Safari Cleanup ⇥ tbray.org

Tim Bray:

Also, Safari is technically competent. It’s fast enough, and (unlike even a very few years ago) compatible with wherever I go. The number of Chome-only sites, thank goodness, seems to be declining rapidly.

So, a tip o’ the hat to the Safari team, they’re mostly giving me what I need. But there are irritants.

I am sure there are people who will gripe with Bray’s description of Safari as “technically competent” because of all the APIs it does not support. I will not because I cannot remember the last time I needed to open a page in a Chromium-based browser for compatibility reasons.

I do share Bray’s frustrations with Safari’s odd tab behaviour, though. There are a few peculiar circumstances in which links will open in a new window instead of a tab, and when pressing ⌘–W will close a window instead of a single tab. The first of these things happens if you have a dialog box open or if you are using Tab Groups. I am not sure about the second but it has happened to me.

Bray:

I humbly suggest … that Safari do these things:

[…]

Don’t just exit on ⌘-Q. Chrome gets this right, offering an option where I have to hold that key combo down for a second or two.

I disagree. I think Chrome’s nonstandard behaviour is confusing and unexpected. But I do think Safari should offer users a chance to reconsider instead of immediately quitting, especially since the Q and W keys are next to each other. A user’s open tabs are kind of like an unsaved document, except there is no guarantee those same links will work upon relaunch. Sometimes a paywall will be triggered, or a website could be down. I have therefore mapped “Quit” in Safari to ⌘–⌥–Q.

But, on the subject of Tab Groups, I find myself accidentally switching to them more often than I would like. This is because rotating between them is mapped to ⌘–⌥–[ and ⌘–⌥–]. Notice I did not write “by default”, and that is because there is no way to change this shortcut key combination. I have tried; according to Safari, the shortcuts for “Go to Previous Tab Group” and “Go to Next Tab Group” are the ones I have set. Yet, for some reason, Safari still responds to the shortcut keys Apple has apparently hardcoded.