Safari on Windows Keyboard and Mouse Shortcuts
Posted by Dave Hyatt on Thursday, June 21st, 2007 at 5:15 pmWe’ve been listening to your feedback regarding Safari on Windows. If you download the latest nightly, you will find the following new features:
(1) Support for Ctrl+Mousewheel to zoom.
(2) Support for Shift+Mousewheel to scroll horizontally.
(3) Support for tilt wheels.
(4) Support for Backspace and Shift+Backspace to go back/forward.
Other improvements we are investigating include:
(1) Ctrl+Enter www/com completion for the URL bar.
(2) F6 pane navigation to shift between the content area and URL bar.
(3) Ctrl+Tab / Ctrl+Shift+Tab to switch between tabs.
(4) The ability to use browser commands like back/forward from the 4th and 5th mouse buttons.
(5) The ability to resize the window from any edge (and to respect all taskbar functionality).
June 21st, 2007 at 5:26 pm
Some of those improvements should be transferred to the Mac client as well. Ctrl-Enter and Ctrl-Tab maybe, and the 4th and 5th mouse buttons.
June 21st, 2007 at 5:30 pm
F6? Bah, those Windows users should just use Control+L. Control+L is the standard across browsers across platforms.
June 21st, 2007 at 6:21 pm
Could you please add in the equivalent of Cmd- for links in the bookmarks bar? This is one of my favourite features of Safari on Mac, and I really miss it on Windows.
All in all, a minor thing, as I’m loving being able to develop against Safari while on Windows. It is sooo much faster to refresh pages
June 21st, 2007 at 6:59 pm
THE biggest problem I have encountered is the inability of Safari 3 for Windows to render many fonts, leaving whole pages, or sections of pages, empty. E.g. on my PC, Safari cannot render Tahoma or Times New Roman; its behaviour suggests that it cannot handle more than a certain number of installed fonts. This prevents me from testing Safari with many pages … unless I change the pages to use fonts Safari will deign to render.
June 21st, 2007 at 8:10 pm
Using the backspace key for navigation is an abomination! This is one reason to hate the PC!
For one, it makes no sense. What connects the concept of navigation to the concept of deletion? Nothing.
The keyboard has perfectly usable arrow keys. Use them. BTW, I hope the “Home” and “End” keys do what they are supposed to do - even in Safari for PC: get you to the beginning or the end of the _page_
Moreover having the delete key randomly perform acts of navigation is a huge annoyance. I can’t count the many times IE or FireFox misinterpreted my attempt to delete a character I typed into a form. This takes me back to a page I could not care less about. Adding insult to injury, the form contents is lost in the action or the web application on the other end gets confused by the backtracking.
Please, please, don’t ever bring this travesty to the Mac. Better yet, make it optional on the PC!
Pierre
June 21st, 2007 at 9:23 pm
It’s been in every version of Safari on the Mac, Pierre. We don’t trigger it if a textfield is focused though (obviously). Moreover if you’ve edited a form, Safari will warn before leaving the page, so you can’t do it by accident.
June 21st, 2007 at 9:23 pm
@gloubibou, the Mac already goes back when you press the delete key.
June 21st, 2007 at 9:55 pm
It’s great that you’ve added the features that you have (especially backspace), but the Ctrl+Tab switching is a necessity, especially considering the obscure combination that you have now. www/com completion would also be nice; these two are essentially standards considering IE/FX usage. The ability to resize the window from any edge is also a must if you want it to feel at all native in Windows. I’m sure you’ve read the slander about Safari on Windows, and while some of it may be sound and fury, this is a completely legitimate complaint. It’s one thing to make your browser feel like a Mac, it’s another to make it hostile to Windows users’ most basic assumptions about an application window. Keep up the good work.
June 21st, 2007 at 11:39 pm
Of the things you’re investigating, the most important to me is that Safari acts like a proper Windows application. For instance being able to access the Windows task bar with the mouse even when the task bar is auto hidden. Lack of adherence to Windows GUI conventions is the main group of problems that peeple have complained about, and for me that one’s the worst.
It would also be nice to have Ctrl+Tab support, and better still if it worked like Alt+Tab (most recently used order), not left to right like Firefox (where you need to install the LastTab extension to make it work properly).
June 22nd, 2007 at 12:00 am
I agree with Mikel above; you must behave like a Windows app. A prime example is using Win+M to minimise all windows; at the moment, it leaves Safari open when everything else has minimised.
June 22nd, 2007 at 2:35 am
@Thinine: ctrl-enter is not necessary; Safari will perform the same action if it’s given an unqualified domain name and a normal enter/return. The same is true for just about every browser other than IE. Ctrl-tab breaks Mac standards for keyboard shortcuts. Command-shift-left/right do the same thing, though.
June 22nd, 2007 at 3:05 am
Please please please don’t bring ctrl+mouse wheel zoom to the mac. It makes absolutely no sense and annoys the hell out of people who use keyboard navigation because often ctrl is still held down while scrolling to save hand movements.
Its just another thing that windows users have gotten used to and expect it to be a standard when its completely illogical, see also F5 refresh because that makes no sense either.
June 22nd, 2007 at 3:07 am
None of these Windows key bindings would migrate to the Mac. This blog post was just about Windows.
June 22nd, 2007 at 6:34 am
On Windows, some shortcut key events are not being passed to plug-ins. For example:
SHIFT+INSERT
CTRL+X
CTRL+C
CTRL+V
CTRL+K
CTRL+A
We are a plug-in vendor and this functionality is very important to us.
June 22nd, 2007 at 7:15 am
@ahruman
no having ctrl+enter is an added feature, not the same as just pressing enter.
This is why:
some (very stupid) proxy servers are returning a normal page displaying “domain not found”, but not the necessary information for the browser to notice this.
therefore i *always* has to type in the stupid “.com” to an adress when using Safari or Camino. hitting ctrl+enter (or cmd+enter on my mac) is so much better.
please add this option to the mac version somewhere!
June 22nd, 2007 at 7:16 am
[...] example, yesterday evening, Dave Hyatt announced the addition of keyboard and mouse shortcuts for the Windows version of Safari, available only on the nightly builds of the browser, not yet [...]
June 22nd, 2007 at 1:12 pm
JamesH:
Control-mousewheel already has a meaning on the mac: full screen zoom. If you turn on Zoom in Universal Access, control-mousewheel zooms and out on the entire display. I use it pretty often, for a variety of purposes from enlarging Web video that has no full screen button (like CNN), or presenting to someone across the room when I want to zero in on one thing. It’s a cool feature.
June 22nd, 2007 at 1:47 pm
alexander, are you a windowed plug-in or a windowless plug-in?
June 22nd, 2007 at 2:28 pm
It’s a windowed plug-in. You can download it from:
http://misc.xstandard.com/apple/NPXStandard.dll
Test page that loads the plug-in is here:
http://misc.xstandard.com/apple/test.asp
The plug-in is a WYSIWYG editor and the keyboard shortcuts such as the ones I mentioned in the previous post are going to be used often by our users.
June 22nd, 2007 at 2:46 pm
I’m not sure why we would be stopping key events from getting to your window. They should just go right to your HWND. Could you file a bug at http://bugs.webkit.org/ please? Thanks!
June 22nd, 2007 at 3:25 pm
Filed as Bug 14317. Thanks.
June 22nd, 2007 at 4:45 pm
Glad this backspace issue did never bite me on the Mac. Kudos to the Safari/WebKit team for a decent implementation of an odd behavior. PC browsers are not always kind enough to detect that I am currently in a text field.
June 22nd, 2007 at 5:52 pm
[...] example, yesterday evening, Dave Hyatt announced the addition of keyboard and mouse shortcuts for the Windows version of Safari, available only on the nightly builds of the browser, not yet [...]
June 23rd, 2007 at 8:28 am
[...] Apple está atenta para as sugestões e críticas dos usuários do Safari para Windows e os últimos builds de [...]
June 23rd, 2007 at 5:52 pm
We need a right click Select All option as there is in FF
June 23rd, 2007 at 10:35 pm
A GUI that behaves (an to a certain extent, looks) the way people using an Operating system is extremely important. It’s the same reason Apple pushes design guidelines so much to ensure apps for Mac look like apps for Mac.
As such, i think shortcuts and correct (native-system) window behaviour are very important.
As a compromise — how about a preference setting to allow Windows-like functionality:
[x] Use Windows-like keyboard shortcuts
From ‘future list’ above:
(1) Ctrl+Enter www/com completion for the URL bar.
>> please bear in mind that the US is not the entire world, and that other domain suffixes exists (.co.nz, etc not to mention .net). I can’t see the benefit of this shortcut personally.
(3) Ctrl+Tab / Ctrl+Shift+Tab to switch between tabs.
>> Extremely important. Sorry to say guys — but the mac shortcuts are horrible to change tabs.
(5) The ability to resize the window from any edge (and to respect all taskbar functionality).
>> You need to be able to minimise a window like any other native Windows application. And that means honouring taskbar minimize/maximise, Windows-M to minimise all windows (Safari lingers around); and the Alt-Space, then “n” does not minimise.
June 24th, 2007 at 8:11 am
If we’re going to moan about shortcuts, I would like to say that I use Cmd-[ and Cmd-] as my previous and next tab shortcuts. I do this with the “Keyboard & Mouse” system preferences pane, which allows you to configure any command key menu item you like. You can easily set yours to Ctrl-Tab and Shift-Ctrl-Tab if you like.
June 25th, 2007 at 8:16 pm
If you could plumb Ctrl+F5 for a forced reload on the win32 builds that would be groovy.
June 26th, 2007 at 11:32 am
@ahruman: I agree with mat79, it would be useful to be able to force the .com in the address bar so I can bypass any sort of autocorrection or errors that I would get otherwise. As well, Control - Tab would be a much more useful tab switching shortcut than what we have now, as others have said.
June 28th, 2007 at 11:16 am
Before we worry about scrollwheel modifier keys, it would be nice if scrollwheel support WORKED properly. Safari 3.0.2 scrollwheel (touchpoint scroll) does not work on my Thinkpad T60p using Vista. Works fine in IE, Firefox, and every other app.
The taskbar behavior is still broken. Clicking the taskbar icon should toggle between “active, focused” and “minimized”. If you click the taskbar button for safari windows, they will not minimize.
It would also be nice if you could use the native font rendering, because the safari/apple font rendering is blurry and hard to read.
July 9th, 2007 at 5:31 am
HTML ate my text. I meant the Cmd - Number keyboard shortcuts. For example, Cmd-1 will load the first bookmark in the bookmarks bar.
July 15th, 2007 at 9:39 am
You can switch between tabs in Safari on Windows in a similar manner that you do on the Mac. On Windows the key-combo is “CTRL+SHIFT+[" and/or "CTRL+SHIFT+]“. And it is logically set up that “[" is jumping to the left one tab, and "]” goes one to the right on the tab bar.
July 15th, 2007 at 9:41 am
Oh, I forgot one thing - something I would like to see returned in the PC version of Safari, “Drag-and-drop” of tabs to the bookmark bar (or desktop - to create a link on the desktop to the site). I like being able to drag a tab to a bookmarks bar folder (you can make a folder there in the bookmarks manager and essentially have a drop-down menu (or several if you want) on the bar - I find that handy for keeping things organized and still very close at hand) and dropping it in the folder/position I want it to be in. I don’t like that I can’t do this in the PC version. At least I can rearrange tabs still…
August 18th, 2007 at 2:28 pm
@WeyrleaderZ: ][ are not where you would expect on all keyboard layout's, to get to them i have to press ALT-GR+9 ALT-GR+8 or ctrl+alt+9 ctrl+alt+8 witch would make the ctrl+shift+] ctrl+shift+[ imposible (ind denmark we have å instead of your [ and ¨ inplace of ], and no ctrl+shift+alt-gr+8 or ctrl+alt+shift+8 dosn’t registre the same
December 18th, 2007 at 9:46 am
What keys do you use on a Windows PC to select multiple items from a listbox?
For example, Mozilla use’s Control Up/Down arrow keys to move between items and Control + Spacebar to toggle the selection on/off. IE uses Shift+F8, Up/Down Arrow keys, then Control + Spacebar to toggle selection.
I’m running Safari v3.0.4 on XP.