Please. Fix. That.

Mobile Safari and the auto-opening bookmarks menu

Update: Fixed in iOS 7.

If you use Mobile Safari a lot on your iPhone or iPod touch, you may have experienced this one.

After closing all of your open sites, Mobile Safari leaves you with a blank, "Untitled" view. Now, click the home button to leave Safari. Now, relaunch Safari. Instead of just displaying that same "Untitled" view, it loads up your list of bookmarks. Now, that might be helpful to someone, but for me, I always end up tapping the "Done" button to dismiss my bookmarks, because inevitably, I already have a site or web search in mind, and it isn't in my bookmarks. Rather than tap the "Done" button every time this happens, I'd rather tap the bookmarks button on the off-chance that I do want to use my bookmarks.

Perhaps another way to fix this is to have the bookmarks display, but show not completely hide the address and search field. That might be a little too cluttered, though. Suppressing the bookmarks list is probably the better approach. It's notable that this is not the behavior for Safari for iPad, which behaves and looks more like Safari on a Mac.

If you too are annoyed by this, I do have one workaround to share for this. You can create a home screen icon for the address "about:blank" (just type that into the address bar, then use the middle toolbar button at the bottom of the screen to create a home screen icon for it). This icon will cause Safari to always launch and display a blank page.

 

Safari's broken cookie table

Update: Fixed, I guess? Safari 5.1 greatly simplified this view. It no longer shows detailed cookie data. This table simply lists the domains and the fact that cookies exist. If you remove cookies for that domain, you are removing all of them; you can't delete individual name/value pair. But, the design problem has been addressed, and this information is accessible in the Safari Web Inspector.

Safari (5.0.3 currently) is my preferred browser, but I loathe the interface for managing cookies. I hope you have a wide display so you can see the contents of the entire cookie value. Maybe you can use this as an excuse to get that 30" monitor.

Lots of issues here:

• There's no way to copy the value of a cookie to the clipboard.
• You can't even see the entire cookie value in some cases.
• Some cookies will expire when the browser is closed (a session cookie) and this list doesn't indicate that.
• There's no way to restrict the search field to only search the domain, path, cookie name or cookie value field.

Firefox (3.6.10 at the time of this writing) gets most of these issues right, except that really long cookie values are cut off (however, you can highlight the it to copy it to the clipboard and see the entire string that way).

Chrome (version 10, sorry... 11, now — I'm on the dev channel for Chrome) has a web-based UI for preferences, and the cookie management view is a little odd: if you have lots of cookies — and who doesn't — you select one to view, then scroll waaaay down the page to view the detail for it. But, it does let you see the whole cookie value there, and that value can be copied if you want it.

 

There is a workaround for some of the Safari issues. If you've enabled Safari's "Develop" menu (which you can turn on from the "Advanced" tab of Safari's preferences), you can view the Web Inspector, which opens up a pane at the bottom of Safari that shows lots of things about the site you're on. One of the tabs in that panel is labeled "Storage". Within that, you'll be able to inspect the cookies that are active for that specific web page and domain you're visiting. This view still suffers from the problem of trying to show the cookie value within a column, but each value can be selected and copied to the clipboard. It also tells you if the cookie will expire with the session (meaning, when the browser is closed). I just wish these improvements were available in the other view of cookies, and thus accessible to all without having to enable a developer feature. Granted, most users do not need to delve into their bag of browser cookies, but you must admit that the existing dialog is pretty poorly designed.