A Blog About Making Culture
lack of ambition
January 7, 2003
I've always been pretty platform-neutral, so Apple's little announcements are only of marginal interest to me. But the idea of developing a digital communications platform is one that's close to my heart, so I'm always interested in hearing Apple's message, because of their insistence that they're innovating.
Today they've launched Safari, which is a Gecko (Mozilla engine) browser that loses Chimera's tabs and adds brushed metal ugliness. Maybe the tabs will show up when the browser's out of beta. Then, in another stunning fit of innovation, they made a clone of PowerPoint with fewer features. The hardware I don't care about, since I've not noticed a public outcry for a laptop with a screen that's a foot and a half long. Other than that, it seems like faster and more, just like every other hardware announcement in the history of personal computing.
Considering how much third-party innovation is going on with the OS X platform, I don't understand why Apple is focused on such bizarre and disparate directions for their software. The Mac comes with no software that enables an ordinary person to publish their thoughts to the world as text. Seems a grave oversight for a platform that's targeting an audience of creative people trying to express their ideas.
Question for those of you on the Mac platform: How often do you enter text in a form or field in a web browser, compared to how often you capture or edit video?
Update: Later, we all saw that the browser engine was kHTML, not Gecko, which was picked due to its better customizability and performance and due to the maturity of the code a year ago when the project was started. More info in the comments.
Previously: changing the channel
jogin.com :: weblog
iDon'tCare: Hi, I'm Steve Jobs. Welcome everybody, to the San Francisco Macworld 2003 Keynote. Boy, do we have some cool stuff to show you todaaaay.. But first, let me just repeat everything I said last year. There's super-cool iTools, and, there's the Switch ads,... read more »Team Murder
Mostly Hype But I'm Still Talking About It: I was partially sucked into the hype today and downloaded Safari to take a test drive on the ugly blue read more »Team Murder
Mostly Hype But I'm Still Talking About It: I was partially sucked into the hype today and downloaded Safari to take a test drive on the ugly blue read more »tima thinking outloud.
Links Safari.: Apple announced the public beta of their OS X browser Safari with much buzz and less then stellar reviews. Apple's use of the Konqueror/KHTML rendering engine as opposed to Mozilla Gecko is a bit controversial (or more accurately intruiging), but in t... read more »Tobias
I wish Apple had thrown their support behind Gecko, but the engine used by Safari is KHTML which seems to peform rather poorly.
Anil
Tobias, are you sure of that? Safari here was identifying as AppleWebKit (like Gecko) in its user agent.
Rafe
I’m pretty sure it’s KHTML. I’ve read that it’s not regular KHTML but some massively optimized version that has amazing performanc enhancements, not that I put my trust in demoware.
As I said on my weblog, I’m glad to see anybody coming out to compete with MS on the productivity apps front. Keynote, if it turns out to be anything, could show people that it’s OK to come out with your own presentation tool, word processor, or spreadsheet. Office has been an incredible deterrent to innovation.
Anil
Yup, it’s kHTML. Anyone know why they’d pick that over Gecko? (Dave Hyatt?)
Rafe, you’re right that it’s good to see competition with Office, but given that the core apps are dying, it’s better to compete with the future of productivity apps. That’s an article I have yet to finish, though…
Tobias
I don’t know why they didn’t use Gecko. It’s kinda sad that they chose an inferior engine (I’m amazed at how many problems and bugs Mark Pilgrim found after using it for only 2 hours). The bookmark management is slick, integrated spell checking is probably the dream of every blogger and the interface just kicks ass, but without tabbed browsing and without decent standard support I can’t imagine using this for more than just testing.
Maciej Ceglowski
The best feature on that browser is the little bug button in the corner. Click it and you get a textarea (the URL you’re at is already entered for you). One more click, and the bug flies home. That’s a crazy wonderful feature (assuming they do get sent anywhere. How cheeky would it be if they got sent nowhere at all?).
It raises the question*, how can designers who do such beautiful UI work (notice also the ‘stop popups’ menu item, and the ability to turn off ad cookies without disabling all cookies, or getting constant cookie alert dialogs) can simultaneously leave out tabs and use the nasty chrome look?
Did a second shift come in, or something?
*Read all about begging the question here.
Pascale Soleil
Wow, that’s a lot of negative commentary…
Have you folks actually tried this BETA software? For my money it’s very fast and slick.
Yes, I’d like to see tabbed windows. And autofill for forms.
Other than that, I’ve got no complaints. It makes Netscape look sick, is more stable than OmniWeb, and is more streamlined than IE.
Andrew
I’m very disappointed in the lack of tabbing. I never clip A?V materials from my browser. I constantly enter text.
(Aside: “The comes with no software…” — there’s a noun missing here.)
alan
I imagine the kHTML over gecko decision was a business one. Apple probably wanted something that they could take complete control of, rather than be at the whim of the sometimes brilliant/sometimes stupid Mozilla group (which, open source or not, is ultimately controlled by AOL/Time Warner).
Alex
I’m really baffled by the widespread demand for tabs in Safari.
The whole reason they’re useful has everything to do with the “window fills screen” paradigm that is so pervasive on the Windows platform. And when you minimize windows they become indistinguishable from eachother.
On the Mac where there’s no stigma to make your web browser fill all that space, you get nicely stacked windows that are easy to flip through. If that’s not enough, you can always make use of minimization to the Dock.
A better complaint would be that Safari, in disabling pop-ups, has made it nearly impossible to bring up a lot of blog “comment” areas.
TheBrad
Limiting access to pop-up comments windows is not a problem limited to Safari, though, is it? Seems like every pop-up disabling scheme breaks some of these systems. OTOH, I’ve used a few sites with pop-up forms today under Safari and had no difficulty. But I haven’t seen a single pop-up ad.
All in all, not bad for beta.
John Moltz
So far the best suggestion I’ve seen is skipping tabbed windows altogether in favor of an OS X drawer, where you could see the content of each window.
I don’t think there’s any mistaking the message behind this. I suspect Safari and Keynote are just the beginning.
Next up: word processor and spreadsheet.
Rafe
Believe it or not, some people who never, ever maximize windows still find tabs to be amazingly useful.
The popup killer in Mozilla works really well in terms of distinguishing nuisance popups from the useful ones that you actually want to see. Basically, if the popup appears as the result of a click by the user, it lets it through, if it’s created as part of some action on the page, it’s not.
Derek
Seems a grave insight for a platform that’s targeting an audience of creative people trying to express their ideas.
We’ve secretly replaced your favorite Anil Dash with John Dvorak.
Dan
Tabbed browsing will be missed (for now), but the bookmark system rocks, and is far more useful to me. SnapBack is nifty, and the Google search in the toolbar seems quite handy.
The interface is clean, and I honestly don’t mind the brushed metal look. I just wish Apple would pick an interface and be done with it.
Anil
Man, are y’all really that excited about the bookmarks? We’ve had that shit on Windows for years, and I never considered it that big a deal.
Nate
Seems to me that all the bookmark-happy people are just buying into the hype.
Guanyao
I think the main reason why Apple went with KHTML instead of Gecko is all the crud that’s in Gecko including all the platform-independent code imbedded in it that Apple doesn’t need. Just take a look at the size of Safari v. the size of Chimera.
Samantha
John Moltz: You’re right, the OS X drawer idea IS a stroke of genius. My god, but that would be great. Basically like how Preview works with PDF files and the like…
What I like about the pop-up suppressor in Safari is the hot-key to turn it on and off.
Interface seems like one of those things that’s liable to change once this pulls out of beta and into 1.0.
Spell checking is amazing.
Web page load speed is an issue that’s important to a lot of mac users. That’s coz most webpages take waaaaay too long to render. Surfing on a mac has often been slow, sluggish and frustrating for me.
Mrs. Kennedy
Um, did you mean grave oversight?
Joe Grossberg
Yup, it’s kHTML. Anyone know why they’d pick that over Gecko? (Dave Hyatt?)
On the basis of this email, it looks like the folks at Apple thought the Mozilla/Gecko codebase was just too damn bloated.
Joe http://josephgrossberg.blogspot.com
P.S. Anil — please update your story, and remove the Gecko reference, so it doesn’t spread misinformation to people who don’t read the comments.
Anil
Oy, typos and omissions fixed. This was my most dramatically sloppy entry yet! Shoot first and ask questions later, I always say.
Jason Fried
What’s the deal with all the metal-UI haters? What’s the real gripe? You don’t like the visuals? Takes up too much space? Metaphor doesn’t work for you?
I’m just curious cause I’m as picky as they come when it comes to UI, but I really like the Apple metal look.
Oh well.
Jason Fried
One more quick thing about Safari that is really nice… If you mouseover my name it says “Open http://www.37signals.com in a new window.” It’s always nice to know that a new window is going to pop when you click a link.
Would be even better if a little box or some mini-icon appeared next to the hand icon when you rolled over a link that pops a new window.
Ok, I’m done.
Joe Grossberg
Hey Anil, at least you make an honest effort. That asshole Matt Drudge prints lies all the time. I wrote him about the time he “scooped” the lie that FDR was going to be Time’s Man of the Century, asking for a retraction or at least a clarification. He didn’t even respond.
Sporky
The brushed metal is in iTunes, quicktime, iDVD and iMovie and iPhoto- you’d think you’d get used it by now or pay for a program which strips the metal out of the gui. As for tabbed interface, I don’t much care for it at all. I like just going up to window and switching (in IE 5) windows there.
I only opened Safari for about five minutes last night. It was sleek, trimmed down, opened in about two seconds. It has most everything I want in a browser as is. Also, I’ve never used auto-complete on any of my computers. I might be a freak for not doing so, but I am who I be.
Nate
Agreed, auto-complete’s only use has been to alert houseguests to your choice of porn fetishes.
LKM
Man, are y’all really that excited about the bookmarks? We’ve had that shit on Windows for years, and I never considered it that big a deal.
You have no idea what you’re talking about. You need to go and actually look at the implementation. It’s a unique new approach too bookmarks. Some like it, some don’t.
And I don’t like the metal UI because it’s inconsistent. As long as people using it stay within Apple’s guidelines for using them, it’s okay, but Safari doesn’t actually fit into their own guidelines, so… It’s inconsistent and wrong.
ealar
About brushed metal, I think apple is pushing towards the ability to “metalify/demetalify” apps using a utility built into OSX 10.3. I feel a strong argument going on inside apple between developers over this features.
BTW the new version of metalizer has the feature to “metalize all applications”, I must say every window being brushed metal is even more stunning than pinstripe. They might have wanted to use BM but been stuck with pinstripe because of resource/speed issues.
Chris
If you hate the brushed metal, and have Interface Builder, you can get rid of it by following Michael Tsai’s instructions.
d.w.
As quite a few people have pointed out elsewhere, one of the prime drivers for tabbed browsing is the fact that new window creation speed tends to really suck eggs in most browsers. Safari’s new window speed is almost scary. I’ve been using Mozilla and Chimera (both with tabs) for over a year, and after 4 days with Safari I find I just don’t miss them at all.
KHTML vs. Gecko appears to have been a tradeoff between performance/footprint (KHTML) vs. maturity/standards compliance (Gecko). I think they made the right choice — the rendering bugs in KHTML are fixable things (indeed, there is evidence of great responsiveness on these issues from the Apple/KDE coders), but the kind of serious architectural work Gecko needs to be more competitive in the embedding space is no small effort.
pb
I don’t know how there could have been any confusion that Safari did not use Gecko. Jobs mentioned it, it’s all over that Apple site, but nowhere on the Moz/MozZine sites, it’s been a big topic of discussion, etc.
I say leave tabs out. Mostly bloat with incremental value at best. 95% of web surfers get along without them just fine. Their absence will have zero impact on Safari up-take.
I’m actually glad Apple has decided not to stick with one visual and that being Aqua. Not only is the brushed metal cleaner, the buttons seem much less garish, and, this is a biggy, it is functionally better because of the dragability. You can drag a Safari window from the bottom (if you have the status bar displayed). I wondering 1) if they’ll mov to brushed metal for everything and 2) if they’ll put the brushed metal all the way around the window making them dragable from any side.
pb
And one more thing: I agree with Anil that the video editing is never going to amount to much. Even if it ever got very easy to do (which it will inherently not), it’s not appealing. Amateur videos aer unlikley to ever be interesting. FinalCut is not PageMaker.
That said, .mac does have homepages (aren’t blogs just glorified homepages?). But they aren’t free.
Matt
Hey, I miss tabs, but if enough people howel, Apple always listens.. Jam the feedback, they will add tabs by v1.0 I’m sure.
I think for me anyways, the number one issue with a web browser is speed. I can’t stand it when just scrolling the window is a choppy or jerky affair which is every browser except Safari. Every other browser fails to be smooth on a G4 with Quartz Extreme even! Of course with Microsoft’s Carbon browser I would expect such lameness, but even Chimera (being supposedly Cocoa / Mac optimized) successfully bombs on most websites in this manner.
I’m glad Apple chose the sleeker (much so!) KHTML engine. Rendering / layout issues can be fixed and (hats off to Apple) they’ve provided the user feedback button to make it easy for Apple to quickly pinpoint the areas that need improvement. Trimming the fat from bloatware is a much harder task.. especially in an argue-forever, act-rarely environment like the Mozilla project. (Heck, they STILL haven’t done anything about even JPEG-2000 for example.. and it’s 2003..
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