Drupal 6 and browsers make nice-nice!

Here's an odd tale of browser compatibility, for the admin who finds regular Drupal news just far too exciting: 

Safari is my main Mac web browser, yet I always used Firefox for Drupal administration. Three reasons:

• Various useful Firefox plug-ins for web designers
• Some minor TinyMCE troubles using Safari
• Inability in Safari to use a "middle button" mouse click to open a link in a new tab

Actually, the first I can toss out when I just want to do some content creation or basic admin and don't need one of those spiffy Firefox plug-ins. (And Safari 4 has some nifty web designer tools of its own that I want to check out.) Meanwhile, somewhere along the path of upgrades to Safari, Drupal, and TinyMCE alike, I think I stopped having troubles with text editing; I don't even remember what the initial oddities were that drove me from Safari to Firefox.

That left only the third Safari oddity as the thing keeping me hewn to the 'Fox: that middle button behavior. (An aside to anyone thinking Macs use just one button: Please do take note of what century we're living in. The Mac and a multi-button mouse are a couple so old they complete each other's sentences.) 

Using a browser, I live for opening links in new tabs, using one click of the mouse's scroll wheel or other "middle button". On every page I browse, including a Drupal site, this works as expected. With one exception: any Drupal 5 site in which I'm logged in. Then the middle-button click utterly refuses to open any link in a new tab; it always opens the link in the same tab. That's very inconvenient for Drupal admin work. 

At the same time, there was a separate TinyMCE oddity driving me buggy with Drupal 5 and Firefox: bizarre cursor placement, under which text entry would often begin one space to the left of the apparent cursor position. On top of that, adding a link to text would always insert a new, unwanted space between the text and any following punctuation (like a period). Those annoyances kept me busy editing misplaced text, and would have had me going back to Safari if they weren't just a hair less annoying than the no-middle-click problem.

Well, moving ever more to an all-Drupal 6 workload, I found a pleasant Firefox surprise: With D6 and Tiny Tiny MCE, the buggy cursor and linking problems are gone. Great!

Hey, how about ol' Safari, too? I decided to try it again. And lo, when performing admin via Safari 4 on a Drupal 6 site, middle-button clicks now work correctly! (Don't know about Safari 3 and Drupal 6.) Hmm, is it the new Safari or the new Drupal that makes the difference? I'll try Safari 4-based admin on an old Drupal 5 site... and bleah, middle-button clicks don't open new tabs. Looks like it's Drupal 6 that patched up the problem for me. 

So with D6, it's all green lights with either browser. I'm especially happy about the reconciliation with Safari; it's nice to be able to jump into a quick admin task on a Drupal 6 site, without having to change software. Drupal 6 and Safari 4, together you're a 10!