This was included in WebKit builds beginning several years ago, apparently, but is something I recently stumbled upon. Historically, Safari has been pretty insistent on making sure web page form fields (like drop-down menus and buttons) retain the Aqua look-and-feel. Web designers, on the other hand, have gotten used to choosing colors and font sizes for those controls, so they fit in with their site's design.
Hopefully everyone can now be happy: Safari 3 allows web designers to style form controls with CSS. The results are pictured: instead of a glossy, Aqua-like control, Safari displays a matte-finish control in the color and size of your choosing. You can even apply background images to form controls. If you don't apply styles to your controls, then Safari retains the Aqua look.
This shouldn't require any changes to code that's already written for other browsers: Safari 3 should pick right up on the formatting, and display it as the designer intended. It does, however, open up WebKit-specific CSS to your form controls.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
5-08-2008 @ 12:49PM
steve said...
Safari can do that since 3.0 in October 2007 ;-)
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5-08-2008 @ 12:53PM
Robert Palmer said...
I figured it wasn't something totally brand new, but found very little documentation about it online. Thought it could help someone searching in the future (as I was, a month or so ago).
5-08-2008 @ 12:50PM
Fritz Laurel said...
Two words: simply irresistible.
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5-08-2008 @ 12:54PM
Robert Palmer said...
That's what this thread is for: http://www.tuaw.com/2008/05/06/youre-gonna-have-to-face-it/
Get it alllll out of your system. :)
5-08-2008 @ 4:49PM
Fritz Laurel said...
"Have mercy!"
Sorry, I have a "hard head." I know, I know, it's "disturbing behavior." "Your mother should have told you" "it could happen to you." "I didn't mean to turn you on."
"Keep in touch"
p.s. I was going to reply in the other thread, but I thought those 2 words fit better here. Thanks for letting me do this. Okay, I'm done now. :D
5-08-2008 @ 12:58PM
Micheal J. said...
A good example of this when Safari 3.0 came out was that buttons on Flickr (for posting a comment and such) appeared the same as they would in Firefox instead of the Aqua style button.
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5-08-2008 @ 1:19PM
Bender Bending Rodriguez said...
@ Robert Palmer,
If you want to keep up to date on the changes made to WebKit you can checkout their blog. Lots of goodies coming soon to Safari.
• http://webkit.org/blog/
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5-08-2008 @ 2:07PM
Hawkman said...
Have actually been considering repressing this with a user stylesheet. It seems like a great idea, until you discover that 90% of the designers who use this have atrocious taste... :)
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5-08-2008 @ 3:29PM
Reefdog said...
Agreed. So much. Nonstandard form controls bother the tar out of me. Of course, if I used IE, I probably wouldn't mind...
5-08-2008 @ 3:57PM
Joshua Ochs said...
Amen. I have friends who run a professional web design company (who do quite excellent, tasteful work actually), and when they complained about Safari's using native controls, I looked at them like they were from Mars. They want everything on the page to look like their design; I want my browser to look like it's part of my computer and OS.
5-08-2008 @ 4:16PM
Rhywun said...
This is another reason - among many others - I think the web is an awful application platform, and trying to turn it into one has been a huge mistake. It's hard enough to get people to figure out how to use your software when one button looks like every other button. Now you have to teach people how to recognize *what's* a button on top of how to actually use your application. The only explanation I can come up with for this situation is that designers must get a sadistic glee watching their testers click on random bits of the page trying to figure out how to use it.
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5-08-2008 @ 11:55PM
smoke_tetsu said...
Personally, I find those styled controls in the latest versions of safari to be ugly.. especially since they aren't even smooth. I wish Apple hadn't done that.
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