Google Mail / Safari: Stealing focus when loading is complete is not OK

December 7, 2008 @ 16:22

I use Google Mail’s web interface for both personal ramblings with friends, and during my endless conversations with my buddies at work. This usually works just fine - the Google interface designers and engineers have produced a solid and well-designed interface for people dealing with large amounts of mail on a daily basis.

So, all is good then? No. Pose that I’ve got a web browser (in this case, Safari) open, with two tabs displaying my personal and my job’s mail interfaces respectively (both are hosted by Google). If some operation in tab one takes more time than usual to complete (I’ve bet you’ve seen this - it’s indicated with a small yellow overlay at the top of the page telling you about the progress of the operation) I usually switch over to the other tab (or any other tab, it doesn’t have to be another Google Mail interface in that newly switched to tab). So far so good.

When interacting with web pages, you often use your keyboard (to fill out forms, write comments etc.). This works just fine until the first tab decides that it is done loading - and makes Safari put focus on the first tab again. This is NOT OK. I could be in the middle of a typing operation, and once the first tab gains focus again each and every keystroke I type is sent to that tab. This could lead to all kind of “interesting” things - before realizing what has just happened, I usually manage to mute, archive and step through some mails… argh!

I’ve tried to reproduce the behavior in Firefox (version 3) without any success. Might just be Safari that’s playing tricks with me. Just wanted to let you know, and flag for help (if you know how to fix this, I’m more than eager to learn how to prevent this).

Safari 3.X: Bookmarks with dynamic titles

April 15, 2008 @ 09:53

Safari (at least on Leopard) has this really annoying behaviour; if you’re using bookmarks, the tabs that are used for displaying these will always have names corresponding to the names of the bookmark items. This is really annoying for e.g. Gmail - you’ll want the title of the tab displaying the Gmail inbox to be able to be updated (since it shows you if there are any new mails in your inbox).

Philip at work came up with a simple solution to this; just take your bookmark, say…
http://mail.google.com
…and change the address of the item it to…
javascript:document.location=”http://mail.google.com”

This will make the title update to whatever the title of the page currently is, instead of the name of the bookmark. Brilliant!