Go home, Safari. You’re drunk.

An open letter to Safari.

A while ago—I guess when iOS 7 came out—I started using you as my primary browser.

It seemed like a good idea at the time. Or maybe I just I bought into the iCloud/Apple promise, but it’s really cool to have your bookmarks, passwords, credit cards and tabs synced across devices without me having to do anything.

I already used Mail, Notes, and Reminders, so “going all in” made sense.

As a web developer/power user it did take me a while to part from my beloved Chrome, but I finally thought I’d let go and went for it.

The problem with Safari

I know that I’m going to get a lot of hate from this, but I’m gonna say it: you suck.

You suck in many ways, but there are a few things that literally drive me crazy:

UI

The address bar font—way too small. It’s the most important thing, why not make it bigger? It’s a small thing, I know, but…

How about a favicon on the tab so that I can tell what website is loaded, and the “x” on the right?

Ok, these are just things you do different. Have to get used to change, think different…

Tabs on top

Hello..? You’re the only major browser who hasn’t figured out it doesn’t makes sense the way you do it. I know you tried that a while ago, but I wonder: what happened..?

Pinning tabs

I love it. There are just a few websites that I need every five minutes, or you are doing research and you want to make sure you don’t close a tab accidentally. Pinning tabs rules.

Oh, wait… You can’t do that? Why! I don’t get it, it’s so simple and useful…

Closing tabs

Alright. You gotta have the “close tabs to the right” thing, uh? Oh. Ok, nevermind.

Developer tools

It’s not you. It’s me, I’m sure.

But your inspector just don’t feel right. I love Chrome’s, Firebug, while your developer tools have something I just don’t like. Menus hidden… I don’t know.

Oh! And why do I have to enable the menu entry.

It’s developers who developed you, why are you being all snobby now?

Safari 8, and switching back to Chrome

The stuff above kind of bothered me, but I found workarounds.

But I have to tell you, deep inside I was hoping that version 8 would address most of the above—which I actually see as problems (or at least annoyances).

Alright, so I was eager to try out your new shiny version.

I must say, I was pretty disappointed. All of the stuff that bothered me is still there. But that isn’t really the problem.

Address bar (or should I say “domain” bar)

You have to be kidding me. You’re hiding the full path in the address bar, and only showing the domain name.

Why! Don’t you realize that I used that to figure out on what page I was on a website, and to hack the address?

On Reddit, /r/webdev/, /r/web_design/, etc. are going to be something from the past? “reddit.com” is enough, you think?!

Mmm… I’m gonna have to go ahead and disagree with you on that one. Clicking/tapping on the address bar every time I want to see the full path?! Don’t be ridiculous, what a pain…

And don’t tell me that it’s for phishing scams. People can figure out if they’re on pa.ypal.com or paypal.com if you make the rest light gray. Why remove it completely.

I just don’t get why it bothered you so much.

UI

Initially, I decided to go with you to have a seamless experience between desktop and mobile.

I was kind of disappointed when I saw how completely differently your UI looks and behaves on iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite. I think it would’ve been wise to unify them, so that one didn’t have to learn two ways of doing the same thing. And it’s just a few buttons.

Oh, and the full path thing. That really pisses me off.

Adieu

It’s been wonderful. But we’re through.

I know that you only care about 80% or your users, and the people that work on you are probably the best in the field. But it just doesn’t work for me.

Of course, I don’t even know why I’m writing this. But now I feel better.

[Written on Google Chrome]