Shopping Carts in Ravines

I have very few complaints about Apple products. Largely fitting that pattern, the iPhone 3G is the best phone I’ve ever owned and has exceeded my requirements as a digital organizer.

Similarly, Safari on OS X has consistently been a fast, stable and standards-embracing browser and while any browser lacking my Firefox extensions must come in second place, I use Safari daily on sites FF can’t handle and love my ‘view in Safari’ FF extension.

However, the only reason I ever open Safari on my iPhone is because without jailbreaking it I have no other choice.

Firstly, finding out that Apple’s so-called ‘full Internet experience’ didn’t include Flash was a little ridiculous considering Flash is as common as CSS and an absolute requirement for a huge number of sites.

Once you try actually surfing the web, though, it’s no wonder they crippled it like that. The rock solid browser on my MacBook Pro became the least stable of any app on my iPhone and some of the bugs are so serious and so obvious that the only way they could be present is for Apple to have knowingly shipped them.

1. Safari crashes constantly, often for no apparent reason. Even on basic text-focussed pages when no data activity or zooming/scrolling is even taking place, which also makes the whole web app thing a total crock. Crashing is so endemic that before they even fix the stuff that is bringing Safari down all the time, they should implement an auto-reopen option. Google Chrome-style tab isolation would be terrif too.

2. The totally ludicrous runaway backspace bug. After hitting space twice to write a period with a gap (something you can do accidentally even if you don’t ever intend to use the feature), sometimes hitting backspace to correct it will cause a runaway deletion to occur where you watch in horror as words or even lines are deleted piece by piece as if you were holding the backspace down. For a blog writer and blog user, this is equivalent to shipping an automobile that jams into reverse whenever you tap on the brakes, and makes the browser keyboard literally useless except for filling out brief forms.

3. I have the feeling this is a bad decision more than it is a bug, but… Safari suffers from a strange tendency towards the unnecessary reloading of tabs. Website data that can’t be retained in a computer’s memory is stored on its hard disk in a ‘cache’ which is updated later on when the website is reloaded. The mobile version of the browser still has a cache - you can see that in the settings - yet it doesn’t seem to do anything. When you open a new Safari browsing window, use it to load a page, and then switch back to one you had open previously, most of the time it will automatically reload the entire page, even when both aren’t particularly hefty pages. It’s not like my 16 gig iPhone is lacking the ability to hold onto Google News Mobile Version for 5 seconds, the devices have plenty of storage room and proper use of a cache is a no-brainer: it would save on sluggish reloading time and keep data charges down.

I did write most of this entire entry on my iPhone, but using the Wordpress app. Even if I was painfully careful to avoid the backspace bug, I guarantee that Safari would have crashed. I’d bet money on that every time.

So what does Safari on the iPhone have going for it? The main thing that makes this whole mess any better is how painful most mobile browsing has been until now. And beyond that, it is functional to some extent - though I would never recommend that anyone do any writing within Safari beyond the length of a sentence or two, and never anything of particular importance.

Treat it like Windows 3.x and constantly expect a crash. If you don’t mind reopening the browser a few times, maybe you’ll be able to manage getting through reading the day’s news and a few blog posts before you give up.

Development of upcoming Linux-based phones should be interesting to watch, because right now the iPhone is great Apple hardware but is kind of lacking when it comes to representing Apple software.

Take a look at the reader-voted top Safari complaints at PleasefixtheiPhone.com.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 19th, 2008 at 12:55 pm and is filed under Internet / Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.