Kooky, quirky Safari

I tried the brand new Safari browser for Windows last week. While I’m still a little puzzled why Apple would even bother entering the Windows market, I’ve noticed a couple of things which I don’t particularly care for:

• Like iTunes, it has a kooky user interface, which can’t be customised. I don’t know about you, but I object to applications which are created by knuckleheads who think that their interface is better than the one I chose to use.

• The inability to handle the CSS “overflow” property. Whether you set the value to “visible”, “hidden”, “auto” or “scroll”, it treats it as “visible”. Which is horrible when your content includes source code listings, which typically use the <pre> and <code> tags.

While the former is only irritating, the latter is actually a problem because it degrades the user experience, if your website design uses scrollbars for preformatted text, like the example below:

For instance, both Firefox and Opera provide a horizontal scrollbar for the source code. Safari and it’s KHTML rendering engine, fails to do that, opting to push the sidebar to the extreme right instead.

As web designers, we’ve had to implement stupid browser hacks for a number of years now. Must we now cater for Safari’s quirks too? What year is this?

Posted in Rants, Software, Usability, Web, Windows by Ivan