November 15, 2007 Almost there, Safari 
I want to use Safari as my regular browser. WebKit‘s taking off. There’s solid development efforts going on. It’s native to my OS. It’s never been quite there, though.
I’m a Firefox fan and advocate generally. One of the reasons for my support is its support for plugins, including the Web Developer Toolbar, which I use daily. When developing and testing pages, I frequently disable the browser cache so my refresh is ensured to contain the latest changes. This makes browsing any other site near impossible. Every little star icon in Gmail has to load every time the Inbox is refreshed.
Fully functional Gmail support is important to me. For that reason, I’d been using Firefox’s cousin, Camino, for Gmail, regular browsing, and project management web apps. Something’s been a little off there too, though.
So I tried Safari again recently, with the 3.0 beta. I ran into a few snags, though, that really impact me:
- In Gmail, I could not hit tab from the Message field to hit the Send button. After composing a message using nothing but the keyboard—even to enter a recipient’s address and have Gmail autocomplete it for me—I had to reach for the mouse to send.
- In Backpack To Do lists, the cursor wouldn’t place in the next, new list item automatically. Again, entering content with the keyboard, hitting enter on a To Do item submitted it, and left the cursor...nowhere. Reach for the mouse to click into the autogenerated new field.
- Using Gmail Notifier as my default client, Safari’s “Mail Link to this Page” menu item wouldn’t launch a compose screen. In the past I’ve seen errors saying Gmail Notifier wasn’t supported. Recently it would launch a browser window but would redirect to the Inbox instead of the compose screen. At that point I switched my default browser back to Firefox, which did successfully launch the compose window when I mailed a link from Safari.
They sound small, but they’re things I do all day long. I gave up. Decided to use Firefox full-time. That left me with my management apps (email, project management, etc) in the same application as my development windows. Not good, either.
Then I read the Surfin’ Safari post, ”Ten New Things in WebKit 3,” this morning. After my first pass through, I wanted to comment and say, “Yes, but until these three things work for me, I cannot switch to take advantage of these 10 new things!” I couldn’t comment. I couldn’t find an email address to comment.
I read through the article again and saw this:
WebKit 3 fixes many bugs, and supports additional text editing features like links and lists. We now have support from web applications like WordPress, Google Docs, GMail, Blogger, and many more.
I downloaded the OS X Tiger 10.4.11 update, launched Safari, browsed to Gmail, and…
We’re good. I can tab to the Send button. I can launch a compose screen. I can add To Do items with just the keyboard in Backpack. Now, however, typing in the To field in Gmail isn’t providing me the autocomplete address lookup! I’ve been noticing a severe lag in this in all browsers lately, and suspect something on Google’s end. This needs to be working and working fast. I need to be able to hit Compose (or hit ‘C’ on the keyboard), be in that field, type a name, and be on my way to composing.
Once that’s there, I’ll be happy, and using Safari full time.
If you find yourself bouncing back and forth between browsers to try out features or for different uses, Bookdog is a great little OS X app for migrating and synchronizing bookmarks.
Update: I just noticed an “Older Version” link in Gmail. I clicked that and found myself in a Gmail where autocomplete of addresses in the To field works in Safari. I again wasn’t able to tab to the Send button, though. In fact, tabbing from the Message field brought me to the Subject field and inserted tab characters. So it’s up to Gmail to restore autocomplete...?
Update 2: It’s becoming apparent that once I type an address into the “New Version” of Gmail, it’s available in autocomplete going forward. I’ve also noticed that every Gmail screen now has “?ui=2” in the URL. Things could be working out nicely in Safari 3.
