Why?

[mmcirvin]

When Jeffrey Zeldman has software meltdowns, he describes them in detail. (He seems to have had bad luck historically with Mac OS X upgrades.) In this particular installment, he points out some Apple design decisions that can make things worse in emergency situations.

Of them, the one that baffles me the most is Apple's decision in recent OS X versions to absorb its system Web preferences, including the default browser preference, into the Safari Web browser. (Previously it was under a pane in System Preferences, where it should be.) This is not just irritatingly monopolistic; as Zeldman discovered the hard way, Web browsers are common points of failure, and this places a potential means of recovery from that failure dangerously within its sphere of influence. The controls to reject the mothership's favored applications should not be inside the applications themselves.

Comments

[chicken-cem.livejournal.com]

Thank you! I've been saying this since Panther arrived. ARGH. They do it with Mail, too -- I hate Mail and don't want to even have to open it in order to set my default client to Mozilla.

Here's a classic example -- Safari crashes constantly on one of my machines, meaning that I cannot get in to change my default browser to Firefox because Safari won't freaking launch.

Put it back in the system prefs, you goons.

Other stuff got moved around in system prefs that doesn't make sense either. Like some stuff that was consolidated under the Accounts, I think should have stayed separate.

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

In Windows, if you install a browser, it'll either have an option to make it the default browser on install, and/or on its first run will notice that it's not default, and ask you if you want it to be the default. Is this no longer possible?

Also, standard CD-ROMS on the market have a small hole on the front, usually near the eject button-- if you need to get a CD out of a powered-down machine, you can shove (gently) a straightened paperclip in there and it will eject the tray up to an inch or so, and you can pull it the rest of the way-- saves time by not having to restart a machine with a ponderous bootup process. I don't even know if Mac CD-ROMs have trays or equivalent anymore, so I don't know if this is an option, but even this tiny hole would've solved one of this guy's problem, as well as the problem of someone who has a doornail-dead Mac because of a PS failure or something. (Of course, the intended use of that hole is probably less well known than the Mac procedure of holding LMB on startup.)

[chicken-cem.livejournal.com]

Weird, I didn't raise any of those issues in my comment, this seems a bit out of left field. For example, I never mentioned CD-ROMs at all, which is not an issue on the table.

The only browser I know of that asks you if you want it to be the default is Internet Explorer, which is of course stupid, since even if you say "No", half the time it would still force itself on you as the default anyway, like a mangy unwanted houseguest. ;-)

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

It was Zeldman who was talking about CDs, and he didn't know the mouse-button trick.

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

Right, I was following up to the first comment in re: CD-ROMs, but I just carried on because my net connection was slow (thanks to BT) and posting two comments would exceed my patience. (I was hopped up on caffeine.)

[plorkwort.livejournal.com]

Indeed, I thought one of the ways to identify Mac support people was by noticing the number of unbent paperclips scattered around their workspaces for emergency-ejecting floppies and CDs; I certainly used to carry at least one on my keychain at all times. Of course, they still didn't help if what was in the drive turned out to be a peanut butter sandwich instead of a disk.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

My old beige desktop G3 has an emergency hole under the CD-ROM tray, but there isn't one on my Quicksilver tower (and I think Zeldman has some roughly similar G4 tower). There's a tiny hard-reset button under the power switch, and an even tinier button you'd need to poke with a paperclip that I think flips you into Open Firmware on boot, or something like that. But no external optical-drive ejector.

Of course, there's undoubtedly a physical eject button hidden inside the case, since the drive is a bog-standard Pioneer job, but it's behind the sleek'n'featureless oval door and would probably not be able to open same if pushed.

What is this "install" of which you speak?

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Since the arrival of OS X and its concept of application bundles, many Mac applications have reverted to the (right and proper) notion, common in the Mac's infancy, of installer-less installation: instead of running some program that drops mysterious turds all over your system, you just take the application file and put it where you want it. So there's no system-wide concept of a browser installer; a Web browser is just another kind of application.

Now, that said, the company most likely to violate this practice is Apple itself. In particular, most people get Safari updates through Software Update now, and I think it might even be squirreling stuff away in weird places, since Safari depends on a system component called WebCore.

But, say, Firefox on a Mac is just a drop-it-where-you-want-it app; there's no installer.

Re: What is this "install" of which you speak?

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...Now, that said, it is possible for a browser to ask to be made top dog on first run. But this hasn't been generally regarded as necessary or even desirable; as chicken_cem said, MSIE/Mac does that, and if I recall correctly, it's somewhat misleadingly worded-- if you say "yes" it crowns itself default handler for just about everything in the universe. My attitude has always been that if I want you to become the default browser, I'll make you the default browser when I please.

But this more pushy behavior may have to become a general practice again because of Apple's asinine relocation of the default browser preference.

Re: What is this "install" of which you speak?

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

Yeah, IE likes to take on just about all URLs unless explicitly instructed otherwise-- and probably a bunch of image types and so on.

Actually, maybe not all URLs-- mailto: might be the exception, though it could be that email apps are even more pushy than browsers. Again, hopefully either email apps will ask whether they should be the default or else Apple will change the behavior.

This reminds me that in Windows, IE's properties are indistinguishable from the system-wide "Internet Properties." Fortunately every app I use prefers its own properties to the system-wide ones, or at least offers a choice-- most only look at the internet properties for the purpose of dialing to connect to the internet, assuming one's not already connected.

Re: What is this "install" of which you speak?

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

Aside from the wet-sock-surprise that you mention when it comes to windows installers, some such installers offer beneficial screens such as pre-customizing how you prefer ot launch it (desktop icon, quick-launch icon, start menu), register the software as appropriate, and do some basic config/setup (notably RealOne and Quicktime Player want to know how irritating they should be, though on a scale of one to ten, neither lets you turn it down below a 7 or so)-- also Mail-Apps, which are pretty much useless before configuring, unless it can import your email account settings from somewhere.

But besides setup, most browsers in windows will by default gripe at launch that they are not the default browser. In IE you have to uncheck a box and hit a button in order for it to stop checking, and others are mostly the same. So instead of loading the failure that was Safari, he'd just run IE from an icon (instead of a link) and have IE bully the rights away from Safari.

Also, what is this webcore of which you speak? Is OSX full of inseparable, anti-competitive web components that will prevent outside browser technologies from ever taking hold? For shame! Split the company!

Re: What is this "install" of which you speak?

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Yes, WebCore would be shocking to me if I ever had given a crap about Microsoft's browser bundling in the first place. (That always seemed to me to be about the weakest argument available to support claims of monopoly abuse, and I wondered why the DoJ was harping on it so heavily back in the day.)