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Safari Extensions: Off to a Bad Start (For Me at Least)

I’m a heavy Safari user. When I heard that Apple was going to try its hand at the extensions game, I got excited, especially with the knowledge that they would be built entirely using web standards (HTML, CSS and JavaScript). Some early extensions could be found before the official launch of the Safari Extensions Gallery, and some of them were pretty impressive (Ostrich, FullScreenYouTube).

This morning, Apple launched the gallery (along with Safari 5.0.1), with big names making the featured list: Twitter, The New York Times, Amazon, among a few others. I installed ‘Twitter for Safari’ and ‘New York Times Updates’ right away, and immediately slumped over in disbelief: both extensions added an entire toolbar to the browser. I hate toolbars; they are synonymous with clutter, and I’m not a fan of clutter either. Instead of simply adding a button some where which, when clicked, brings up the extensions interface in a floating window, these two Internet giants chose this route. And Twitter doing something like this is beyond me — I’ve always regarded them as aesthetes.

There are plenty of people who will not mind the toolbars. But I’m not one of them, and there are certainly many others. Search terms entered in the Twitter extension bring up a neat little sidebar displaying the results, and that’s exactly the type of interface the entire app should live in. Amazon made the right choice with their ‘Add to Amazon Wish List’ extension (a button), and many more did as well. But as long as the apps I really want to use exist in their current state, I won’t be using them.