browsers

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...

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.

Most Benevolent Reader GreenLED informs me that this site is showing major visual bugs in Internet Explorer. Aaargh, I had hoped I was immune to that curse...

I don't have a ready means to test my output in Internet Explorer, having no Windows computer. Alas, it looks like I'll need to use virtualization software in my upcoming MacBook Pro purchase, just for the purpose of testing sites on IE.