As a Macbook pro owner, I do try to use some of the Apple software that they try, not so subtly, to ram down my throat. Some of these include Quicktime, which is a piece of shit, but is apparently crucial to Itunes, yet another pile of steaming turds. When you install Itunes, it inevitably wants to install Bonjour and Mobileme and Quicktime. All I want to do is transfer some music to my iPod. I don’t need those other little floaters that add bloat!! But I digress… after all, the subject of my fury today is Safari.
Safari is like a cesspool of broken hopes and dreams. To use Tom Lehrer’s phrasing, using Safari is akin to “sliding down the razorblade of life.”
“If you hate it so much, why do you use it?” Well, when Safari 4 came out and the interweb seemingly fell to its knees in worship and adulation, I figured maybe I should give it another try. It was a rocky beginning, to say the least, starting from download and install. It just so happened that I was upgrading to Safari 4 when a bluetooth update for OSX was released, and I was puzzled to see that while the bluetooth update did not require a reboot, installing Safari 4 would.
How could this be, I wondered? On OSX, things are supposed to “Just work!” and bullshit like making the browser a vital part of the OS is something that only Microsoft is supposed to do, right? If Firefox can be installed and upgraded without a system reboot, surely those geniuses at Apple, creators of all that is holy and user friendly, can manage the same?
Nevertheless, I installed, rebooted, and lo and behold – the bluetooth update installed, and it DID require a system reboot after all. But why is OSX so dumb that it can’t use one reboot for both things? My experience with Windows and Ubuntu showed me that it was possible to do such things. Even worst, it’s not just installation, but every subsequent update to Safari has also required a system reboot.
After such an inauspicious beginning, I tried not to be annoyed as I configured Safari. For me, browser history is completely unnecessary because I’m not so lazy that I can’t bookmark or google the sites that I want to revisit, and I’m not so senile that I can’t remember if I’ve already read something. Therefore, I always set my history to “no history” at all, so every page looks pristine and it’s not pockmarked by splotches of differently colored links. In Safari, it seems that I can’t do it. It would insist on recording my history. But that’s an offense I can live with, because I can clear history and cookies and cache in one fell swoop.
Worse than history, on a grand, unprecedented scale, is cookie management, or lack thereof. Sometimes a girl just doesn’t want to accept cookies from everyone, you know? I’ll give them some props for at least saying “don’t accept 3rd party cookies” but what the hell??? Why do I have to accept all or accept none? Why can’t I be given some discretion regarding whose cookies I accept?? I’m a big girl and I can make good decisions! (This, to me, is like abstinence-only cookie education!! It just teaches people bad habits in the end!)
And next… on to search providers. Lo and behold, Google is the default. Alright, fine. I use Google all the time anyway. But why can’t I also have other options? Why can’t I search Wikipedia or, god forbid, Bing? Will the interwebs implode if I add another search provider without having to go through some retarded plugin?? AGAIN, what happened to IT JUST WORKS??? HUH??
Maybe if these Apple engineers pulled their heads out of their asses once in a while and stopped worshiping the man in the black turtleneck and jeans, they’d realize that there are features more important than jumping on to the coverflow-ified Chrome page preview bandwagon that’s Top Sites and focus on features important to, say, people who care about security and configuration.
In a fit of pique, my new homepage is now changed from the default Apple page to Bing.com, thank you very much… not that I use Safari now, but it’s the principle of it all.
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