Musings From Mars

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Google, AOL, Yahoo and Apple Compatibility

by Leland Scott

Google Lets Apple Safari Users Down Again

Google Labs today released another shiny new toy for geeks to play with… this one, a web page creation tool. My colleague says it uses Ajax and a rich DHTML Javascript interface to make page creation fun and simple. I wouldn’t know, since so far it doesn’t work in Safari.

I do plan to go back and try it out with Firefox, but what a pain! How come Windows users don’t have to suffer this way? Safari and the other KHTML-derived browsers are still the browsers of choice for Mac users, so by leaving Safari out in the cold, Google is once again doing the same thing to Mac users. Not good. Not nice. Bad Google!

I hope it’s just coincidence that the Google “Page Creator” abbreviates to “PC” and that it’s not a message from the clot of PC users that appears to be blocking Google’s technical heart.

Later on 2/23… I’ve now confirmed that Safari users cannot get in to Page Creator using Safari’s Debug menu, trying to masquerade as IE 6.0, Mozilla 1.1, Netscape 7.0, etc. That means Google isn’t blocking Safari merely by looking at the user-agent string… there’s some underlying technical reason. My suspicion is that it’s related to Safari’s lack of a “content editable” function, which both IE and Mozilla have (though those two browsers have completely different implementations of “content editable”). This is a convenient, and common, excuse, but it’s not acceptable. There are two other ways to include Safari in the party while waiting for the Webkit team to engineer a content-editable function in Safari: You can either employ a lightweight java rich-text editor, such as Edit-on Pro, or you could use an even lighter-weight DHTML editor, such as the one Dojo provides. Either of these would be pretty simple to accomplish technically, so I ascribe Google’s failure to do so to commonplace PC prejudice.

AOL’s I Am Alpha: A Wide Slap At Mac Users on Safari

I Am Alpha: AOL’s Take on Widgets Doesn’t Work on Safari

So, here’s another company that’s dying to get in on the cool goodness that is Dashboard Widgets. This time, it’s AOL with something called I Am Alpha, and they’re basing their work on the excellent open-source Dojo Javascript framework.

Sounds great, but then it turns out that they left Safari users out in the cold!

This is another horrible example of a company with blinders on. Google has been doing this lately, too. What am I talking about? Why, thinking it’s OK to release a new product without support for Safari or other KHTML-based browsers.

It’s particularly galling in this case, since the whole concept of little HTML/CSS/Javascript/Ajax widgets was pioneered on the Mac… first with Konfabulator, and then, in a purer format, by Apple in the Tiger Dashboard. Another reason why it’s horrible is that Dojo itself is almost completely Safari-compatible. Indeed, the Dojo rich text editor is one of the very few that actually works on Safari. It runs great on the latest nightly build Webkit versions, but decently on the latest Apple releases (I haven’t yet tried 10.4.5, which was released today).

It’s NOT OK to do this. Firefox/Camino/Seamonkey/Mozilla are great browsers, but there are features of Safari that keep even those of us who admire the Mozilla family of browsers using Safari the majority of the time. By the same measure, it’s NOT OK to release ANY kind of web application without support for Safari. After all, Safari is–I think this is still the case–the browser that has the MOST COMPLETE alignment with the w3c standards for HTML, CSS, and Javascript. If you want to talk about open standards, that’s great. But then don’t go and release applications that work fine in a crappy browser like IE6 yet not in a brilliant one like Safari.

Grrr. AOL should be ashamed, and this alliance is certainly not something that Dojo should be proud of.

Addendum It should be noted that Yahoo, by contrast, has released its dynamic HTML library of widgets with complete support for Safari. If you haven’t checked it out, you should… there are some marvelous javascript/css widgets for animation, trees, slides, and the rest at the recently released Yahoo Interface Library. What’s even more remarkable–particularly in light of AOL’s arrogant behavior toward Safari–is that Yahoo has developed well defined standards for browser support, and guess what? Apple’s Safari’s browser for both Panther and Tiger is listed as an A grade browser. See the full table here.