 10, but oh well. There is no particular order to the above, I kind of just jotted these down as I thought of them.

I suppose I’ll ask Mike Stickel, Tantek Çelik, and Mike Rundle to do the same.

[tags]meme, apple, macintosh, applications, textmate, netnewswire, marsedit, quicksilver, itunes, iphoto, delicious library, safari, transmit, colloquy, php function index, php, ichat, chax, mail, email, programming, browser, text editor[/tags]