Safari 3 - Yay… Hang on a minute…

This is good news, isn’t it? Safari is a pretty good browser as it stands, so I am expecting some updated behind the scenes stuff (such as security and performance) and some new CSS support is always welcome (Multi-column support, yes please). But what I didn’t expect to hear was they are releasing it for Windows and there is a new feature called “Resizable text fields”… (Yes this is all news to me!)

Maybe the text field you’re typing in is a bit too small to read. Or maybe you just have a lot to say. Either way, Safari lets you resize text fields on any website, just by grabbing the corner of the field. Resize a field and the web page re-flows to make room.

I am a bit suspect about how this is going to work… I just have visions of websites breaking and becoming unusable and confusing the user. I don’t have visions of this being a seamless “click”, “drag”, “arrh that’s better”. I can see this being one more thing that developers have to deal with/design for and clients/users becoming confused when it breaks the design of a site. I really hope this feature has been well tested and I am proved wrong. Of course, if websites are designed properly they should either offer the resize on the site (will this cause conflicts for sites that do offer this client-side??) or be a sufficient size in the first place. I did a quick Google to see if I could find some more info on this, and Macworld have a video of this feature in action. It would appear I have nothing to worry about, but I am holding my breath until I have a go myself.

Safari on Windows… Well, from a non-web developer point of view; great! Another choice for users and competitor for Microsoft. This is favorable news. However, I do wonder how well received it will be by Windows users. Will the “Safari on windows” market share be advanced users only? People who are interested in using or exploring how they access the internet? It will be intriguing to see how it does in the ranks in the months to come after it’s official release.

What about testing? That’s my next question, and it is the main reason I have not installed Safari 3 beta yet. Can we run both versions of Safari side-by-side? Is this just another huge can of worms for us web developers? Questions, questions, questions… Some more Googling on this one and I couldn’t find a solution to this yet. Some people have tried running 2 alongside 3 and it appears to work. However Mac OS X will use the new version of Webkit that ships with Safari 3, so that’s no good. Has anyone found a way around this yet?

Enough of what sounds like my negative take on Safari 3. On a good note, there are some very useful additions, that Roger Johansson goes into more detail about on his website. I would like to applaud the revamped “on page search” and highlighting. (A success in Firefox!) Also, the ability to drag a tab out into it’s own window is cool! I tried this in Firefox once, hoping it would detach into it’s own window and I just ended up with a shortcut on my desktop to the url!

Watch out for the official release of Safari 3 and lets hope and pray we can test simultaneously on both versions with no pain! I know I’ll be developing with Safari 3 in mind starting… as soon as I can get my hands on it with Safari 2 still running.