You’re an Apple Safari browser user. After upgrading to OS X 10.4.8, you are unable to upload files to 37signals’s Basecamp via that application’s easy, web-based uploading tools. Or you are unable to upload your logo to Boxes & Arrows’s events listing. Or you are stymied in your efforts to upload your photos to JPG Mag.
The fault lies not with Basecamp or Boxes & Arrows or JPG. Nor is it strictly because you’re using an Intel Mac. Camino, Firefox, and Opera still let you upload images over http. The problem is Safari. But not every Intel-Mac-wielding Safari user suffers from it. Many continue to upload files after upgrading to 10.4.8. They glance pityingly at you out their passenger windows as they speed past.
What is the problem? You’re a web designer. As a web designer, you’ve used a third-party product like Safari Enhancer to disable caching in your browser.
If you don’t disable caching in your browser, then Safari becomes kind of useless to you as a web development tool, because Safari hangs onto files like a junkyard dog clomps onto a postman’s thigh. Safari will hold onto outdated CSS, outdated text, outdated images. You’ll quit and restart. You’ll check your SFTP settings repeatedly, wondering why you keep uploading updated content to your web project, but Safari keeps showing you outdated content.
Safari shows outdated content for hours after other browsers (even browsers with caching enabled) have recognized that something changed. Safari does this because it makes browsing faster for ordinary users who are not web designers. It works. Unfortunately, what makes Safari fast and fun for ordinary users makes it a pain for web designers—unless they disable caching.
Before 10.4.8, you could disable caching in Safari and still upload files over http. After 10.4.8, you can’t. It’s not a feature, it’s a bug. Until Apple fixes it, you can leave caching disabled in Safari and use Firefox, Camino, or Opera as your default browser—or re-enable caching, and add an hour of Stupid Time to your web development and testing process.
[tags]web design, apple, mac, os x, safari, browsers, web development[/tags]
