Betalogue

While I love Safari and it’s most definitely my browser of choice, there is one nagging problem that I hope — but am not too optimistic — that Apple will fix.

The problem, I suspect, mostly affects those who, like me, are on a slow Internet connection by modem. (What else is new?) Often times when I visit a site such as an online store (www.hmv.com, say), I know my way around and I don’t necessarily want to wait until each page has fully loaded, with all its pictures and everything, before moving to the next page I want to go to. As long as the “Add to wish list” or “Add to basket” button is visible, for example, I don’t need to wait until Safari has loaded the picture of the album cover before indicating that, yes, I want to add it to my basket.

In Explorer or Camino, if I click on the “Add to basket” button while the contents of the page are still being loaded, the browser “understands” that I don’t want to wait until all items in the page are loaded and immediately sends the request to process my click to the web site. If the web site responds fast enough (and usually it does), then the browser interrupts the downloading process for the current page and immediately moves on to the next page to load.

Safari, on the other hand, insists on loading all the items in the page (all the images and button pictures and everything) before processing my request to add the item to my shopping basket and move on. This is very annoying, because many sites (like HMV.com) use lots of small, irrelevant pictures that I simply do not need to see before I move to the next page.

The same problem affects forms. If I enter a text string in HMV.com’s search field and hit the return key, Safari will not process my request until all the elements in the page are fully loaded — which can often take a long time on a pokey modem connection.

Worse still: If, after clicking on the “Add to basket” button or hitting the return key to process my form request, I see that Safari is still busy loading stuff and will not process my request until it’s done, and if I click on the “Stop” button in Safari to stop the loading process for the current page (of which I don’t need to see any more), then everything fails (including my request) and the web page (form or button) ceases to work altogether! No matter how many times I hit the button or the return key after HAVING interrupted the loading process, Safari now refuses to process my request. The only solution is to go back to the previous page I visited, and then go forward again, forcing Safari to reload the page and somehow reset the processing of button clicks and form entries.

This is immensely annoying, and affect a great number of sites — not just online stores such as Amazon.com, HMV.com, etc. And Safari is clearly the culprit, since things work fine in Explorer and Camino.

[This item was submitted to Apple through the Mac OS X Feedback page.]

This entry was posted by Pierre Igot on Friday, April 11th, 2003 at 5:32 pm and is filed under Macintosh. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.