Upgrading Safari on the Mac - Apple Aesthetics collide with Usability
September 6th, 2007 by Michael PetrovThe FMWebschool team has a number of Apple desktops inhouse in order for us to test our software and plugins on all platforms. As part of our regular scheduled maintenance procedures we decided to update all the Macs to use the latest versions of OSX Tiger and get the much anticipated Safari v3 beta installed.
The OSX Tiger update went very smoothly, just as you would expect from such a mature product, however when time came to upgrade Safari it was a whole different story…
We started by excitedly downloading and opening up the Safari 3 package, clicking next a few times, thoroughly reading the license agreement, and clicking agree - absolutely nothing out of the ordinary. Then the familiar “Select your Installation Volume” screen comes up - just the usual click on our only volume and the Next button should lit up. However this time as my mouse instinctively gyrated towards the Next button something was different - I could not click on the Next button. Jerked out of the installation trance that we are all familiar with I examined my screen further seeing the selected volume marked with a red exclamation mark and a message of:
“You cannot install Safari 3 Beta on this volume. This volume does not meet the requirements for this update.”
Double checking the free space and seeing gigabytes available I immediately dismissed it as the problem, then I tried closing all instances of Safari thinking that it might be causing the causing the conflict - nope, the problem still there! The installer log was not helpful either, everything looks successful and we are still faced with a cryptic message about the requirements not being met. After triple checking the Safari site and making sure we fully updated to OSX 10.4.10 we are all stunned by the situation. It’s time to turn to Google with the hope of finding someone else who had this problem - sure enough a number of results come up with bickering about PPC vs Intel as a potential issue and an old version of Safari - with none of the potential solutions applying to us we continue looking. Further down the results there are a number of hits from the Apple Support Discussion Forums which match the general ambiguous symptoms of our issue. After looking at a number of posts there and doing some internal searches for other posts a single possible solution emerges:
“Safari v2 has to be in the Applications folder for the installation to continue.”
As I was just running Safari a minute ago I was thinking that is truly unlikely - after all the software has been running just fine and should be in its default location. Going back into the Finder to verify just for sure, I am very surprised to find that Safari is indeed not in the Applications folder - slightly bizzare, but I investigate further by searching for it - finding it accidentally moved into a subfolder within Applications. As an attempt to fix everything up, I move it back to the Applications folder and completely restart the Safari v3 installer. This time the installation continues without any problem and we get everything up to speed on our systems. However the moral of the story and why I wanted to point this incident out is:
Software companies often take shortcuts to meet deadlines or simply to complete some task before lunch time, and leave ambiguity such as this in their installers - it would not have been hard or time consuming to change the error to “Previous Safari installation not found, please verify its integrity” which would point most people in the right direction, instead we had to scour multiple sites to find a solution for a problem which obviously affected a number of users.
We have also been guilty of this at times with our documentation and error handling in some products - cases that seem too remote to ever happen get overlooked or just get a generic error message with a line or section reference. However we recognize this and try to improve all our products by introducing more documentation and context sensitive help (FMStudio users might have noticed a link to troubleshooting connections in the connection dialog which takes you to this reference article, after which the number of emails about connection errors dropped dramatically!). We hope that if you are a software developer that you do take the extra 5% of time that is required for a regular project and invest it in debugging and good error reporting - it will rapidly pay off through users that are happy, productive, and do not call you as often for support - instead they call to buy more of your great reliable products.
September 7th, 2007 at 9:24 pm
This is why it’s still in beta
September 9th, 2007 at 11:24 am
Beta is not an excuse in this case - after all the Apple standard installer is certainly not in beta and I am sure Safari is not the first product that depends on an older version to be installed. Therefore the engineers not putting enough time in the installer are actually stopping people from working with their beta and finding the bugs within the core software.
September 9th, 2007 at 2:16 pm
Actually, I would imagine that Safari and iLife are using modified versions of the installer because they both are packages that require that the original application be in the /Applications/ folder and so what they are using are different from what most other applications have. They probably just never bothered to include a specific message for your specific issue; I ran into this problem with iLife in the past.
September 16th, 2007 at 11:51 am
It has always been the case with OS X that if you move Apple’s own applications from their default locations Apple’s updaters will not work. It is one of the more irritating offshoots of Apple’s control obsession.