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On this Safari 5 Reader Hysteria
There’s a tonne of posts today about the slick new Safari Reader feature I linked to yesterday. As someone who enjoys reading decent content online, I totally welcome it. I’ve used readability / Instapaper bookmarklets for some time - both on my Mac and iPhone - and, if I’m honest, I’m surprised at the reaction from outlets that call out Safari 5’s Reader feature. If you believe some quarters of the press, the Reader functionality is an affront to online advertising revenues - choking outlets of their deserved revenue and attempts at profit. There’s also clearly some folks who haven’t actually tried Reader.
Let’s get one thing straight: Safari 5’s Reader feature is not an ad-blocker. It’s no more prominent or enforced than clicking the RSS button in Safari’s address field. If you visit a page with a element of over 2,000 characters (I believe) Reader is made available for use - note that it’s not enabled automatically, much as some would love it.
Fraser Speirs makes an excellent point:
Most interesting thing about Safari Reader? It shows how little actual content there is on these busy, long webpages.
Ken Fisher, at the usually-sane Ars Technica calls Apple hypocritical:
So the company that has made an advertising platform a major part of its iOS strategy is also hawking an ad-blocking technology for its Web browser, where it has no stake in ads. App Store: use our unblockable ads, developers! They help you get paid for your hard work! Web: hey, block some ads, readers! They’re annoying!
Gizmodo links to Jim Lynch
Apple has essentially destroyed the web publishing model completely with the release of Safari 5. This is the equivalent of dropping a nuclear bomb on the entire web economy. It’s a weapon of potential mass destruction for web publishers. Publishers now have absolutely no control over how their content is displayed in a browser and if the content can even be monetized in a significant way or not.
Hyperbole much?
You can almost imagine what started off Safari Reader: Steve visiting insert big name news site with ads and being massively unhappy with the reading experience. Here’s just one example. From Jim Lynch’s site.
Yes, Safari does some smart stuff behind the scenes - on Lynch’s blog, his multi-page diatribe is brought into one paginated lightbox - and that eliminates ad impressions. But if Safari Reader eliminates the bullshit practice of publishers including disproportionately highly numbers of pages per article then you won’t hear any complaints from me. My own primary interest in reading online surprisingly goes beyond a headline. I take the time to read an article, and if Safari Reader makes reading much easier, then it’s the site’s fault for failing to make itself reasonably legible.
Thankfully, in amongst a swathe of misjudged writing on Safari Reader, The Guardian has a level-headed piece on the feature:
Technologies like Safari Reader sound a salutary warning to media companies and advertisers. From now on, we must love our readers or die.
Amen to that. If anything, instead of this belligerent whinging, web publishers should wise up that people visit their sites to read content. Safari Reader does hide ads, after they - along with the almost-constant barrage of ‘Share This’, ‘Tweet This’, ‘Buzz This’ bullshit - are shown alongside each post, and above all: it’s not mandatory to use, or enforced any more than the RSS button. Perhaps instead of flamebait posts of ‘Apple are out to get us’ media companies should be asking themselves ‘how did reading content online become so sucky’?
Update, 10th June: I’ve had a tonne of feedback on this post, and published a quick followup including some of it. Thanks to everyone who sent in feedback.
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I’m totally digging the new Safari 5 Reader functionality - so much so that I’m back to Safari (at least for now) full-time.
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A week with Google Chrome
In the five years that I’ve used a Mac, I’ve had two browsers of choice: Camino, and then with Safari 3’s arrival Safari. I know that folks swear by Firefox, but I don’t - and typically find myself swearing at Firefox. Whilst the Mozilla folks have done a fine job of making it look like a Mac app, it never seems for feel and behave like a Mac application. Part of my Safari preference is that I also have a teeny bit of a crush for WebKit, the engine that powers Safari with its CSS animations and long-supported (much clichéd) rounded corners.
In a quick trawl through my Applications folder last weekend, I happened to come across a rather old Chrome OS X Developer Preview that I’d downloaded and promptly forgotten about. Purely out of curiosity I ran it, made sure it was up to date, and started using it.
I haven’t stopped since.
Some Observations
- It’s fast. Lightning fast - I thought Safari was snappy (and compared to Firefox and Camino, it is) but Chrome is screaming in comparison.
- Top tabs - I was probably in the minority to mourn their demise in the final Safari 4 release, but it’s great to have them back. The behaviour of Chrome’s “Open in New Tab” option is also fantastic: when opening links in a new tab, the tab opens alongside the existing tab you’re working in. Safari adds tabs after the right-most tab, whereas Chrome’s option groups the links together, easily allowing you to return to your original tab.
- It’s super-stable - it’s not crashed or hung on me in a week - and it’s still not entered Beta. Take that, Safari.
- The combined search / address field - I find myself still hitting Tab, expecting it to focus a search box, but another few days use should cure that.
- It’s WebKit - enough said.
The bit where I whinge about some minor issue
Whilst Chrome looks and feels like a Mac application, there’s one striking annoyance that irritates me: the behaviour when you click on a Folder in the Bookmark bar. In any other browser, it behaves as an OS X menu should. That is, no matter where you click the item, the menu should appear in a fixed location, below the menu item in question. OS X’s default contextual menus appear directly below and to the right of the area you click.
As it stands right now - and shown in the above comparison - Chrome’s bookmark folders behave like a contextual menu (despite also having their own contextual menus), and it’s driving me a little crazy. Yes, Chrome remains in Pre-Beta - and these things can change - but it’s details like this that make or break whether an application feels like a Mac application. Never mind if an app’s got aqua buttons, a sexy HUD or any other aesthetic beauty. It’s all about how an application behaves. If you’re curious, I’ve filed this as an issue on the Chromium project bug tracker.
If you’re wanting to give Chrome a go, it’s available from the Chrome Developer Channel. It’s still pre-beta, however in my experience it seems to be more relating to its feature-incomplete state than anything else. I’ve been using the Chrome Preview non-stop for the past week, and you’ll have to pry it out of my cold, dead hands.
Side-note: If you’re a LittleSnapper fan, whilst we don’t have full Chrome support in the application yet, there’s a bookmarklet you can use to snap from Chrome. All the details are here.
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The problem with Firefox is that it’s not Safari.
Fasturtle, via Jay Robinson -
➶ Thurly App - Posting to Twitter from Safari
Congratulations to Adam Shiver on shipping Thurly App, which is a plugin for Safari that uses his Thurly URL shortener with options to post to Twitter. It’s free with a $5 licence unlocking more templating options for super-quick posting.
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➶ Apple's Safari 4 tops 11 million downloads in 3 days
The more amazing figure is that 6 million of those downloads (over half) are from Windows users.
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➶ Dinky pocketbooks with WebKit transforms
Another ‘I meant to post it last week’ item, Natalie Downe posted a seriously slick way to make pocketbooks through the awesomeness and magic of WebKit. There’s also some handy Terminal command ones too.
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➶ Pulp Browsers
More awesomeness from Elliott Kember
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All you need to remember is this: perceived speed is the only test of speed.
- Carsonified Blog » Speed: The Secret Code of the Baristi
I’m linking to this after my Safari PDF rant. Downloads still feel quicker when you’re given more feedback instead of an indeterminate spinner. It’s the same speed, however it’s perceived to be faster as you’re given the feedback.
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➶ Observations Regarding the Safari 4 Public Beta
Plenty, plenty on Safari 4’s changes from John Gruber.
© Nik Fletcher 2010 ~ Contact
