Saturday, 8 February 2003

Random Safari UI Requests

Dave Hyatt is asking for more feedback on the GUI for Safari, Apple's new Mac OS X web browser based on KHTML. Here's what I'd find most useful:

  • A “Page Info” dialog like that in Mozilla and Phoenix; I'd like to be able to see the Modified and Expired times for the page, at least. Bonus points if you show the last time the page was locally cached (which Mozilla doesn't do).

  • Import for Mozilla/Phoenix bookmarks. One thing that keeps me on Phoenix under OS X is that I can use the same bookmarks file on every platform I use (Windows, Linux, OS X).

  • There's no way to accept SSL certificates that aren't signed by a trusted registry. (I've reported this as a bug already.)

  • I'm not a huge fan of tabbed browsing, but I think a large chunk of people think it's needed.

I'm not sure these things would get me to convert to Safari completely — cross-platform capabilities are a big plus in my book, which is why I'm very enamored with Phoenix (which manages to be cross-platform without being too bloated, thanks to the unofficial OS X build) — but they'd probably be enough to make it the autostart browser on the very low-end (Beige G3) OS X box I use as my work desktop.