I've held back on posting this for a few weeks as I always thought that Apple would resolve the iPhone's software problems. One of the most compelling iPhone features, for me, is Safari. Being able to read web sites while I'm out and about is a key element of the iPhone experience for me. However, Safari is broken.

Firstly, I'm still suffering some serious stability issues. As an example (and this is not a one-off scenario) I was reading a story at www.theage.com.au. Safari crashed three times. This happens to me several times per day. The sooner an alternate browser is developed and released the better although there's little chance of Apple allowing that.

Secondly, I think that Safari's design is seriously borked. Why doesn't it cache pages so that hitting the back button a few seconds after clicking a link doesn't require that the entire page is completely reloaded? Surely, it would have been easy (after all, we're told that the iPhone is running good ol' OS X) to have retained Safari's caching functions. This design flaw means that the amount of data being transferred to the iPhone via your carrier is being increased unnecessarily. The lack of caching also means that oft used images, like banner images that appear on every page in a single site, are re-downloaded every single time you move to a new page within a site. It's almost like Apple is programmatically increasing the amount of data we use for the benefit of the carriers.

I guess that I could do a factory reset of my iPhone to see if that resolves the Safari stability problems I'm seeing but a troll through various user forums suggests that I'm not Robinson Crusoe so there's no guarantee that a reset would fix things. Besides, I'm a busy person and the iPhone is meant to "just work". Isn't that the "Apple Way"?

So, Mr Apple - please fix Safari. Get it stable and sort out this dumb caching behaviour. Having to reload a page I was at just a few seconds ago over a slower connection is driving me bananas.

One more thing: Please let me access the iTunes Store over 3G. Limiting me to WiFi while I'm travelling is just cruel.

 iPhone • iPhone instability • iPhone Safari