Ben Skelton's Blog

Wanted: Safari for Windows

I have officially switched my default browser from Safari to Firefox. Even though I think that Safari is the best browser on the Mac, I got tired of little bugs and/or missing features on various sites. For example:

• The Air Canada website works fine when booking a domestic ticket in Safari, but when you book an international ticket the "select a round trip flight" screen defaults with all the radio buttons selected — there is no way of selecting a particular itinerary's radio button and continuing with your booking.
• The Aeroplan website will not allow you to book reward travel in Safari. When you find a reward ticket that you would like to book (finally!) you get an error message specifying that you need to supply a notification method for Air Canada to notify you if there is a change in your itinerary. This error message appears even if you have a notification method selected.
• TypePad (the software/service that hosts this blog) does not provide a rich-text editor or spell-checking capability for Safari.

If Apple wants web developers to truly support Safari they have to bite the bullet and develop a Windows version. Apple creates great PC software as they have demonstrated in the past with QuickTime and iTunes and I would guess that Safari for the PC could gain 10% browser market-share pretty quickly, especially if Apple bundled a copy with every download of iTunes. With 10% market share, it would be much harder for sites to ignore Safari.

It would be interesting to see if a Windows version of Safari would take market share away from IE, Firefox or both...

Conditional Comments

I went to the VanX event tonight where Dave Shea talked about working with CSS. It was a really good talk.

Something I did know:
IE has some pretty big CSS bugs that drive most Web developers crazy.

Something I didn't know:
You can use an IE feature called "conditional comments" to get IE to render a stylesheet that contains all your IE-specific fixes. For example, if you have a stylesheet called win-ie6.css that contains your IE 6 specific fixes you would put the following into your HTML (usually below your call to your master CSS file):

<!--[if IE 6]>
  <link href="win-ie6.css" rel="stylesheet" />
<![endif]-->

For IE 5.5 you could use the following:

<!--[if IE 5.5]>
  <link href="win-ie55.css" rel="stylesheet" />
<![endif]-->

We have used JavaScript to do this, but this technique is simple and elegant.

Something I did know:
Different browsers start with different default style rules for various elements.

Something I didn't know:
There is a little snippet that you can grab to strip away some of the default browser styles that are applied to common elements. It was created by Tantek Celik and is called undohtml.css.

Yay!

Habañero Browser Stats

Here are the top four browsers being used on the Habañero website for the last three months. A few things kind of suprised me.

• Firefox usage was a bit higher than I expected considering our target audience is very corporate. When I visit a client site I generally see IE being used exclusively (except perhaps for some of the IT staff).
• I can't believe that Internet Explorer 5.0 is making it into some of the top four lists (even though the percentages are small). Yikes!

Time to Switch from Safari to FireFox?

Twice this week I have been tempted to switch my default browser from Safari to FireFox. The first reason was Google Maps. Very slick service that produces beautiful anti-aliased maps, not to mention that panning with the mouse is a snap and you don't have to wait for the browser to reload. The second  reason is TypePad's WYSIWYG rich text editing and spell checking. Both the services promise support for Safari in the near future.

Perhaps the next version of FireFox which promises a better experience for Mac users will finally convince me.