Safari has some issues with CSS that are destroying the Cari.net homepage. Fun with CSS!

Date: Oct 12, 2006
Title: Safari leaves something to be desired
Comments: 0
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Love the Mac.

Hate the Browser.

Ok, so “hate” is a strong word, but as much as I try to love Safari, I always end up back at Camino or Opera (with Firefox as the development browser). Why?

The Cari.net homepage, slightly mangled by Safari It’s all the little things that should work, but just don’t seem to get there in Safari. For example, the new Cari.net site (launched in August, 2006), validates XHTML 1.1 Strict. Looks beautiful in IE6 (and IE7), FF1.5 (with an odd but minor issue in FF1.0), newer versions of Opera… Safari should follow suit, no?

The issue has been corrected at this point, but it used to push down the top image on the homepage and add a section of the logo. The cause was actually an extra menu item that should have been hidden, but it seems as though Safari doesn’t like to obey “overflow:hidden” in certain situations.

While we’re talking about Safari

I love my mac, and I try to love Safari. I love the auto-complete. I love the speed (though Camino and Opera are definitely right up there with it). I love the integration with the OS and keychain (which Camino supports, but not in a way that’s interchangeable with Safari). I love being able to hit Apple+Ctrl+D to look up a word.

So why is it almost unusable? The keyboard navigation is horrific. Trying to tab through a form is ok until you hit a select box. In all other browsers, you can press the down-arrow to expand the select box. In Safari, you need to hit Ctrl+Down-Arrow. Less than convenient. Then trying to tab on to the next element is generally impossible. And it doesn’t matter what the keyboard navigation settings are set to in the preferences.

And a final note…

It’d be so wonderful to have some decent FIYT (find-as-you-type) searching in Safari. Firefox’s is nice. Opera’s is great. Camino has a great extension to allow it. Safari… not so much. Even the bundles to get it working don’t work all that well.

Here’s to hoping Safari in OS X 10.5 gets a little better.