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July 08, 2003

Safari

Over Surfin' Safari, Dave Hyatt is asking for trackback links to articles that outline issues with Safari. Please note that he does not want UI issues raised.

Thanks for the opportunity Dave, I want to raise two usability issues. Both of these have been logged as bugs for each (and every) version of Safari that I have had the pleasure of using. Before I proceed, I want to say that Safari is a great browser and in general I am really happy about it.

Problem #1.
I use Safari on my powerbook at work. There are a couple of alternate proxy servers. I can configure these as proxy servers in my network preferences (in 10.2) and Camino, Internet Exploder and OmniWeb can then use the web. In particular, all three browsers will allow me to log into (for example) the developer section of Apple's website. Safari insists that I am not connected to the internet. Note that everything works until the first https URL and then stops. Firstly the message is just plain wrong. I am obviously connected and the other browsers have managed to connect (there used to be some errors about self signed certificates in OmniWeb but at least you can click OK or import the certificate). Secondly it is really annoying to have to then cut and paste the URL into another browser, discover that there is now a session cookie missing, back navigate to the starting point, etc, etc.

Problem #2.
I live in Australia. Country code is '.au'. If I type the url for my credit union in the entry bar (www.teacherscreditunion.com.au) I get this amazing error message about a corrupt sound file (I guess because .au looks like a file extension rather than a domain name). No idea how to fix this but I paste the same entry in OmniWeb, navigate to the online banking page, grab that URL and bookmark in Safari (so I bypass the front page) and Bob's-Your-Uncle.

Sorry I can't give you a longer list :-) but really, these are the only two non-UI features that drive me nuts. I still use Safari as my main browser but it would be nice to drop all the others altogether....

Posted by Ozguru at July 8, 2003 10:07 PM

Comments

Problem #2 Is there a MIME map for Safari? If so, can you change it? If you can change it, then you could try mapping the .au extension to "text/html". My above comment might be totally worthless as i know zilch about OSX and Safari.

Posted by: rr at July 8, 2003 10:07 PM