Pathfinder Development » More on Safari and the new Gmail upgrade

More on Safari and the new Gmail upgrade

Brian Dillard, Tuesday, November 6, 2007 @ 9:26 am

Over the weekend my Gmail finally got upgraded to the new version. (I know, I know, a week is hardly a long time to wait for a slow-rollout Google feature. But I'm impatient.) I have to say, the history and back-button support is AWESOME. It's funny that Gmail warns you in a huge red banner to disable Firebug. I, of course, kept it enabled and immediately began digging through the DOM of the new UI. As usual, most of the JavaScript is so obfusticated that it's hard to tell what's going on. Still, it's interesting to dig through layers and layers of iframes and nested divs and see how much DOM hackery is involved. Looking behind the scenes at any commercial-grade webapp is like taking a tour of a sausage factory.

Luckily, I have a strong stomach. I'm going to make it a weekend project to really dig in and learn how they're handling their history support. In a previous post, I wondered why the new Gmail is only available for Firefox 2 and Internet Explorer 7. Given my own experiences with Safari's history object, I shouldn't be surprised. With bookmarkable URLs and history management so central to the new Gmail UI, no wonder Safari has been left in the cold; it's simply too buggy in this regard to receive A-grade support. Safari users have been complaining to Google that it should fix Gmail for Safari even with the old UI. I think those complaints should be lodged at Apple, not Google.

P.S. Sure enough, leave Firebug open in Gmail for any length of time and your Firefox will slow to a crawl. My FF has been crashing a bunch this week, but I'm not sure whether it's Gmail or Firefox's own latest updates. Commenters, am I the only one seeing this?

Topics: Browsers, Firefox, Firefox Extensions, Google, Safari

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Comments: 8 so far

Nope, you’re not the only one. Firefox also crashes when I use GMail and Yahoo Mail. I don’t know the issue between Firefox and online email clients, but it surely annoys me that I have to restart it after I finished reading and responding to my email..

Comment by Mark, Tuesday, November 6, 2007 @ 9:46 am
I have seen Firefox crashing at least once daily for the last couple of weeks, despite a recent update, and it’s been very annoying. For me the most common problem happens when using GMail, and there’s a strange problem that is seemingly related to timing that crashes FF when a Google or GMail tab is busy and I open a new tab at the same.

I’m still looking forward to having my GMail upgraded

Comment by Takuan Daikon, Tuesday, November 6, 2007 @ 10:33 am
I’ve been seeing a lot of Firefox 2.0.0.9 crashes over the last few days, and they’ve been happening while doing stuff in Gmail. Firebug is disabled, so I don’t think it’s that.

Comment by Sven, Tuesday, November 6, 2007 @ 6:03 pm
Crashing’s been a non-stop experience in Firefox since the Gmail upgrade for me. It happens any time I navigate away from Gmail.

Comment by Andrew, Thursday, November 8, 2007 @ 10:43 am
Yup. I’ve noticed the same, and pretty much stopped using FF on my mac. Camino seems better for some reason.

On the Safari and Gmail front, I’m glad to see you come out and say Apple needs to fix it’s browser! As a web developer I feel we take too much flack for not having 100% browser support out of the gate!

Comment by Andre Charland, Thursday, November 22, 2007 @ 10:20 pm
FF has been crashing left right and center for me. Whenever I click on a label in gmail or navigate away, boom.. FF is gone. I even downgraded to 2.0.0.7 but to no avail. So I’ve started switching to the old UI first thing on logging in..

Comment by AJ, Friday, November 23, 2007 @ 6:06 am
After that updates there’ve been so many crashes…
Each time I navigate from an Inbox to Spam folder, I’m ready that it’ll halt down.

Comment by Rustam Khodjaev, Sunday, November 25, 2007 @ 1:40 am
i have been having issues using gmail seamlessly on the safari under the newer version. not sure i can really make out as to what’s new in this version of gmail. but it hangs on me, and does a bunch of other funky things - i have been switching over to the older UI version as soon as i log in on gmail.
is anyone having a similar issue?

Comment by mechie8682, Saturday, November 1, 2008 @ 10:51 pm