MacOS 10.3 Users: Web browser frustrations?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I’m coming up against the sad truth that no web browser can be all things to all people. Or rather, no web browser can be all things to even one person: me.

I had been using Camino for a long time and was reasonably happy with it. Then I upgraded to Panther and it stopped rendering menus with scroll bars properly. It will pop the text of the menu to some other random location on the screen, but the hot spot where you need to click to select an item remains in the original menu location, rendering all by the shortest menus unusable. Pull-down menus are okay, it’s just menus that appear imbedded in the page with a scrollbar. (Yes, I have the latest release: 0.7.) I can’t find any other reports of this problem from other users.

So I fired up Safari, which had been updated with my upgrade (I think.) I’d given up on Safari before because it crashed when I submitted a certain form on a certain website that I visit very frequently. That problem had been fixed (either on the Safari end or the website’s end). When I started working on my next PowerPoint lecture, I discovered that Safari has a bizarre behavior when you drag and drop graphics to another application; it converts them to TIFF, making them look crappy and causing problems when the file is transferred to a non-Mac computer. You can still save the image to disk, then add to the PowerPoint file, but why would I want to go through the extra step every time? (That’s maybe 20 times per lecture!) I was disappointed, because I loved Safari’s little search thingie in the upper right hand corner, which matches the search thingie you see in the Finder and other applications that adopt the Mac look. It keeps a list of your last N searches, so you can quickly go back to them. And, I realize that this is a silly thing to even care about, but I liked brushed metal Mac-look appearance, also, 'cause it matches the Finder, iTunes, etc.

A friend recommended Firefox, so I downloaded that today. It has the search thingie like Safari (yay!) but the search thingie doesn’t have a history (boo!). Also, it fails to render the little red hearts on a playing card website I visit frequently. This is not an intolerable problem, as it does do the diamonds properly and if the number is red and there’s no symbol after it obviously means hearts, but still, it is slightly annoying.

The last time I used full-on Mozilla, is was too damn slow, but it did offer full functionality. Maybe I should download the latest release and give it another try? I don’t have any interest in the mail or other applications that come with it, though.

Oh, I even have one nice thing to say about Internet Explorer: The Google Toolbar rocks.

So I wonder if other Mac users have similar difficulties? Any suggestions?

2

I use Safari all the time and love it. Can’t say the drag-image-and-save-as-TIFF thing ever bothered me.

3

I do a lot of dragging and dropping. The textbook from my class is available on a CD in HTML format. The image files are named silly things and arranged in directories in a silly manner, so the only practical way to get at the illustrations is to read the text in a web browser and then drag the images into PowerPoint. I get a lot of images for class off the web, too. I can see how most users probably don’t care about the drag and drop thing, but it makes Safari undesirable for me. This is terribly frustrating, because I like everything else about it! Why can’t it drag and drop like a normal browser? stamps tiny foot and pouts

4

I don’t have PowerPoint, but I can’t reproduce this behavior dragging from Safari into any other application. What about dragging the image to the Finder first and then into PowerPoint? Yeah, an unnecessary step, and if Safari is changing file types that’s wrong and should be fixed… but I can’t get it to do that.

(For that matter it seems weird that a TIFF file would look worse than what it was converted from. It’s usually a lossless format isn’t it?)

5

Yeah, that works! Thanks for the suggestion!

Maybe it is a PowerPoint-specific weirdness. I’m using PowerPoint vX. If I try to open the .ppt file on a Windows machine, instead of the image appearing, there’s just a placeholder, and it says you need Quicktime to open the image.
:confused:

Yeah, it’s strange alright. They look awful, and they even come out a bigger than when I drag to the Finder first, then PowerPoint. I’m not 100% sure they’re coming across as TIFF, but here’s the article I’m going from, at macosxhints

6

The browser that’s fast becoming my favorite is the X11 version of Mozilla (not the Aqua version). I have the scroll bars problem with Camino, too; I like iCab for reading the boards but it’s too incompatible with far too many sites to use it for much of anything else, I just don’t like the look and feel of Safari or Internet Explorer, and OmniWeb, like iCab, still has compatibility probs. Opera is OK but nothing to write home about.

X11-mozilla is fast fast fast and pretty compatible. If only the clipboard worked better between X11 and Aqua!

7

Argh! You had me all excited until that last. I always have X11 going anyway . . . that would have been a nice option. But if I can’t select, drag and drop easily, the browser isn’t useful to me.

OTOH, most of the time I’m trying to copy from X11 to Aqua it’s to take a URL from my ssh session into my web browser . . . Hmmm . . .