Keeping up with Safari

For those interested in keeping up to date with developments regarding Safari, here’s a few links you might like to follow.

To his eternal credit Dave Hyatt, a senior Safari developer, is posting responses to critical feedback of the browser on his weblog. A noble and welcome move.

Jason Kottke has expressed his indifference at Safari and suggests it may have been a better idea to merge the application with other web-enabled applications such as Watson, Sherlock and NetNewsWire ;

"Why the distinction between regular web browsing and web browsing using specialized interfaces for structured data? Using Watson to find movie times is great, but it means having a separate application running...and for ticket purchases, it dumps me back into a web browser anyway. Apple’s Sherlock app offers functionality similar to Watson. Why not merge Sherlock and Safari into one application?"

As usual, John Gruber is one of the first to provide a well balanced argument on why this is a bad idea ;

"...transmogrifying Safari into a browser-plus-web-services-front-end would be a huge mistake... What’s needed is an app that is to web browsing what Photoshop is to bitmap editing, or what BBEdit is to text editing. Do one thing and do it right. There’s no reason to move beyond the browser until someone makes a decent one."

Mark Pilgrim also continues to provide commentary on his weblog of his continuing research of the web browser. The level of detail in his research is pretty incredible ;

"I did what any self-respecting over-achieving web designer would do: I ran through hundreds of CSS import tests, found 18 cases that affect Safari, tested each of them in 27 browsers, and made a table of the results."

In the midst of this activity and commentary, Apple has released an updated beta (v51) on their website. I have to say that I am very impressed by the quick response of Apple (and Dave Hyatt) to public feedback on their browser, and their openness to discuss future modifications and features. Long may this practice continue.

Posted 7 years, 2 months ago on 13th January 2003.

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