• Certificates that enable wifi at work were not migrated
• Safari 4 was not migrated (I was left with Safari 3.2.1 on the new box)

I only realized the latter when I noticed that some SMIL animation had stopped working in Safari

These are things that I just can’t seem to get used to, things that I miss when going from Windows to Mac OS X. In other words, stuff that Mac OS X developers should seriously consider changing/adding to their OS.

• The mouse acceleration curve. After years of working in Windows and Linux (Mandriva/SUSE/Ubuntu), this is by far the hardest one to deal with. I’m trying out iMouseFix for now, but things still seem a little “off” somehow.
• Resizing windows only on one corner (Thanks to Steve for this link).
• Easy keyboard access to the menu – this is probably just something that I missed in my scanning for Mac OS X keyboard shortcuts. I really miss the Alt key usefulness in Windows. [Update: As mentioned below, ctrl-f2 works, but it is far worse than a simple alt keypress]
• Related to the above, Menus and Title Bars not attached to the window in question. I hate having to move my focus and mouse to a different region of the screen to do something related to the window in focus. Yeah, I know this is a contentious one, and possibly it’s just something I need to get used to – but an option for Windows users trying to get used to Mac OS X would be great. [Update: To those below who claim that ONE menubar is a better idea, why is it better for the menubar to be detached from the window you're using, but not its toolbars?]
• I miss being able to copy and paste a file path from Windows Explorer into a File Open dialog in any application. Why doesn’t Finder include this very obvious thing that I can at least drag to the toolbar during customization?
• Dragging a file from Finder into TextEdit does not open the file, it puts in a file link. Is there a way for TextEdit to automatically open any file I drop into it? Barring that, what’s the easiest way to bring up arbitrary files into a text editor? I miss my TextPad right-click option…
• System clock does not visibly show me the date information, I am forced to click [Update: David posted a tip below to fix this, though I've found the it buggy: you must not be in a "Custom" region and you must use the "Medium" time format and you must paste your date _AFTER_ the time]
• You cannot selectively delete items out of the Trash. This seems ridiculous to me. If a file has been in my Trash for a month, I can be pretty sure that I don’t need it anymore, but the same is not true of a file that I’ve just deleted. Yes, I can move files out of Trash, then Empty, then items back. Or I can install little apps to do that for me. But once again, OS X has made more work for me where Windows did not.

Since I’ve never used the KeyNote app in MacOS, or even Google Presentations, someone will have to give me the skinny on how this stacks up. But it looks nice! Even in Firefox 2 on my 8-year-old Ubuntu machine, the performance is acceptable. I should try it on my Macbook Pro. Check it out.

• 2008-04-29 – CSS Reflections
• 2008-04-24 – CSS Masks
• 2008-04-17 – CSS Canvas Drawing
• 2008-04-14 – CSS Gradients
• 2008-04-08? – CSS Transitions
• 2007-10-31 – CSS Animation (spec proposal)
• 2007-10-26 – CSS Transforms (spec proposal)
• 2006-12-21 – Text Fill and Stroke
• 2004? – HTML Canvas – thankfully this was quickly reviewed and thrown into HTML5 so that Opera and Mozilla could get into the act
• Others -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing, -webkit-border-vertical-spacing, -webkit-margin-bottom-collapse, -webkit-margin-collapse, -webkit-margin-start, -webkit-margin-top-collapse, -webkit-padding-start, background-position-x, background-position-y, -webkit-tap-highlight-color (iPhone only), -webkit-text-security, -webkit-text-size-adjust (iPhone only), -webkit-line-break, -webkit-nbsp-mode, -webkit-rtl-ordering, -webkit-user-drag, -webkit-user-modify, -webkit-user-select, -webkit-dashboard-region (Dashboard only)

Is this a problem?

What’s troubling me is not that many of these inventions could have been done using SVG (which WebKit now supports quite nicely). I understand that XML is not for everyone and that a few CSS properties are easier to pick up to do what you want.

No, what troubles me is that a few of these innovations are not yet proposed as formal specifications so that they can be interoperably implemented in other browsers (Firefox, Opera). [Update: Correction - as Mark points out below, several of these have indeed been proposed as formal specifications - Bravo!] The point of the WHATWG effort was both to evolve HTML and to specify it in sufficient detail so that future browser vendors would not have to reverse engineer de facto browser behavior. Will the WHATWG eventually have to churn out CSS5?!?

On the other hand…

… Apple has a perfect right to introduce WebKit-specific CSS properties. WebKit is more than just a single web browser. WebKit is a platform and Apple obviously wants to put as many cool web development tools into the hands of its developers as possible. They’re already doing a good job at meeting existing open web standards – why not innovate on the side? Also, using CSS ensures that things can degrade gracefully, so you can’t quite fault Apple for ‘anti-competitve behavior’ like you could Microsoft and Netscape’s efforts during the First Browser War.

Unfortunately…

Unfortunately these inventions might have the same secondary effect: Forcing the other browser vendors to spend resources on reverse-engineering efforts in order to remain competitive. This could realistically happen before Apple gets a chance to propose these things formally to the W3C. [Update: See Mark's comment below]. It is much more likely to happen if WebKit were to become the dominant force on the open web.

WebKit is not yet the dominant web browser technology, but it’s fast on the rise. From all accounts, it is much easier to pick up and hack on than the Mozilla codebase. Let’s take a look at where it is being used:

• MacOS Dashboard
• Safari on MacOS
• Safari on iPhone
• Google’s Android
• Adobe’s Integrated Runtime (AIR)
• Qt 4.4+
• Nokia S60 Browser

I’m sure readers can help me add to the above list too. I believe there is a plan for WebKit to ultimately take over Konqueror’s KHTML guts one day too, isn’t there? Ironic since WebKit evolved from KHTML in the first place.

So when will it be a problem?

Are we seeing any signs of a trend towards a WebKit-dominated web yet? There are already iPhone-specific websites. How long before Opera Mobile and Mozilla Minimo want to get in on that action and are forced to reverse-engineer? And I’m sorry, but looking at the source is not an acceptable alternative to a well-defined specification.

A tentative conclusion

After typing up this entry and proof-reading it, I tried to discern if I had any coherent conclusion and if I could figure out just what the heck I was saying:

• Apple is not in the wrong for introducing WebKit-specific CSS properties, I think they learned their lesson from the HTML Canvas experience.
• You also cannot fault Apple for its adherence to web standards. They are definitely doing their job here
• It seems like they plan to propose these things as standards eventually, which is also a good thing.
• I guess the only thing I can say is that I hope these proposals happen sooner rather than later, for the other browsers’ sake. [Update: As mentioned below, Apple has already proposed many of these things to the W3C as specifications, thereby alleviating most of my concern]. Apple should take a page from what happened to DOM Events: The fact that Netscape and Microsoft had two different event models resulted in the W3C proposing yet a third incompatible Event Model, which Microsoft still has not implemented eight years later. Those type of things just hurt web developers in the end.