Please file this entry under “innocent kavetching”:
On the Media Temple’s site, they have a page with 10 Reasons to switch to their service. Here’s #8:
World’s greatest designers.
The world’s hottest, most talented designers have trusted (mt) for years to serve their digital creations. Being the most critical demographic on the Internet, we believe this has strong merit.
Sounds pretty cool. I bet 90% of those designers are on a mac. extra cool. I bet out of that 90%, that 70% of those people use Safari as their primary browser (maybe more).
I click on over to the details page for their new Grid server to read:
AJAX Webmail
Check your messages more than 10 times a day? Want to access all your messages from anywhere? Get attached to a webmail solution that loves email as much as you do. Manage all your email in one place with the sexiest looking webmail client you’ve ever seen! Just like your favorite email program, you can drag and drop messages, manage your appointments, create to do lists and much more!
That’s great! So I set up Apple Mail to use IMAP, cuz that’s how I roll. I even got IMAP to save drafts and sent mail, courtesy of a tutorial from One Digital Life (thank Paul!). To make sure my drafts and sent mail were being synced with my web mail I logged on to Media Temple’s wicked “AJAX Webmail”. They give you 4 options:
- simple (any browser)
- simple (ajax)
- Advanced (IE6+)
- Advanced (mozilla)
I chose simple(ajax), with no success. Both ‘Advanced’ options, didn’t work either. The only option I could actually get to work properly was the simple (any browser) option and even that one has quirks (it was telling me I had 30 or so emails in my drafts folder from 1969. when I tried to delete them, they wouldn’t die).
So… I called up tech support to ask what the deal was. They promptly told me that Safari isn’t a supported browser for email and if I wanted the full monty I’d have to use Firefox. I fired up, er, um, Firefox and checked my webmail. And I gotta say, Media Temple’s webmail is one dope looking application. It beats the pants off of GMail, Yahoo etc… maybe not the new .mac ui, but it’s pretty cool. But I’m just a little ticked that Safari isn’t supported, the tech further gave me some schpiel about how he read that Apple was going to discontinue Safari development cuz it’s a buggy, terrible browser. Oh sure! I believe that one.
I’m not trying to knock Media Temple here, their hosting is great, their tech staff is helpful, immediate and even funny and even their simple version of webmail whips the pants off Dreamhost’s squirrel mail, but there seems to be something not quite right, when a major feature is touted and it doesn’t support a large swath of the people paying for the service. It’s always the details that people remember. It may seem like some little nothing, but being a new customer and having this kind of annoyance makes a definite impression.
What do other Media Temple / Mac OS X / Safari users have to say? am i just getting old and cratchety?
One Comment
I was a bit annoyed by this as well – and quite shocked when I first jumped on to check it out! For the most part, Safari’s support of Javascript is weak compared to Firefox; but it is in no way a buggy browser, and supports some expert level features (cough, CSS 3 drop shadows and multiple background images) – it’s not going anywhere. Especially since it’s using webkit, as does Adobe’s most recent Apollo.
Media Temple does seem to serve the design community, and their design work looks solid – but they code on the poor side, and I’m sure that has something to do with it. Right now their main page has spacer gifs on a table layout without alt information! That’s web development avoidance in the top 5 atleast now adays. They call their flash using the invalid old school method – when we’ve been using http://blog.deconcept.com/swfobject/ for years in this industry. If you can’t code html with a decent grasp on semantics/tableless, or for the basics atleast valid, you can’t expect to dish out decent javascript on a weak foundation. So I say it fails in Safari because they code poorly; wether they lose the ego and admit it or come to terms with the problem.
One Trackback
[...] The app is beautifully designed and simple as can be. At first it seems like the best solution, but as I started adding things like Airline dates and such, using this app quickly became a nightmare. I’m sure most of the problems I encountered are because I’m using the (outdated, almost pre-historic and certainly on it’s last legs) Safari. In a calendar app, 90% of your time is spent in the “event details” HUD, adding dates, times, notifications, meta data etc… This is where the meat of the app is. And it’s for this very reason that Google Calendar was giving me such a headache: [...]