OK, so Safari 4 runs Yahoo mail so much drastically better than Firefox that I think I'll keep it for at least that. But there is no easy way to just add different search engines to the search bar. On Firefox this is trivial. I don't do plugins as a general rule. I get them for major things (like Firebug for debugging web apps). But I don't go for the "let's redo your whole UI in some crazy new way" ones. I like to fix small things, and only those things. Trying to find a way to add search engines led to a maze of plugins, some of which take over the whole known universe, and many of which aren't up to speed with 4 beta yet. And the one that looks best will only support 4 beta on Leopard, which I don't have and have no particular interest investing time and money in. Not until a lot more crap refuses to install than a lousy plugin.

How can Safari get this essential thing wrong? Google must be paying them to not allow anything else without hacks, I suppose. Idiots. Until they fix this or take the Google Chrome approach to the address bar I won't be adopting this in full.

But damn does Yahoo mail ever fly in this thing.

Tags: browser wars
Current Location: computer desk
Current Mood: annoyed

So... Apple has very wisely decided to take advantage of Google's absurdly slow progress on Chrome for Mac OS to put out the Safari 4 beta, which blatantly appropriates as much of Chrome's feature set as possible. It also implements

It's an obvious strategy and one I'm happy to reward. I've flirted off and on with Safari over the years- it looks very nice and loads much faster than Firefox, but I've had trouble getting it to work with Yahoo mail which is a dealbreaker for me- for a while Yahoo complained about it (not Safari's fault) and then more recently would load fine, but would balk when I tried to reply to a message (no, I have no idea why either- didn't bother to investigate, just went back to Firefox).

But Firefox 3 has had some problems on my machine at work (which is Windows, but still it makes me distrustful of upgrading) and it just sucks up ram and gradually slows to a crawl if I leave Yahoo Mail open on Firefox 2 on my Mac. However, so far Safari 4 seems to work much better with Yahoo Mail than Safari 3, and is far more responsive than Firefox of either version. We'll see how well that holds up after a couple of days of running, but I'm encouraged.

Plus it apparently implements the drag-a-tab-to-create-a-new-window feature I wanted a few posts ago. Yay!

Tags: browser wars

OK, I have a longstanding browser feature request, but maybe someone out there knows a browser that already does this, or knows that Firefox does this and can tell me where the blasted option is since I certainly can't find it.

I frequently want to take a particular tab from a window where I've got a billion tabs open, and pull that one tab out into a new window. Usually for one of two reasons- either I want to compare it side-by-side to something in another tab, or I want to start a new bunch of tabs centered around the one I want to pull into a new window.

And yes, I frequently either forget to open things in new windows, or more often only want it in a new window later. And a lot of times, the tab in question would take a long time to reload, and might not come back at all (comics.org being my depressingly canonical example of this, although it's been better ever since we blocked cover image leeching).

Anyway, anyone know a browser that does this? And if it's Google Chrome I don't care because those jerks can't be bothered to support MacOS. So yes, Mac-friendly browsers only, please.

Tags: browser wars