saturn return to sender

Speaking of consistency in UI …

Hi, my name is Eric, and I use Safari.

Hi, Eric.

The reason I still use Safari instead of Firefox as my main browser is, yes, partly that the controls don’t look Mac-native. It’s kind of shallow, but that will be fixed soon enough. No, the real reason—and this was still the case in the daily build I downloaded the other day, but perhaps it will change before FF3 is final—the real reason is that text controls don’t behave like native Mac text controls.

I navigate text fields so often that using the arrow keys with option, command, and other modifiers is thought-free second nature. It’s always faster to move the cursor and select text with the keyboard than with the mouse. Firefox’s text fields do let you navigate and select with the keyboard about as well as you can with standard Cocoa fields, but the modifiers are different, and the standard modifiers are mapped to other things. Down-arrow (or shift-down-arrow to select) on a single line field is the big one for me. Try it in the Safari location bar, then try it in the Firefox location bar. Grr.

Seems like a small thing, but it’s what’s keeping me a Safari addict, despite Firefox’s many benefits.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 8th, 2007 at 12:38 pm and is filed under geekery. 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.