Brief Safari 5 Notes

Just poking around the new Safari 5 today. Here's what I've noticed so far.

• Safari 5 still has no way to restore an accidentally closed tab. UPDATE: One of my fine readers points out in the comments that you can now hit command-z (or choose "Undo Close Tab" from the File menu) to restore an accidentally closed tab. This is great news. Unfortunately, it only works for the last closed tab, whereas Firefox allows you to restore multiple tabs in sequence. Still, this is a major improvement. I'll take it.
• Nor is there a built-in way to automatically restore a Safari session after quitting the app. You must still hit "Reopen All Windows from Last Session" from the History menu.
• Fortunately there is an extension for this already.
• Safari 5 sometimes gets a bit confused when directly saving items with the "safariextz" file extension despite the fact that said extension is the one used for Safari 5 extensions.

  

• The addition of extensions in Safari is wonderful, but the roll-out seems uncharacteristically rushed.
  • There is no unified, Apple-sanctioned place to get extensions as yet.
  • There are no demos of the technology featured on Apple's site.
  • Seems strange considering how prominently featured this key new technology is in the announcement literature.

    

• Safari 5 blessedly restores the ability to always keep a tab open even where there is only one. UPDATE: Another reader points out that the ability to keep the tab visible at all times has always been around in version 4, but was in the View menu rather than the tab preferences where it had been housed in previous versions, causing numerous users (myself included) to miss it entirely. Thanks, kind reader!

  

• Safari 5 features a new, jumbo preferences window.

  

• I have no idea what the new tabs preference does. What is the difference between "Always" and "Automatically?"

  

• Actually, here it is in Help. The pref pane language is astoundingly unclear. Even the Help description is confusing.

  

• Crash city! That didn't take long.

  

• And now, because the tabs are all restoring at relaunch, I can't open Safari 5. Nice. Here's how Firefox handles this.

  

• The Gmail Checker extension looks promising.
• OMG. Gmail is down?! WTF?

  

• I will say this: Safari 5 is FAST!
• Composing posts in the Wordpress GUI is much improved; key commands now work as they do in Firefox.
• Autocomplete now works from the middle of a search term. Yay!

  

There are a lot of nice touches in this new version of Safari. But there are still a few features I rely on that it lacks: bookmark syncing and tab restore spring immediately to mind. Still, with the improvements to general surfing and web app functionality and the amazing speed, I'll be taking a closer at Safari for more of my browsing needs.

Delete Unwanted Usernames from Firefox

I think this post's title says it all, but a word of explanation nonetheless.

One of my favorite features of Firefox is that it remembers usernames for forms. Anytime you type a username in a form Firefox will store it, and the next time you go to that form and select the username field, Firefox will display all the usernames it remembers for that particular form in a dropdown just below the field. It's pretty sweet.

The only problem is that sometimes the field gets populated with usernames you don't want in there. For instance, I've been doing a lot of work on a web application, and it involves logging in as various test users. But these users are only temporary, and I don't want them stored. Or, worse, have you ever mistakenly entered your password in the username field? I've always wondered if there were a way to clear these unwanted or temporary usernames, and it turns out there is.

A quick Google search was all it took, honestly. A Netlobo article contained the answer. But the short story is, to clear an unwanted username from the remembered username dropdown, simply highlight the username in the list and hit Shift-Delete.

And there you have it. Problem solved.

Window for One

Like a lot of SysAdmins, I work in a cave. No windows except for the odd Dell system, of course. No natural light whatsoever. It can get depressing. So I was pretty intrigued when I saw this Winscape virtual window.

I've actually had this idea for some time. Get a large, bright screen and show video of the outdoors on it. Hang it on the wall and frame it with some trim so it looks like a window, and voila! Instant techno-window. But this rig adds one cool wrinkle: parallax. Parallax is the changing of said view out said window as your position relative to said window changes. Simply playing video of the beach on a screen will yield less realistic results as it will lack the parallax effect.

Parallax in the Winscape rig is achieved with a transmitter on the viewer that sends location to a sensor on or near the virtual window display. As the viewer moves relative to the screen, a computer tracks the movement and updates the display accordingly.

As someone who deals with a lot of art and museum installation, I can tell you that there is at least one big potential problem with this kind of setup. How do you deal with more than one viewer?

The Winscape system, while cool in concept, is clearly only suitable for the basement-living single crowd. Pity.

Magic Mouse

I got a Magic Mouse for Christmas, and I like it a lot better than I thought I would. When first hearing about it, I thought the Magic Mouse sounded amazing, like a combination of the best features of a mouse and a trackpad (yes, I'm addicted to two-finger scrolling) without the mechanical deficiencies of past mice. Then I began reading people's experiences, in particular, gripes about the lack of configurability of gestures provided by the Mouse preference pane.

But I got one anyway, if for no other reason than I had to see for myself. And I must say, I'm mighty impressed. The mouse works quite well for my purposes. I can use it on our leather couch with minimal tracking glitches. And in most respects it simply behaves like a normal, decent cordless mouse, which is extremely useful now that I'm all portable and junk.

But what really makes the Magic Mouse something special is that you can, in theory, make it behave however you want. And that theory becomes practice with the installation of a single piece of software: MagicPrefs (or the more configurable, but less user-friendly BetterTouchTool, which also allows you to configure your trackpad).

MagicPrefs allows you to configure your Magic Mouse with whatever multi-touch gestures you want. I really like the fact that it allows you to disable single-finger scrolling and replace it with two-finger scrolling on the Magic Mouse. This alone has reduced the huge number of accidental scrolls I've made and has allowed me to match the way I use the mouse and the trackpad.

With MagicPrefs I've also assigned Exposé to multi-finger clicks on my Magic Mouse, bringing back a missing feature of my old Mighty Mouse.

Out of the box I'm quite satisfied with my Magic Mouse. And multi-touch gestures make it possibly the coolest mouse I've ever used.

Google Chrome Beta

Google's finally released a beta version of their browser for the Mac. I'm surprised at how impressive I'm finding it. Here are some initial observations:

• "Reopen Closed Tab"

  Google Chrome allows you to reopen the last tab you closed, which is an insanely useful feature I don't seem to be able to live without anymore, and a big reason I keep using Firefox. It's a deal-breaker.

  

• Saves your session

  Chrome allows you to reopen your tabs and windows from the last session, just like in Firefox.



• Username memory

  Another Firefox fave is that is reliably remembers my form data without having to save my passwords. Safari never does this quite right for me, but Google Chrome nails it.

  

• Uses the Mac OS X Keychain to store passwords

  If you did want to use Chrome to store your passwords, it'll do so using Mac OS X's native Keychain mechanism, which I greatly prefer to Firefox's app-based mechanism.

• Nice looking, native looking appearance

  I like the way Google Chrome looks, and it uses the same rendering engine as Safari, so it tends to render pages better than Firefox.

• URL completion based on text inside the string (a la Firefox's "Awesome Bar")

  Chrome has the ability to suggest a URL even when you type in a part of the URL that occurs in its middle. I use this every day to get to my Wordpress admin page by simply typing "wp" in Firefox.

• Uses the native Mac OS X spellchecker

  Chrome, like Safari, uses the native spellchecker, making it better integrated with the OS than Firefox.

• No Snow Leopard Text Substitutions

  Snow Leopard brought with it Text Substitutions — handy for filling in usernames and password, and something I was really looking forward  to using. But non-Cocoa applications must be written to take advantage of them. Safari has them; Firefox does not. Nor does Chrome. Bummer.

  

• Text entry doesn't take key commands (bold, ital.) like it does in FF

  Firefox still wins at text entry, particularly when composing my blog posts. Firefox allows for Mac OS X key-commands for bolding (command-b) and italicizing (command-i) text. Chrome, like Safari, currently lacks this functionality. A minor nit, sure, but something I always note as an area in which Firefox is more native in behavior than Safari.

• Nice looking developer tools

  Chrome's developer tools look to be on par with Safari's. To get something comparable in Firefox you need to install Firefly. I prefer the native tools if I can get 'em.

  

• When opening a new tab via a link in the current tab, the new tab opens directly to the right of the current tab

  Oddly, this behavior mimics what I've seen on the iPhone. I don't really like it there, and I'm pretty sure I won't like it in Chrome either.

• You can hold shift while opening/closing a new tab to watch the animation in slow motion

  On a purely gee-whiz note, Chrome lets you watch tab animations in slow motion by initiating them while holding the shift key, just like the Mac OS X Finder and Dock do.

• Fast! Wicked fast

  Chrome seems to be about on par with Safari in terms of launch and load speeds. Which is to say, fast. Very fast.

• Cold, Cruel Irony

  Finally, for some odd reason, the page Chrome consistently has trouble with is my Gmail. I know, I know, it's beta, but really.

  

When testing out a new browser there are a handful of features I look for first. In particular, I'm addicted to Firefox's ability to save window and tab sessions at quit, to undo the closing of an individual tab directly after the fact, and to remember my usernames on login pages without having to save my passwords. It's also essential for any browser to be able to handle the plethora of web-based forms and apps I use on a regular basis, apps such as the Wordpress backend I'm using to post this article, for instance. Finally, I look for features that I miss in Firefox. These are features that are generally present in Safari, things like native look and feel, speed, and Keychain integration. I suppose my ideal browser is a combination of Firefox and Safari, so that's generally what I'm looking for when testing them out.

With its unique ability to treat each tab and window as a separate process, Google Chrome takes an innovative approach to a web browser while still employing the best features of both Safari and Firefox. Many of the things that make me staunchly stick to Firefox — saved sessions, the ability to undo a closed tab — are present, as are many of the features that make me wish I could use Safari — native good looks, speed, keychain integration. There's still a lot missing from this beta. Bookmarks in particular are half-baked, lacking the ability, for instance, to open a group of bookmarks in tabs. And after using Firefox for the past few years, there may be extensions from its vast plugin ecosystem I may find myself unable to live without. Nevertheless, once mature, Google Chrome looks to be a strong contender for my primary browser. There's a lot here to like, and this is only a beta. The Mac Google Chrome team should be very proud.