Before I get into this, let me say that in general I like most of Google’s products and services. That said, I tend to have one huge complaint about them (which appears to be becoming a trend in new products they release)—their lack of support for Safari.

There are two glaring examples that come to mind right off the bat. The first is the Google Talk (a.k.a., Gtalk) functionality that was added to Google Mail (a.k.a., Gmail). While the normal Gmail interface works fine, the Gtalk stuff is only supported by Firefox and Internet Explorer 6.

The second is the newly released Google Calendar. I visited the site today and got a message telling me my browser wasn’t supported. Sigh.

Now, I realize that I could fire up Firefox (or Camino since it uses the same engine) and use the Gtalk features in Gmail or Calendar, but that’s not the point. While I don’t mind Firefox, it just feels clunky and slow compared to Safari and using for just a few sites is an inconvenience since I’m using Safari for everything else. That brings up a few questions:

Why don’t those features work in Safari? Does it lack support for something that the supported browsers have? If so, what? And if so, has anyone reported it to the WebKit folks so they can add support for it? Do the Google folks just not care about Safari (which I’d find hard to believe)?

If anyone from the teams responsible for these products at Google or anyone else has any insight to why they don’t support Safari, please let me know. This whole switching browsers thing to get the full functionality is getting old¹.

[1] Please don’t compare this to IE6 vs whatever; that’s a completely different situation. IE6 is 5+ years old—Safari is not.