The Minority of All Minorities

If you talk with the Firefox crowd, the only reason they’ll give you, is that with fewer users, the rogue producers of malware will prefer to focus on Internet Explorer vulnerabilities. My Safari has got that angle completely covered. I did download Firefox once, but couldn’t see any real advantages over Safari. Speed of execution is sometimes mentioned, but Safari has that covered as well.

Just one word about Google Chrome before discussing a few more design flaws in IE. If you ever tried Google Chrome, you’ll understand ridiculous. It’s the most stripped off browser of them all. I suppose the philosophy was there’s genius in simplicity. And carelessness in rudimentary. I find use for it, though. RealPlayer will not be present in Safari, and gives me, for some reason, download errors with IE 8. So, if I want to download some video with RealPlayer, I have to use Google Chrome.

One important feature of Safari: if you want to get a password in some text field, all you need is to have it in a Post It (sticky note) widget, lying around the desktop. Click the password twice to select it, then drag and drop in the text input field. With Safari, a copy of the password will go to the input. With IE, the password will be cut, gets to the input, but you will no longer have it in the original Post It note. With Safari, you don’t need to type it (gotcha keyloggers) and there’s no mistake ever in transcribing to the text input. You can have multiple truly randomized passwords, and never make an error in either typing or recollection. If, during a workday, you need to log in and out of many places, this feature alone should make or break your choice of browser.

With Safari, I have an as-you-write spelling checker wherever I am. It’s all good, but now I have to remember when I am typing unsupervised by this feature. Handling of bookmarks is simple, as in easy, and professional. You get to have a bar over the web page, listing those you use very often (Yahoo!, Wikipedia, Dictionary, NetLingo, YouTube). You have folders and folders within folders. To move bookmarks around, just drag and drop (like in iTunes playlists). Using your browsing History again is very convenient. Safari lists sequentially and with descriptive detail, all the pages you have visited. Need to backtrack on something? Open the History and go back to where you were before. Start using these features often and you’ll see how much you need them if you work your browser as a serious or professional user that requires simple and easy. Needless to say, Internet Explorer Favorites and History are cumbersome and harder to use. The History in particular gives you some mention of sites and that’s it. Neither of these features in IE is for heavy use, as they not facilitate, you’ll go to them only once and awhile, unaware of the potential that ease of use would put in your hands.

It’s hard to have complaints for Safari in Windows, but for completeness, I’ll give them to you. Safari in Mac OS X is actually even better. If you are following a sequence of generic pages, like the results of a search, photographs in a gallery, a list of items requiring several pages, the reference in the History will be the same to them all, so you’ll have to guess either the last, or some page in the beginning. Safari in the Mac OS X gives you more detail, so these generic pages are referenced with distinctions. Finally, both IE and Google Chrome have extra blank tabs so that to create a new tab one click does the trick. In Safari, the extra new tab must be created from the drop down File menu. This really ruins the whole thing.

So, you see, being a member of the ultimate minority of minorities, does have a rationale. I have the factor of cool of a Mac user; the factor of cool of a non-IE user; and last but not least, the factor of real cool of having very good reasons to be ♫ a Safari person in a Windows world. Now, if only the Internet execs understood that!…