browser

A few months ago, I switched to Safari after having used Google Chrome exclusively for the past four years (before that it was a mix of Safari and FireFox). Safari is lean and fast, but the one thing that really bothered me was the fact that I would often try searching for something by entering keywords in the location/address bar, then hit enter, and nothing would happen.

I quickly realized that if I did this and nothing happened, I could jump back into the location bar (⌘-L), press the left arrow key to get my cursor in the beginning of the string, then hit space and enter to perform the search.

Until today, I've begrudgingly used that workaround. But then I was checking Safari's preferences to see if I might be missing something obvious, when I decided to uncheck some options and see if it made a difference. And it did!

Or... "Best Practices of In-App Web Browsers"

Being the usability nut that I am, I have decided that my goal of making a perfect in-app browser for various iPhone apps is an impossible task. But, judging from what I've been able to do so far, and from many different Web View examples I've seen from around the web, there are some basics that every in-app browser should get right.

I'll start by showing the in-app browser in two very well-known iPhone apps: Facebook and Twitter.

Facebook's Browser

Twitter's Browser

Fundamentally, and functionally, these two in-app browsers are the same. And, after looking at maybe a few hundred other browsers, It seems like the list of essential features of a usable in-app browser are:

For some users, being able to tab through all clickable elements on a page is a blessing. For most, though, it's a curse (at least, in my experience). The default behavior of a browser should be to allow users to tab through form elements only (textfields, textareas, search forms, submit buttons, etc.).

For some time now, Google Chrome has only allowed users to tab through every. Single. Element. on the entire page. Luckily, there's a new setting that popped up in the 'Under the Hood' settings recently that allows a user to turn off this insane behavior.

In Chrome, select Preferences, then click on 'Under the Hood.' Go down to 'Web Content' and uncheck the checkbox next to "Pressing Tab on a webpage highlights links, as well as form fields."

Voila! Problem solved - now I can substitute Chrome for Safari much more readily. That and being able to read PDFs in-browser...