Home Forums FineTunedMac Community Lounge So, um, Safari 6...

I just (with some resentment, I might add) bought a copy of 10.8 Mountain Lion, mostly so I can test apps that I develop on it. I'm typing this using Safari 6, which, err...

Um, I quite like Safari. I've used it as my primary browser for years, but, err...

Uh, I'm not quite sure how to say this. Safari 6 is, um, well, it's, uh...

It's a catastrophe. It's a howling, fetid mass of still-warm dingo's kidneys, marinated in the slime that bubbles up from a decaying mass of bat guano. It's a shambling wreck of a browser, the bastard offspring of an evil joke played by Steve Job's angry ghost upon all those who would oppose him. It's an enormous step backward from Safari 5, with less reason to live than a neo-Luddite in a space station. I can not for the life of me figure out what the hell they were thinking.

Okay, they ripped out its ability to read RSS feeds. I'm not sure why they did that, but meh, whatever. But that wasn't enough, oh my no.

When they had finished gutting the RSS bits and sewn the corpse back up, they started looking around for other useful bits and bobs they could hack off with a hatchet. Like hitting the Delete/Backspace key to go back to the previous page--something that has become so firmly integrated in my motor memory I fear I will never be able to adjust. Like taking the status bar off the bottom of the window, and replacing its functionality with...nothing! Like creating a way for, God help us, Web sites to push notifications onto the Notification Manager. Like moving the Empty Cache command to the Develop menu, which most folks will have turned off and therefore never, ever be able to find (wha--?). Seriously, it's a mess. I almost can hardly believe they did this.

My next move, after I'm done posting here, will be to download Chrome onto this system, and that may be one of the last times I use Safari when I'm booted into 10.8.

> Like creating a way for, God help us, Web sites to push notifications onto the Notification Manager.

> Like moving the Empty Cache command to the Develop menu, which most folks will have turned off and therefore never, ever be able to find (wha--?).

Data I've accumulated in the course of my continuing investigation into tracking cookies/caches has had me convinced for some time now that Apple has made a very conscious corporate decision to throw its "valued customers" to the wolves in the form of not necessarily making it easier for them to be tracked, but certainly making it more difficult for them to deter the trackers.

Looks like it's even worse than I thought.

I could never fathom why pressing deleting should go back in the first place and found it very frustrating when accidentally hit when one doesn't have a field properly selected when typing in forms.

You can still turn on the status bar in the View menu.

Moving Empty Cache to develop menu is stupid and I reported as such to Apple as a bug months ago, but they didn't listen and it's unclear if any of the options in the Reset Safari command cover it.

My biggest issue is the new Web Inspector which is much harder to use as a developer than the previous one, however I can still use the old Inspector via the Webkit Nightly releases.

I don't really care about RSS in Safari, but I do miss it in Mail and have since replaced it with NetNewsWire.

Otherwise Safari 6 in ML is quite fast and is an improvement on previous versions.

> Moving Empty Cache to develop menu is stupid and I reported as such to Apple as a bug months ago, but they didn't listen and it's unclear if any of the options in the Reset Safari command cover it.

I wonder... You and I had a bit of a back and forth a while ago about Safari (5) Web Content's incessant crashing, and on your advise I began d/l'ing the Webkit Nightly Builds; I found them to be more stable than Safari, itself, but only marginally.

At that time I was in the habit of clearing Safari's cache (command-option-E) neurotically frequently because of the myriad tracking caches it harbored, and about six weeks ago I decided to see what would happen if I stopped, and, lo and behold, SWC hasn't crashed since.

I've no idea whether the clear command still works, but if it doesn't, it's possible that Apple moved the functionality as its answer to the crashes.

(The only option in Safari 5's reset pane that looks like it may deal with caches is "Remove all website data," and that, of course, is a non-option.)

Any thoughts?

Edit: I now quit Safari neurotically frequently and Cookie clears cache quite nicely and crash-free, thank you.