Is that supposed to be Brushed Metal?
Safari is brushed metal. I've already debated the validity of the whole brushed metal thing, so I won't do it again, but I still have problems with the brushed metal-ness of Safari. Look for a moment at every other brushed metal app in the OS. They all have a border on all 4 sides via which you can drag the window. Additionally, they all have 4 rounded corners that are possible because of the borders. Just look at the resize tab on the bottom right of brushed metal windows. They are all nice and big. However, the resize tabs on Safari windows are tiny. Every single brushed metal app shares those characteristics, every one except Safari.
The Status of the SatusbarI was under the impression that the statusbar's job was to update the user about the status of the page, as well and add information about the current page. However, Apple doesn't seem to have embraced this idea with their web browser. It is true that the status bar does give basic information about what the page is doing, and it updates when you hover over links, but this is about it. Instead, for some reason other status information is randomly distributed through the window into places that are illogical.
Take security information for example. It would be most logical for a little lock to be included in the statusbar, right? But instead Apple does the most peculiar thing. They include the little security lock in the titlebar. Not only is it in the titlebar, it is in the top right corner on the titlebar. What a random place! That place is almost always reserved for the toolbar toggle. Another example is that when Safari detects a RSS feed, it will display a little status button in the address bar. A status button in the address bar? Why not the status bar? With all this page information all over the place there is barely anything in the statusbar at all, and really is almost useless.
No Support for HTML? I know that Apple isn't always ahead of the times, but there is this cool new thing out called HTML. It uses "tags" to create webpages. It would be nice for Apple to support these "tags". Now you may be wondering what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the fact that Apple supports all of the HTML tags, except one: the <label> tag. I mean, every other decent rendering engine supports it, even KHTML upon which WebCore is based does. This can't be a design issue: controls in dialogue boxes and programs support <label> functionality. So why isn't it supported in Safari? Did the Safari developers just get lazy one day?
Other UI OdditiesAnother issue I have with the current Safari model is the lack of a real toolbar. Now, realise that in Mac OS X the word "toolbar" has a specific meaning. I know that Safari's bar has elements other than buttons, but don't use this as an argument against it being a real toolbar: there are plenty of other apps that use custom views. The fact is that real toolbars are much better because they are consistent across apps, can be easily hidden and are fully customizable. Currently the search field and the address field are artificially connected, so you can't have one without the other.
Another UI problem I have with Safari windows the scrollbars. It is Apple's established policy to display a blank scrolltrack when there is a possibility that the window will need a scrollbar later. The idea here is that when you are dragging the window, scrollbars are not randomly popping into and out of existence messing up the size of the window. Safari should not be exempt from this guideline.
The caches are polluting my HD!The sad thing is that Safari does not just give you an inconsistent interface for itself; it also Safari doesn't appear to use caches any more, but iTunes pollutes your file system with hundreds of cache files. But don’t take my word for it; just do a search for any number. Inevitably it will return hundreds of files and folders that are in your Library folder that look something like the screenshot at left. While this may not have been much of a problem in 10.2, when there wasn’t a robust search system, here in 10.4, it’s a huge issue, because I am always searching my home folder for files. Apple should store Safari’s cache in a single file, not a massive quantity of files. What's crazy about Safari's caching is that it is useless beyond it's initial purpose. Wouldn't it be cool if you could browse webpages when not connected to the internet, or even better: use spotlight to search recently visited pages?
Tabs and ExposéSafari uses a tabbed interface. Those who are familiar with Windows know that Applications used to come in two different interface models: Multiple Document Interface and Single Document Interface. Tabbed Document Interface is a new model that is entirely separate from the Single Document Interface model. However, Apple has not realised this, and they treat tabbed windows like a single document. This is a major drawback because despite the fact that exposé is a great invention, it doesn't reveal tabbed windows that aren't active. What should be done with exposé is allowing some way to reveal tabbed windows. The whole point of exposé is switching windows, what good is it if you can't switch to windows hidden in tabs?
Of course exposé isn't the only window switching mechanism. There also is the window menu and the contextual menu that is revealed when you right-click on an application in the Dock. If Apple wants to keep it's applications up to date, I think it's very important that it integrates tabs with these things as sub-options. This is especially true if more applications adopt tabs. I've heard, for example, that iChat may use tabs in the future.
Stop and ReloadApple made a horrible "innovation" with Safari. Someone at Apple thought that there could be no possible reason for you to have separate reload and stop button, so they combined them! There are two things that are wrong with this philosophy. For one, I may want to reload while a page is still loading. A big pages that take a while to download and render cannot be reloaded with the current system, until it has finished. However, there is a much, much worse problem. On my humble 1.07GHz iBook with a 1.5Mbit connection pages take sometime to load and render, which messes up something in Safari. This means that almost every time I click the Stop button whilst a page is loading, it waits to register this click until the page is finished doing whatever it is that it's doing. This means when I want Safari to STOP doing anything, it is now going to spend even more time loading the page again. Unfortunately, by reflex I try to stop the reloading, which just refreshes it again, ad infinum.
FaviconsLastly, the way that Safari deals with favicons. For some reason, they update very rarely. Not even refreshing a page, which is supposed to reload all of that page's resources (you know, stylesheets, scripts... and images), will reload the favicon. As far as I know, there is no simple way to force Safari it reload favicons.