Betalogue

I have yet to upgrade to Mountain Lion (in part because of this), but I am in the process of bringing all my existing applications up to date and, when Apple’s soon-to-be-extinct Software Update suggested that I also install Safari 6, I figured that I might as well get a foretaste.

Within an hour of launching Safari 6, I was greeted with a recurrence of this behaviour. Now, to be fair, it might just have been a coincidence. When Safari 6 decided to start refusing to load anything that was not already loaded in its windows, I figured that maybe the fact that Software Update did not ask for a system restart after installing it was not such a good thing after all, so I restarted, and I haven’t experienced the problem again since.

But it still is a rather inauspicious debut. Of course, this particular bug is made all the more egregious by the fact that, when Safari fails to connect to the Internet, all kinds of Safari-related technologies fail as well. So when I clicked on the “Help” button next to the “Safari can’t connect to the server” error message, I got this:

Since Mac OS X’s lousy help feature is web-based, it too fails to connect and so to be of any help in any way. Nice.

The bottom-line here is that the bug, which I started experiencing with Safari 5.1, is still there in Safari 6 under Lion and so there is a good chance that it’ll still be there in Mountain Lion. Sigh.

The other thing that makes me positively mad is Apple’s decision to remove the preference setting in Safari for changing the default font for web pages. Sure, I am geeky enough to figure out how to use a custom CSS style sheet to work around the problem, but really… Why is there a problem to work around in the first place? This is typical of the Apple that makes no sense whatsoever and regularly rears its ugly head. What were they thinking? How on earth can they justify such a decision? “iOS does not have such a setting, so OS X shouldn’t have one either”? And they really think that we are not going to believe that they are dumbing down OS X after that?

Mountain Lion has several “features” that are actually the restoration of pre-Lion features that were arbitrarily removed in Lion (such as the “Save As…” command, the three-column view for Address Book, etc.). I guess we’ll get another round of that in year, with the next version of OS X.

Grrr.

This entry was posted by Pierre Igot on Sunday, July 29th, 2012 at 4:25 pm and is filed under Macintosh. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.