When do you think safari will support gmail chat?

[spaceballl]

Anyone know if the newest version of webkit has this working? When do you think it will come to safari

Kevin

 

[janey]

that's up to the google people, not the safari people. go bug the google people over it, although support is highly dependent on how much time the google devs are willing to spend tweaking the code to make it work on safari.

 

[spaceballl]

are you sure? even when i set the safari user agent to a different browser, gmail chat still doesn't work.

 

[mkrishnan]

are you sure? even when i set the safari user agent to a different browser, gmail chat still doesn't work.

I don't want to speak for Janey... But I think she means that Safari already supports the standards correctly... (i.e. it validates) and so the problem is with the way Google coded the page, and not with the way Safari is interpreting it.... Whatever Google did to get it to work on browsers that don't support the standards, they made it not work on Safari...

But FWIW, why not just add Google Talk as a Jabber account on whatever IM software you use (AFAIK, Proteus, Adium, and iChat can all do this).

 

[spaceballl]

But FWIW, why not just add Google Talk as a Jabber account on whatever IM software you use (AFAIK, Proteus, Adium, and iChat can all do this).

haha i was just looking for reasons not to use firefox, but it looks like i'm sticking with it

 

[mkrishnan]

haha i was just looking for reasons not to use firefox, but it looks like i'm sticking with it

I just went back to Firefox temporarily, because right now, for whatever reason, I'm experiencing memory leaks or slow downs and other system ugliness as a result of Safari. With Safari open, right now, everything kind of gradually slows down, and unless I keep resetting Safari every few days, it gets out of hand. For whatever reason, running Firefox resolves this. And then later, the issue goes away, and I go happily back to Safari.... I don't get it.

So in other words, if my spelling on MR deteriorates, it's because of Firefox!

 

[janey]

I mean that Gmail uses ajax (that fancy schmancy group of technologies - xhtml, javascript, xmlhttprequest...- that lets you incrementally update the page) for everything they do, and despite there being standards, there are certain things that are not cross-browser compatible. Same goes to most of the web 2.0/ajax web applications out there that aren't compatible with safari. changing the user agent isn't going to do anything because safari is not going to render the page the same way as firefox or internet explorer regardless of whether or not safari pretends that it's MSIE or firefox which is all changing the user agent does (which might get you past lame javascripts and pages telling you that it's in your best interest to use MSIE6...but not for this)

so in essence it takes them more effort to work on a safari-compatible version of gmail chat because the code that works on IE doesn't work on Firefox, and when you get it to run on Firefox, you discover that it also doesn't run on Opera and Safari, etc., which just means more work to get the stupid thing working on all browsers correctly because what works in one (like back-button functionality) is broken in another. Let's not forget browsers that can't handle it at all, then you have to worry about making it degrade nicely and telling the user to go stuff it because you're not going to support x browser for the time being..

btw, i dont think ANY browser supports all standards correctly Especially not CSS, which is why I hate it so much Safari's better than most browsers when it comes to the Acid2 test, but that doesn't mean crap if everyone else (read: firefox, msie, opera, ...basically you have 98% of all people using browsers right there) doesn't follow the standards as well. I'm sure the people over at w3c know that very, very well

 

[lethe]

it's working now!