My First Experience with Leopard

Design Logic  |  Post a Comment
Mar 5, 2008

I’ve been watching the blogosphere and waiting for the latest version of Mac OSX to reach a level of quality that most people seemed to be happy with it. With update 10.5.2 that seemed to happen, so I bought the disc and set it up on my machine.

And my first experience with Leopard was so special that I just had to share it with everyone:

An error dialog box that says, You cannot use the application Safari with this version of Mac OS X.

Take a moment to let that sink in. It’s not saying that I have an old version of Safari, or that the Safari I’m referencing can’t be run on Leopard. It’s telling me Safari can’t run on Leopard. Period.

What it means to say is that I’m trying to open the version of Safari left over from my Tiger installation, and that version doesn’t run on Leopard. That’s just not what it actually says.

And whether or not I figure out what the error means to say, it’s still pretty jarring to hear that Apple’s browser doesn’t work on Apple’s latest operating system.

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The conversation continues...

  1. On March 5th, 2008 at 11:49 pm, julian said:

    Wow, how’d you manage to have an old version of Safari around?
  2. On March 6th, 2008 at 12:15 pm, zsz said:

    I’m the ridiculous guy that likes having his applications organized in folders, as opposed to having 100+ applications in one folder.

    But Apple isn’t so good at looking in folders to find old versions of software. No Safari in the Applications directory? Great! We’ll just install the new one and be on our way. Leaving the Safari in the dock to point to the old version.

    Hence that beautiful message.
  3. On March 6th, 2008 at 1:28 pm, Whitney Hess said:

    That’s super weird. I recently got the MacBook Air and it has Leopard pre-installed and a version of Safari that works (3.0.4). So what version were you running previously to upgrading the OS? I would definitely send this link to Apple and try to get the issue resolved.
  4. On March 6th, 2008 at 1:47 pm, zsz said:

    I was running whatever the latest version of Safari on Tiger was. I don’t know the version number, I didn’t check.

    As I see it, there are two fundamental problems here:

    1. Apple only checks the root Applications directory, and none of the subdirectories, when updating an application.
    2. The error message is terrible and doesn’t communicate the actual problem.

    According to Julian, #1 is just the way things have been for a while. But #2 might be worthwhile to point out. I’ll see if I can figure out where to submit a bug.

What do you think?