We hear you, loud and clear. Lots of Mac users want Safari. Heck, my wife does! So, why aren't we supporting it?

Well, sorry to say, there are some bugs in Safari's text editing support. If you're interested in the technical details, here's an example.

On the editor page, we have some toolbars. When you click on the buttons in the toolbar, you want it to change whatever text is selected. But, in Safari, unlike all the other browsers, when you click on that button, it drops the selection in the page before giving control to us. So, there's nothing to change, and all the buttons don't work. This is bug #1.

OK, we can deal with this. We can watch the mouse, and when the mouse moves right over a button, we can grab the selection before you click, and then restore it later. That almost works, but we then hit bug #2: Safari incorrectly reports what the selection is if it's been made by double clicking. If I select the first word of the sentence "Thanks a lot" by dragging, Safari tells me the selection starts at position 0, and goes to position 6, which is OK. But, if I double click, say, right on the 'a' in 'Thanks', Safari tells me that the selection starts and ends at position 3, even though it also tells me the text of the selection is "Thanks". So when I go to restore the selection, it's wrong, and it still doesn't work, only sometimes instead of always.

I don't know how to solve this. I can play some games with collapsing the selection to an endpoint, and moving it around, but they're complicated and they might not work in all cases. I'm asking Apple for help. If anyone reading this has a suggestion, I'd be glad to hear it - you can reply here, or in the feedback form on the Writely site.

So, that's why we're not on Safari yet. It's a nice browser in some ways, but it's missing important stuff that's going to take time to work around. We're trying, and I'm sure we'll get there, but it might take a little while.