Safari 4 and Drupal 6

In Drupal 6 and browsers make nice-nice!, I got all happy over the Safari 4 beta abolishing several bugs that had kept me from using Safari as my Drupal site admin tool.

However, I failed to post a crucial follow-up to that: it wasn't long before a new oddity forced me to toss Safari out the door once more. The problem was in buttons, such as those for opening a "Choose file..." dialogue when uploading an image. Sometimes – not in any way I could predict – buttons would be dead in the Safari 4 beta, doing nothing when clicked. That's an annoyance during general web use (such as when trying to submit a comment somewhere), but a show-stopper for admin work. 

The problem persisted even after the official Safari 4 launch, so it wasn't a beta problem alone. Yet a search on the Apple support forums and elsewhere didn't turn up people with a similar problem, so clearly it wasn't a real Safari problem at all. That's where I lapsed out of my usual vegetative state just long enough to remember that I had a couple of old third-party Safari plug-ins installed, Inquisitor and Safari Stand. They're both nifty tools, and perhaps later I'll play with Safari 4-tested versions, but at least one was gumming up the works; removing both has fixed the problem.

It's only been a few days, but so far I haven't found any problems remaining when using Safari for admin work on Drupal 6. Great! And there's a big bonus, as well: Apple's playing up blazing JavaScript speed as Safari 4's forte, and it's really making a difference on my iMac. Dialogues for images, links, and so on in TinyMCE pop up so much faster now than they do in Firefox. (And as a small bonus, the Top Sites feature is handy for quickly getting at any number of sites in progress.)   

I may want to head back to Firefox at times to use some specific web developer plug-in, but for general admin work, Safari 4's speed alone is making me happy all over again. Until the next show-stopping bug, that is...