Zooming Safari interferes with EN

[msadesign 1]

I'm having several issues with EN. Three are related to zooming the screen (Safari 7.0.3, OS 10.9.2). There are four issues:

 

Plug-In Causes Delay

1. If the EN plug-in is active, and if several tabs are open, after closing a tab there is a noticeable delay waiting for the next tab to appear (I've tested this widely with Safari on several machines);

 

Zooming Screen Interferes with EN

2. If the EN plug-in is activated (in pref/ext) after a series of tabs are loaded clicking on the EN elephant in the menubar may have no effect- I've noticed this occurs most of the time but not all the time and I don't know what makes a difference;

3. Similarly with activating the plug-in after tabs are loaded using the contextual menu (right click) will show that an action choice is available, but the choice is not actually executed;

4. Clicking the elephant icon will not bring up the pop-up that appears from the right if Safari screen is set to zoom more than 100%.

 

So it's a quandary. I'm preparing a new reference book on tropical plants and EN has made the process hugely easier, especially in the field. I really like and use EN. I am a 'premium' member. It works great on the iPhone. On the other hand, 100% view on Safari just will not work for me as I cannot read the screen unless it's 130% minimum (and setting a minimum font size is one possibility but it has mixed results including loss of content in some situations). Modern 27" iMacs have so much real estate that even with 130% zoom there is plenty of room to display content.

 

 It's possible that a custom CSS will move the ball forward but again that could alter the content of a website, so to be considered a last resort.

 

I'm posing this both to alert the smart guys at EN but also to see if anyone else has seen these issues, or if anyone else has eyesight issues that require a zoomed screen? I can easily ignore issue #1. But the other three all ride on the zoom issue and I don't see a workaround?

 

Perhaps this is operator error but if so I sure don't see it?

 

 

[ScottLougheed 1,316]

Hmmmm, I tried to reproduce this but I was not able to. Likely I am not recreating the scenario accurately or I don't understand the problem exactly. 

 

If the clipper is invoked while zoomed into an element on a web page, indeed the clipper loads out of frame where it cannot be seen, so if you are consistently zooming into web pages this could be tough... I do imagine a custom CSS would be the easiest solution. 

Alternatively, you could try switching to Google Chrome browser. I just tested it there and clipper zooms along with the webpage rather than getting pushed out of frame. 

 

As for the delay and slowness, I couldn't reproduce any delay between switching tabs or loading tabs, and even with about 15 tabs loaded the clipper would appear as expected. When a clipper was loaded on one or more tabs, switching to a tab without the clipper was not noticeably slower than when there are no clippers invoked anywhere.... Again perhaps I'm just not interpreting the problem correctly. 

[msadesign 1]

Hey Scott,

 

First, thanks for taking the time to attempt replication. The fact that you could not do so is actually good news: if it's just user error, I can fix the user…

 

As to the Safari/Zoom issue:  I get that switching browsers works, but really it's not a very good solution, is it? Isn't this a genuine bug? Realize that nearly three and a half years into a major research project I realized that EN could be hugely helpful, and it has been. But also realize that the browser setup is also critically significant at this stage of the work. For now I will try another browser although having worked with Safari for this research project for so long it's not an appealing switch. Re-gaining EN is important, though.

 

It's also worth pointing out that other applets have problems with zoomed screens. This editor, for example; clicking on Font Size brings up a font list but it is below the bottom of my screen. Similar things happen with data collection boxes like user email and the like on other sites. This points to a more general Safari issue, maybe not an EN bug?

 

Is there a reason you recommended Chrome over Firefox?

 

Is this a critical issue? Yes it is.

 

​On the delay: no, I don't think you are replicating my experience- I explained it poorly. My EN extension is last in the list (screenshot attached), if that matters, which I don't think it does; I did try to isolate the issue by disabling half, then half, but alswya came back to EN.

 

Do this in Safari: load up a couple dozen tabs. Now, click to close one of the tabs and notice the delayed screen refresh for the next one.

Now, dibble EN, then do the same thing: click on one of the tabs to close and see that the next tab is immediately available.

 

Is this a critical issue? Far from it. Just annoying. 

 

oh. And on the custom CSS, now that I think about it more I don't see how this would work, so it's not really a solution.

 

Thank you for your time and efforts.

 

Michael

[ScottLougheed 1,316]

Hi Michael, thanks for clarifying and elaborating. 

With respect to the zoom issue:

I agree, switching browsers is a rather labour intensive. I suppose it is a matter of deciding whether labour is worth it or not to get the behaviour you are looking for. 

My suggestion of Chrome (Rather than say, Firefox) comes from a few places:

1) Just happens to be the other browser in my applications folder, and my former default (I use safari as default now). So it was handy to test with and was on my mind. 

2) The Clipper for Firefox is not as advanced as the clippers for Chrome and Safari which are more or less identical. As far as I know there are some firefox-specific quirks that have slowed development on making a clipper 100% feature-matched with Chrome and Safari. As such, the Chrome clipper is going to offer nearly an identical experience for you, whereas the Firefox clipper will require yet more adaptation on your part.  

 

As for accounting for "wonky" safari behaviour, I think this comes down to a difference in how the browsers function and how Evernote had to write the clipper extension for each browser. My understanding is, while the chrome and safari clippers look identical, the under-the-hood stuff is browser specific, written from the bottom up for each browser. In addition, the two browsers do very different things when zooming web pages, so given these two things (1: totally tailor-made clipper; 2: completely different ways of zooming), I think this is just how Safari behaves with interface elements like the Clipper when zooming. I therefore hesitate to call this a "bug". Now, just because it isn't a bug doesn't mean it isn't frustrating! Because of this, however, I wouldn't expect a fix coming down the pipe soon. You could submit a support ticket though to let them know that the behaviour is frustrating. You could also draw their attention to this thread to save you re-explaining everything. 

 

With respect to the delay/laggy-ness, I gave another shot at reproducing it with your clarified instructions and I'm not sure if I am seeing a difference.

(1) With about 12-15 tabs open, clipper extension enabled, there was a very minor delay when switching tabs, in the order of milliseconds. 

(2) With about 12-15 tabs open, clipper extension disabled, there was a hardly perceptible delay when switching tabs that appears to be shorter than (1). 

(3) Reenabled the clipper, and tried switching tabs, and I seem to have the same performance as (2) that is, whatever delay there had been at (1) seemed to not be there any longer. 

 

It is hard to tell whether this is just an issue of my perception and really the delay is the same for all three scenarios. Also, my method is flawed because the reduced delay could potentially be attributable to Safari having already loaded and cached the tabs between scenario 1 and 2. I'd have to dedicate some time to a more rigorous test to make sure this wasn't the cause of the perceived reduced delay... So I'm just not sure what to think!

 

Perhaps the delay issue is also worth a support ticket, Evernote staff might have some ideas for troubleshooting or might request some other info that could help them trace it/you fix is. 
 

What a puzzler! Good luck with the ongoing work and let us know how things turn out for you and your clipper troubles!

[jbignert 473]

Have tried to reproduce this but cannot see any of the 4 issues at this point, but we'll continue investigating. 

One idea is a possible conflict with another extension, you can try disabling them 1 by 1 and see if the issue goes away. We'll test against the ones you have for the next release.

[msadesign 1]

jbignert: Thanks for joining the fray!

 

On the issue of disabling: Do you remember remember Conflict Catcher in OS<10? It was used to find extension conflicts and worked quite nicely by disabling half at a time, and I followed that procedure here to narrow down the issue but with no results at all.

 

Scott:

 

On the delay issue: I've learned from your response and from trying with only a dozen tabs that there is almost no delay unless more than 25 or so tabs are open; clearly there could be some workflow issues here on my end.

 

On the Clipper: thanks for the background- it's very useful. I should have reported, though, that sometimes the clipper will not appear when zoomed. This is linked I think to turning on and off the clipper extension.

On Chrome: Wouldn't you know that imported bookmarks were botched? As part of my research there are many folder-bookmarks, some with >30 tabs; Chrome got confused, imported several copies of all of them and in a different order).

 

Bottom line: As long as Clipper is running I don't care about that sidebar that appears when clicking the elephant in normal zoom.

 

Thanks.

[ScottLougheed 1,316]

Ugh, not surprised about the bookmark transition being botched, it is clumsy at the best of times. Good luck with the ongoing troubleshooting.... computing seems to be a matter of constant compromise! 

[kahuna 0]

I just started using EN web clipper today and am having problems 2 & 4 that msadesign referenced in the OP but not problem 1 or 3(though I haven't tried with 25 tabs open).  OSX10.8.5, Safari 6.1.2, web clipper 6.1.  The issue is intermittent in my brief testing and difficult to duplicate but happened multiple times after safari restarts which will be very frustrating if it continues as I often zoom in to work with sites as the OP does.  Further description below.

 

After zooming into an article on Quartz http://qz.com/206283/all-the-western-companies-youd-have-to-combine-to-get-something-like-alibaba/, clicking the elephant no longer has any effect on ANY tab I have open at the time(I had 6 & 8 tabs open the 2 times it happened).  However, I can open a new tab in the same window, and the clipper will work fine on the exact URL it originally failed on in this new tab, even upon zooming.  Switching back to any of the tabs which were open at original failure, those tabs continue to fail.

 

The only other notes are: 

1. I had safari web inspector open on another tab both times it failed, but I also had it open four times where I couldn't replicate the problem
2. The only other extension I have is 1Password

Hope this helps with tracking it down