Apple: Do not drag install Safari
Posted by Pierre Igot in: MacintoshMay 12th, 2004 • 11:00 am
Apple has a laconic new Knowledge Base article that states:
You should not drag a copy of Safari 1.0 or later to install it. If you do, Safari may not work, or may give unexpected results.
Beta versions of Safari were compatible with “drag install,” the practice of installing software by simply copying an application to the desired location. With Safari 1.0 and later, this is no longer a viable method of installation. Instead, use the Safari Installer, which includes necessary support files.
Of course, what this article doesn’t address is: Why doesn’t Apple try harder when it comes to enforcing its own standards in terms of intuitiveness? There are just far too many Mac OS X applications that cannot be “drag installed”. You need to run an installer, you often need to enter an administrator’s password, you need to wait while the installer goes through its lengthy “Optimizing” process, you sometimes have to restart your computer…
How far we are still from intuitive software installations! I realize that, in some cases, there are probably underlying technical issues. For example, Safari is based on a web page rendering technology that is actually part of the OS X system itself and can be used by third-party applications to render web pages. Running the installer is obviously Apple’s preferred way to update not only the Safari application itself but this web rendering module in Mac OS X as well.
Still, is it too hard to imagine a solution where you could install the new version of Safari via drag-and-drop, and then, the first time you actually run the new version, it would actually run a one-off installation script that would also install the web rendering module in Mac OS X?
It just seems to me that, these days, Apple isn’t putting much effort into making the software installation process more intuitive. And yet they are the ones who should be leading by example…