I’m completely sick of “web 2.0” applications/companies/websites not working in Safari. I’m even *more* sick of people who say that users critiquing a web application’s inability to work in Safari are lame or don’t know what they’re talking about. This rant was brought on by comments on TechCrunch about the new version of Writely tools. I left a comment that basically said, “it’s lame that Writely is introducing new features when the basics of their application still don’t work on Safari” and then I got flamed.
Safari Matters
If you care about the Macintosh user base, then you should care about Safari. If you don’t care about Safari, then you’re saying you do not care about the Mac user base. It’s quite simple.
The default browser on Mac OS X is Safari, take it or leave it. How many non-tech-guru Mac users out there actually took the time to download Firefox or Mozilla when they had a spyware-free and completely capable browser like Safari already installed on their machine? People download Firefox because they’re sick of IE6 and all its shortcomings. A tiny percentage of the real world downloaded Firefox because they like the theming or the standards-compliance (I fit into this category, as do most of the people who read this site, but we’re not exactly the majority), but that’s not the allure of Firefox. People don’t switch to Firefox because they’re eager to get rid of the float margin bugs in IE6 or want 24-bit PNG support with alpha transparency, they switch because they hate spyware and the Fox is billed as a better alternative to IE6.
But on Mac OS X, there is no IE6. The default browser for my operating system is elegant, spyware-free, standards-compliant, quick, and easy to use. Why would a normal Mac OS X user download Firefox when Safari does what they want? Firefox on Mac OS X looks bad, doesn’t load as quickly as Safari, and has some goofy bugs. I’m not saying that Firefox is a bad browser because it’s not, it’s terrific, but on Mac OS X it just doesn’t wallop Safari the same way it wallops IE6.
Best Practices
A web team not supporting a crappy, old browser that doesn’t work well is one thing, but not supporting a modern browser like Safari is just ridiculous. If a web team can make an application work on IE6, then there is absolutely no reason they can’t make it work in Safari. No reason at all. Yes, Safari has some Javascript quirks, but so does IE6 and every other browser, and web developers have found ways around different Javascript implementations in the past so why is this any different? I’m not just some graphic artist spouting off like this, I’m someone who’s been writing Javascript for web UIs since 1996.
Writely doesn’t support Safari so I won’t be using it — not a big loss since Writeboard does a better job at what I need anyway.
