A few days ago I was very happy to finally return to using Safari as my main browser on OSX. A few days on there are still things that are upsetting me about it and which I wish Apple would fix as it has to be simple enough to do so.
My first bugbear is the GMail window title not updating to show the current number of unread messages. I find myself frequently checking my GMail tab because it shows 2 unread messages despite having already read them. Also with respect to GMail, the inbox doesn’t always update with new messages and I have to click the inbox link to refresh the listing. Still staying with GMail, the handy AJAX style address look-up tool that auto-suggests contacts as you type doesn’t appear to work at all. I don’t like having to type full addresses any more, AJAX has made me very lazy.
Another problem that I have noticed is that if you have a large number of tabs open, you reach a point whereby the tab hits its lower size limit. So, the result is that you get a prompt to show you that you have more tabs open. That’s fine. However, when you click on the little arrows to see the other tabs and then select an “overflow” tab, it brings the window into focus but doesn’t bring its corresponding tab into focus. This means that the only way you can close this window is using Option+W or going to the menu instead of the little close button that is right there on the tab, as normal.
I previously said that I liked being able to bookmark a group of tabs so that I didn’t have to open windows individually. I said this despite there being no session manager built into this feature which is a Firefox standard at this stage. However, I would now like to do a u-turn and say that this feature is not really that good. The lack of a session manager is really starting to bug me as I have to re-sign into GMail and then refresh my Google Reader window instead of them just being there. In addition if you have a site open to look at something and you hit the magic group bookmark to open all your saved tabs, it closes the current site that you are looking at and refreshes the browser with the saved tabs instead. How annoying is that? Especially considering it must have taken more programming effort to check and close any open windows first rather than just adding to the container. Ugly feature Apple, very ugly. I fear that I might find more things in the coming days that I don’t like either.
UPDATE: Scratch the GMail AJAX prompt thingy. I just discovered that Google have actually released an updated UI for GMail that causes this to stop working. Never saw any notification of it but just spotted the link to the older UI now. The older GMail UI also correctly refreshes and updates the window title when you read messages. So, apologies to Apple on the GMail problems but the other issues remain.