Safari/browsing issues

Posted by Pierre Igot in: Macintosh
March 13th, 2003 • 10:25 pm

Got a weird bug today in Safari while trying to visit the site 4thegame.com. Got a warning about a Java applet wanting to run on my machine. I clicked on “Deny”. Then all of a sudden most buttons and menu items in Safari ceased to function. Here’s what the application menu looked like, for example:

A picture named Safari-Disabled.gif

Worse still, even those controls that were still apparently active would fail to work. Instead, I would systematically get an alert sound, and nothing happening. This affected all the title bar buttons in all my currently open windows (I had about a dozen), which I could no longer close. I could still got from one window to the other by clicking on it and scroll up and down, but that was about it.

It seems to have to do with the Java applet on that particular site. I force-quit Safari, relaunched it and reloaded the site, this time with no Java warning. I then submitted a bug report through Safari. (I sure wish that Safari would give some feedback about whether the process of submitting a bug actually worked or not.)

A more general issue I have with Safari (and other browsers for that matter) is that they offer me no way of taking a “snapshot” of all the sites that I have currently loaded in various windows through a “Memorize Open Sites” command, so that I could just quit Safari, relaunch it, SELECT a “Reload All Memorized Sites” and watch it reload all the sites in question.

Instead, I have to use the History feature to identify all the sites that I had open, and open them all individually one by one. To make matters worse, since things are fairly stable in Safari and OS X now, I can go several days without restarting Safari, which means that I sometimes have windows in Safari that contain web pages that I loaded several days ago and haven’t yet had the time to read. This makes using the History feature for reloading all these sites rather tedious!

The “snapshot” feature would also help in those cases when Safari does crash (and there will always be such cases). You could set, for example, Safari to automatically take a snapshot of all currently open web pages every half-hour or so — and thus be able to reload all the sites with one single command.

Just a thought. I’d like to see browsing become more convenient in a real-world computing environment.


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