- Overprotective Safari
- Forgetful Safari
- Dumb DVD Player
- TextEdit Windows Incorrectly Positioned
- iChat Forgets User Changes to Windows
- iTunes Autofill Solely for iPod shuffle
- iPhoto Doesn't Fail Gracefully
- iPhoto Doesn't Display File Names Nicely
- Disk Utility Doesn't Erase Free Disk Space
- iTunes Doesn't Make Recommendations
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2. Forgetful Safari
OK, I admit, this next complaint isn’t something that can be rectified with a minor tweak. But addressing it would make using Safari much more user-friendly and productive. In a nutshell, why doesn’t Safari—or all browsers, for that matter—have a preference for saving its current state when you quit, with all your open tabs, windows, and their contents preserved?
This would completely eliminate a common problem. Have you ever been exploring the Web, opening multiple sites in different tabs, and then you attempt to press Command-W to close the current tab, but your finger slips and you press Command-Q instead? Poof! All your open tabs disappear as Safari quits instantly.
It’s infuriating that the relatively innocuous close window/tab command and the destructive quit command use shortcuts adjacent on the keyboard. In most applications, if you attempt to quit with open unsaved documents, an alert appears. Not so Safari. True, you can hack Safari to provide a warning using Taboo (freeware), but this isn’t an elegant solution. Far better is to install Saft ($12), which adds a ton of useful features to Safari’s preferences (see Figure 2), including the ability to save opened browser windows when quitting and restore them upon restarting Safari. Plus Saft addresses the complaints I have about how Safari handles downloads!
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Figure 2 Saft adds so many useful preferences to Safari that it’s a bargain at only $12.
I love how Saft deftly saves my open windows and their tabs when I quit and then restores them when I reopen Safari. However, it doesn’t save the content that was visible when I quit. Instead, it saves the URLs and then reloads those pages the next time Safari is opened. I want the content of the pages available regardless of whether or not I have Internet access (that is to say, I don’t want to use a third-party utility that sucks down an entire site for off-line browsing).