Improvements in Safari 3 Beta
Posted by Ryan on June 12, 2007
I’m not sure if it’s just out of habit, or convenience, or if somewhere in my subconscious I preferred it’s [apparent] quickness, but I almost always find myself using Safari when browsing the Web. So, needless to say I downloaded the beta of version 3.0 as soon as it was available on apple.com. I’m sure there's numerous improvements made, and I'm not even entirely sure what they've been trying to sell it on, but from a design/development standpoint, a few new features and fixes have already caught my eye.
- Support for styling of form elements
- This was always kind of a bummer, both when using Safari or when designing a site. Using Safari, you always knew you might not be getting the whole picture when it came to styled form elements. And from a design standpoint, you never wanted to do anything too drastic that might only partially style form elements for Safari users. As lame as I feel admitting it, I’m totally excited that Safari’s supporting form element styling, though probably more from a user viewpoint. It’s so weird running across styled submit buttons I’ve done for past projects and since forgotten about.
- HTML over Flash
- This used to be a problem in [nearly?] all major browsers. Dropdowns in that primary-nav resting right above your main Flash content, never seemed to behave quite right. Flash always bullying that HTML content for top z-index. Well now Safari (as well as Firefox) users can view all the HTML content they want on top of Flash player.
- Improved “Find”
- No more searching for that pale-blue highlight. Command+f now dims the whole page (or source) with all instances of the searched text remaining un-dimmed, and the current/target found instance being highlighted in orange.
There are a couple of annoyances that come along with the beta though – not the least of which is the resizable textarea elements. I’m all for providing the user with desired functionality, but this one just seems a little too weird for me. Personally, I think it’s the designer’s responsibility to ensure a textarea is sized adequately, if not, increasing the browser’s font-size should provide the flexibility to scale the textarea to a reasonable and usable alternative. I haven’t looked into how the textarea’s parent element’s width must be defined to ensure it scales with the textarea, and I can't say I'm going to concern myself with it any time soon. A behavior this quirky in a browser is a bit of a detractor for me. It’s only the beta Ryan, it’s only the beta