Safari (worlds worst web browser) and applets...

[blahblahblahh]

The first rule of Safari's debug menu is, there is no Safari debug menu.

Just because Apple's site says there is, don't believe it's actually true. Yes, they claim it's a "secret" menu that you have to turn on by running a command-line hack, but ... it doesn't work in the latest (current) versions of OS X.

Without the debug menu, Safari gives you no errors at all, and no access to any java console, or any of the things we take for granted.

Of course, Safari has some Safari-only java bugs, so at this point I recommend you give up on making applets work on Safari - if anyone is dumb enough to use it as their main browser, screw-em.

But...if you open the Console (applications/utilities/console), you can see any exceptions and stack traces. No "empty classloader cache" or essential tools like that, but at least you can see the errors.

[blahblahblahh]

But you're still screwed, because mozilla on OS X doesn't support applets.

Well, at least it ignores the applet ARCHIVE attribute, which means you're going to have to:
 - do no signing
 - do no compression
 - put all your classfiles individually on the server
 - whimper

on days like this,

* blahblahblahh wonders why he even bothers trying to make java code work on apple's lame OS

[blahblahblahh]

Ah. A little birdie (long-time OS X user) tells me it *is* all Apple's fault, that the bugs they introduced to Safari in OS X Tiger (released around 1 month ago) are so severe that many OS X users have been forced to stop using it entirely.

Allegedly *many* websites are completely unusable, including most internet banking, and lots of otherwise ordinary sites, and Apple is rushing out some fixes in a few weeks time.

Sigh. Regression Testing? They've heard of it...

Games published by our own members! Check 'em out!

[Mojomonkey]

Debug menu has been included since 1.3 and continues to be supported. It's a property though, so you have to turn it on:

defaults write com.apple.Safari IncludeDebugMenu 1

but ... it doesn't work in the latest (current) versions of OS X.

Running 10.4.1 and it works just fine and dandy.



While "defaults write" isn't obvious, it is there.

[Mojomonkey]

P.S. I've had zero problems with any sites (including my banking, Wells Fargo) and Safari. If your little birdie cares to ellaborate, perhaps I can see if I have problems on some of these sites.

Macintoshian Achaia never mentions any severe Safari issues, so I have a feeling his *might* be an isolated case.

[blahblahblahh]

Debug menu has been included since 1.3 and continues to be supported. It's a property though, so you have to turn it on:

defaults write com.apple.Safari IncludeDebugMenu 1

but ... it doesn't work in the latest (current) versions of OS X.

EDIT: if this sounds harsh, it isn't meant to be - bitter (about safari bugs I've had hassle from before), yes, but not rude

Um, I said that because "it doesn't work in the latest versions of OS X" here - we have many OS X machines here, most running latest Tiger, doesn't work on any of them. In-house OS X staff are adamant the safari problems are a widely-known issue. Shrug. I can see it not working with my own eyes, and I know Tiger is definitely screwed up, have seen apps stopped working, etc. I also double-checked at the time, and this tuerned out to be not uncommon. So, I'm afraid your "works for me" is nice for you, but I know it's not the same for everyone else .

Oh, and I also know first-hand that until VERY recently (last 2-4 months) safari was broken in many non-trivial ways - e.g. it didn't support XML stylesheets! - so it's not surprising it's broken again.

[blahblahblahh]

P.S. I've had zero problems with any sites (including my banking, Wells Fargo) and Safari. If your little birdie cares to ellaborate, perhaps I can see if I have problems on some of these sites.

Unfortunately, he's on a plane to Australia right now

But he's English, so he'd have almost certainly been referring to Lloyds, HSBC, or Barclays.

[Mojomonkey]

Boy, too bad Chris turned off the karma, this thread could then be marked -10 worthless.

You said it doesn't work in the "latest (current)". Which it works fine, if your people knew what they were doing. Then you try to change your post's meaning... nice.

You said it requires a "secret" hack to turn on. Which it requires a defaults write, never been a secret, it's a developer tool (which is what the debug line is aimed at).

You say that bugs release "1 month ago" are so severe that many users stop using it. Ok, um, what? Where is even the anecdotal evidence?

So, I'm afraid your "works for me" is nice for you, but I know it's not the same for everyone else

Maybe you need to point your staff to people who know what they are doing? Or remove them from the payroll?

And let's see you call people who use it "dumb" and to "screw-em". You call it a "lame" OS.

This is a very ignorant post. Next time instead of coming on here and complaining, do a little research, find out what the problem is and fix it. You'll find that YOU are the isolated case, and YOU should look into why that is.

EDIT: Anyways, you are pretty damn good at Trolling me, I don't know why I always bite on your obvious flamebait posts. Counted to 10... better... in conclusion, don't support Safari, I know I don't care, and the only people it will hurt is you.

[blahblahblahh]

You said it doesn't work in the "latest (current)". Which it works fine, if your people knew what they were doing. Then you try to change your post's meaning... nice.

For the third time: It. Does. Not. Work.

I knew about the terminal command from the start - but where all other browsers use a GUI, and mainstream ones like Mozilla have the features visible on the menus always - safari has nothing in-browser to see what the error-message *caused by the browser* is.

Apple pioneered standards in GUI design, yet their own flagship web-browser "doesn't do" error-message dialogs, nor even use the status bar for them (which is lame, but better than nothing). Personally, I find that unimpressive.

You said it requires a "secret" hack to turn on. Which it requires a defaults write, never been a secret, it's a developer tool (which is what the debug line is aimed at).

I couldn't find it documented anywhere except on the apple developer website - there was no menu option, nothing in preferences, nothing in system preferences. That's not a normal application feature AFAICS.

Shrug. YMMV on this point - but to me when you do not use the standard for setting a preference (the apple application menu) and having to go outside the app to a system-dependent setting is a hack. Not having any clue as to how this works or why within the app itself makes it a deliberately hidden, or secret, hack.

You say that bugs release "1 month ago" are so severe that many users stop using it. Ok, um, what? Where is even the anecdotal evidence?

I use a mac every day, but I don't sit around in the mac community. On a daily basis I work with many who do - mostly professional design companies, illustrators on massively souped-up macs (witness we have an Adobe Illustrator file that no-one has yet been able to export from AI because tis so huge it crashes all systems we've tried on so far), programmers, etc. We share news and warnings on things like Tiger. Only one person I know upgraded - everyone else tried on a spare system first. Some people found core apps they needed in order to do their dayjobs no longer worked with Tiger, and so waited for updates from Apple to fix those issues. Others (like myself) were able to migrate their main machine to use Tiger.

You call it a "lame" OS.

Well, each time I've pointed to a conrete problem, you've ignored it . Concrete problems are severe as:

- apple doesn't (apparently) do basic regression testing
- safari doesn't render XML
- safari doesn't render mainstream webpages
- OS X doesn't support MIME (pointed out various times elsewhere)
- apple broke safari in their minor OS update that they charge a fair whack of money for, and have aggressively pushed to everyone

Some others:

- OS X leans heavily on certain technologies including Samba - but OS X's samba support is utterly utterly awful. If you look carefully, you'll see a large contributory factor: they are MANY versions behind the current release (of the order of 18 months or so IIRC). Even windows 95 has better samba support than OS X
- previous apple OS updates are well known to have done things like wipe the harddisk, or corrupt it. As far as I know, MS has only once had this problem, ever, and we all know how good they are at writing good code

This is a very ignorant post. Next time instead of coming on here and complaining, do a little research, find out what the problem is and fix it. You'll find that YOU are the isolated case, and YOU should look into why that is.

Shrug. I started the post to request help, but whilst writing it and digging further found out all fingers pointed back to Apple and general shoddiness, and it morphed from a request for help into a warning to anyone trying to debug applets on OS X + safari: don't. Just tell your users to get mozilla, or any other browser that actually works.

EDIT: Anyways, you are pretty damn good at Trolling me, I don't know why I always bite on your obvious flamebait posts.

LOL. Maybe it's better to get a reaction, risk being wrong and stupid, and at least be educated by your fellow posters than to never say anything contentious and never learn anything new?

I know I don't care, and the only people it will hurt is you.

Good. The aim wasn't to hurt anyone, but instead to spare people pain. A lot of us are branching out into bending over backwards to get stuff working nicely on OS X, and here's an example of where it's not worth even trying to.

[woogley]

I couldn't find it documented anywhere except on the apple developer website - there was no menu option, nothing in preferences, nothing in system preferences. That's not a normal application feature AFAICS.

The debug menu was meant for developers, not for users - hence why it was documented in the apple's developer website. I don't really consider a hack either, because Mozilla's "about:config" isn't heavily documented either (it's not in the Help dialog), and it's not much more user friendly than safari's "default write" even though "about:config" is a GUI (well, a table with properties that are mostly obscure to the average user).

Games published by our own members! Check 'em out!

[swpalmer]

I've never had any issues with Safari... well there are the sites designed to only run on IE issues... but that isn't really a fault of Safari.

I've never needed the debug menu, so I haven't enabled it.

The Java console has always worked fine, but I'm not sure if I have it enabled in the most recent build.

Blah^3 you are the first person that I have ever encountered that has any significant negative thing to say about Safari.  My boss claims it is slow, relative to IE on Windows, but that is largely due to the default fixed delay before Safari attempts to render an incomplete page.

[blahblahblahh]

I couldn't find it documented anywhere except on the apple developer website - there was no menu option, nothing in preferences, nothing in system preferences. That's not a normal application feature AFAICS.

The debug menu was meant for developers, not for users - hence why it was documented in the apple's developer website. I don't really consider a hack either, because Mozilla's "about:config" isn't heavily documented either

Yes - I fully agree with you that the mozilla about:config is also bad - although note that about:config is a settings system, whereas I was having a hard time trying to even get hold of the *errors* being reported - and to control basic fundamental features of the java plugin (essentials like killing the classloader cache). Mozilla's behaviour is sort-of excusable by the argument that "most people shouldn't change settings anyway" (although personally having seen how many people WANT to change mozilla settings but never find about:config to do so, I don't buy that argument)

As you said, it is actually rather good in that it lets you edit all settings through a GUI, but ... the fact that that GUI is hidden, and most users never find it, and it has no organization and many settings with similar names that conflict or damage each other with no documentation makes it a nightmare for most people who might otherwise use it .

[pepijnve]

Maybe the preference isn't getting updated correctly for some reason? Have you checked in the configuration xml file manually? IIRC you should find an xml file called ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.Safari. If the preference is set correctly in there I don't have a clue either why it's not working either.
About it being a hack, I personally like the defaults command thing. It does the exact same thing you would do in a Cocoa application when manipulating preferences (i.e. the same mechanism as implemented by the NSUserDefaults class) except it does it from the command line. This allows for an easy standard way of manipulating preferences from the command line. The alternative would be to parse the xml files yourself...

[blahblahblahh]

Maybe the preference isn't getting updated correctly for some reason? Have you checked in the configuration xml file manually? IIRC you should find an xml file called ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.Safari. If the preference is set correctly in there I don't have a clue either why it's not working either.

Thanks for that, I'll try it and see what happens.

About it being a hack, I personally like the defaults command thing. It does the exact same thing you would do in a Cocoa application

Sounds like my thoughts on mozilla's about:config - compared to the alternative of no interface at all (e.g. hand-editing mozilla's file, which also happens to be XML) it's great ... but when looked at from the context of it's an application setting that you have to leave the app to set AND you don't use the system prefs to set, it's awful.

[swpalmer]

You call it a "lame" OS.

Well, each time I've pointed to a conrete problem, you've ignored it . Concrete problems are severe as:

- apple doesn't (apparently) do basic regression testing
- safari doesn't render XML
- safari doesn't render mainstream webpages
- OS X doesn't support MIME (pointed out various times elsewhere)
- apple broke safari in their minor OS update that they charge a fair whack of money for, and have aggressively pushed to everyone

Some others:

- OS X leans heavily on certain technologies including Samba - but OS X's samba support is utterly utterly awful. If you look carefully, you'll see a large contributory factor: they are MANY versions behind the current release (of the order of 18 months or so IIRC). Even windows 95 has better samba support than OS X
- previous apple OS updates are well known to have done things like wipe the harddisk, or corrupt it. As far as I know, MS has only once had this problem, ever, and we all know how good they are at writing good code

Now that's what I call a major TROLL.

Apple doesn't do regression testing? Complete lie and you (likely) know it.
All your complaints are with a single application (Safari) - but the OS is trash?
OS X doesn't support MIME types? Heck, Windows has never even heard of a MIME type... but once again I think you are really referring to Safari and the jnlp thing.
"minor OS update" - yeah right.  Sure the marketing material lays it on a bit thick.. but there are a lot of major changes that the marketing stuff doesn't mention at all because they are developer related changes or technical enhancements. (e.g. access control lists and extended attributes in the filesystem, better concurrency in the kernel...)
Apple's Samba is behind?  Not surprising.. Apple is careful about the changes they make. Samba in general is complete crap, but it works better on OS X than any version of Linux I have tried.
You complain about not having developer debug tools in the main UI of a browser?  .. when if fact you found the info to get the debug stuff from the exact place you should have - the Apple Developer Connection...

When I upgraded to Tiger I had zero issues with Safari... well except for a rendering glitch on scroll bars, but that wasn't specific to Safari.

 In terms of general usability, features and technical coolness Mac OS X is clearly quite a bit ahead of the Windows and Linux.  You won't find many people that have used a recent version of OS X that would say otherwise.

Were you having a bad day or something?

[must learn not to feed the trolls...]

[blahblahblahh]

All your complaints are with a single application (Safari) - but the OS is trash?

True. But the problem is that OS X is presented as an indivisible package - you can't get safari any other way, and safari seems hard-coded into OS X in a similar way to MSIE and windows (tried prising it out but not had much success so far).

but there are a lot of major changes that the marketing stuff doesn't mention at all because they are developer related changes or technical enhancements. (e.g. access control lists and extended attributes in the filesystem, better concurrency in the kernel...)

* blahblahblahh throws hands up and admits to not knowing this at all

This is not purely ignorance - I carefully reviewed all the supplied info that came from apple and all the readmes that were easy to find, and none of that was in there. OS X generally fools me into thinking that if I can't see something and can't find it quickly it's not there

Apple's Samba is behind?  Not surprising.. Apple is careful about the changes they make. Samba in general is complete crap, but it works better on OS X than any version of Linux I have tried.

You are lucky. SImply the version number (10) is enough to tell me that apple's version is worse by a long way than the current linux versions (i.e. I can remember some of the whoppers that hadn't been fixed by version 10), unless they have embarked on a scheme of updating the source but not updating the version number reported within OS X.

Alternatively, it might be a while since you used samba on linux, of course - they put out new versions very rapidly .

Were you having a bad day or something?

By the time I'd been mucked about by Safari, yes .

[swpalmer]

the problem is that OS X is presented as an indivisible package - you can't get safari any other way, and safari seems hard-coded into OS X in a similar way to MSIE and windows (tried prising it out but not had much success so far).

As far as I know Safari is not special.  What issues are you having?  The default web browser is set in Safari's preferences.  I can see that it automatically picked up that I have Firefox installed and so I can choose Safari or Firefox as my default web browser.  Though the core rendering engine is also available as a framework for other developers to use (WebKit), so that might be why you see 'Safari' issues pop up in other places.

(Mail also has a preference item for the default mail reader)

but there are a lot of major changes that the marketing stuff doesn't mention at all because they are developer related changes or technical enhancements. (e.g. access control lists and extended attributes in the filesystem, better concurrency in the kernel...)

* blahblahblahh throws hands up and admits to not knowing this at all

This is not purely ignorance - I carefully reviewed all the supplied info that came from apple and all the readmes that were easy to find, and none of that was in there. OS X generally fools me into thinking that if I can't see something and can't find it quickly it's not there

There was a great blog about all the cool features in Tiger...
Here it is   http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/macosx-10.4.ars/1