Comments on: Safari UI Annoyances, Part 1: Huge Waste of Pixels

By: Will

Will — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 15:06:47 +0000

safari sucks – apple tends to hide many features in order to make it “easier to use”. However, this is just plain stupid, annoying, and pointless. You don’t need to hide things – make them where they should be – if the average user doesn’t need them / know about them, they won’t go looking. For anyone else that’s familiar with any other computer os out there (other unix based, whichever gnome / kde linux version you choose, even windows) I feel it I feel that their native browsers have a better ORGANIZATION of tools – yes, *cough* even IE – now, that’s my opinion, and I’m not arguing that IE performs better (or well overall), just arguing that the I feel it’s much intuitive there…

so, basically, it’s either all or nothing – either you don’t know anything and using safari is very easy, or you know EVERYTHING and you can control visual safari from the terminal – anywhere in the middle and you’re screwed…

By: Rich

Rich — Fri, 04 May 2007 16:55:41 +0000

I know this is a little off topic, but firefox has an extension that does EXACTLY what you suggested. It’s called fission and I use it constantly. So, if anything persuades you to change to Firefox in the future, make sure you download fission.

By: Julian Bennett Holmes

Julian Bennett Holmes — Sat, 24 Mar 2007 04:58:07 +0000

DNM: No, I think I got it. What I mean is, what would happen then if you’re on apple.com, and you see a link to times.co.uk, for example?

By: Steve

Steve — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 22:08:45 +0000

Right, you won’t see nearly as much of long url’s, especially if the current page’s url is already taking up the entire field. Plus, the address field uses a larger font than the status bar, so you’d be missing even more of the url.

url’s popup in a tooltip window when you hover long enough. What would help is if you could tap the shift key or escape or something to make them appear right away. Couldn’t use the command key because that’s reserved for showing a longer description in the tooltip.

By: vanni

vanni — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 19:25:16 +0000

@Michael
>Safari 3 has this (in Leopard)

Horray!! Yet another reason to look forward to Leopard .. hope the rumours about a new release date of Nov is wrong!!!

By: Enzo90910

Enzo90910 — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 11:46:56 +0000

I would suggest having a status bar smoothly appearing only when hovering over a link and disappearing at all other times. This should take care of all cases and give you maximal pixel space when you are just reading the page.

By: Willem van Duijn

Willem van Duijn — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 11:05:54 +0000

On http://5thirtyone.com/archives/489 there are some nifty plugins:

= Inquisitor:
Directly show search results as you tipe beneath the search-field. Very nice!

= Saft:
All kinds of extra’s, but I think Apple should make this default in their browsers:
– type ahead find, like in Firefox: just press / and type the phrase you’re searching. No need to do Command+F to open a searchbox that is displayed over the website you’re searching (annoying)

– dragging of tabs

– restore browsing session / tabs

– sidebar with tabs’ content thumbnail

By: Frode Hegland

Frode Hegland — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 10:29:07 +0000

Very, very, very very nice!!

By: Sebhelyesfarku

Sebhelyesfarku — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 02:33:46 +0000

Opera shows a tooltip over links. Safari is a p.o.s. anyways.

By: eikonos

eikonos — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 01:57:49 +0000

I only have the status bar visible because I want to know where links will go, so this would allow me to turn it off and save space. Do the Safari/Webkit developers read this site, and can they add this feature — even as an option for users who want it?

By: Dan

Dan — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 01:57:25 +0000

When I hover over a link in Safari I get a tooltip after a couple seconds. I feel like an idiot because I have no idea how I activated this. But it can definitely be done, and with the delay it is not obtrusive. I also have the status bar switched off because with this feature I don’t need it. I did a Google search and it looks like Safari Enhancer (mentioned by #20 above) is the big one people are using for this functionality.

By: Steve Simitzis

Steve Simitzis — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 00:57:43 +0000

Two problems here:

(1) Long URLs (already discussed).

(2) Javascript onclicks. Links that catch onclick events often link to “#”. As more and more sites go Ajax, seeing “#” flash up in the address bar all the time will become a nuisance.

By: Tim

Tim — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 23:36:39 +0000

awesome idea, i just turned the status bar on for that reason

By: B deR West

B deR West — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 21:45:02 +0000

A further search reveals it to be SafariEnhancer, found here: http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/17776

By: B deR West

B deR West — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 21:39:55 +0000

I don’t know which of the many Safari-customizing applets it is, but one of the allows link addresses to be displayed as tooltips. While I agree, it clutter the experience, the fact that when I’m just reading a Web page there isn’t a huge grey bar at the bottom of the window makes up for that little bit of clutter.

I have AcidSearch and SafariStand, but when I poked around in them, I couldn’t find the preference for this feature. I also have ForGetMeNot, but also couldn’t find it in there.

By: Willem van Duijn

Willem van Duijn — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 21:23:43 +0000

Tooltips on each link will cluther everything, and moreover: it will destroy most of the browsing-experience as suddenly tooltips appear everywhere. Imagine a clean nice website, and suddenly a tooltip is there in a completely different style.
Even worse: a page with many links will result in a stroboscopic mousecursor, with tooltips popping up and disapearing. This can be leveraged by building in a delay, but then I also have to wait if I /do/ want to see the URL to be followed.

But it can be implemented parallel to the statusbar, and optional offcourse :) But that will make things too difficult for novice :)

Better is to introduce a right-mouseclick. When a user hovers above a link, and presses its right mouse button the contectmenu appears displaying the full url. But this can make the contextmenu too cluthered.

Anyway, quite difficult to come up with something useful. But I still don’t see what is wrong with a 13px high statusbar :)