Google Spreadsheets supports IE, Firefox, Mozilla, Netscape and Camino but provides no Safari support. (It worked fine on the Mac under Firefox.) Which begs the question: Do you trust a third-party web-based application with your data? Particularly Google which has had a few rather embarassing data loss incidents? On the upside, gSpreadsheets offers .xls and .csv file downloads. Downside? The formatting is pretty primitive even though the basics are all on-offer: bolding, highlighting, underlining, merging cells and more. I was even able to drag between cells to create a range for my in-progress formula.
It doesn't work in Safari and it also doesn't work in Safari's Linux cousin, Konqueror. Basically any browser based on the khtml engine won't work, which is truly a shame.
They also don't support the OpenDocument format. Pretty sad for a company that claims to support open source and open standards.
It has never been explained to me why some Web 2.0 sites (e.g. Flickr, Backpack) work magnificently with Safari, while others (e.g. anything from Google) do not work at all. Its a shame, whatever the reason.
The failure of G/Spreadsheets to work with Safari - so far - is at least consistent with the failure of G/Calendars to work with Safari - so far.
One of the impediments to some Web 2.0 apps working in Safari is the lack of access to the XSLT engine through Javascript. XML can be transformed at load but not upon subsequent asynchronous requests. I'm not sure if that is the issue here, and there are probably ways to develop around this limitation.
Google created an implementation of XSLT in Javascript to deal with this limitation:
http://goog-ajaxslt.sourceforge.net/
The WebKit team has added JS XSLT API, so I'd imagine it would appear in the next major Safari release.
http://bugzilla.opendarwin.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3275
Yep, it crashes if trying to masquerade as Win MSIE 6 with the Debug menu.
I agree that the issue of letting Google have my data is a pretty serious one. Much like where I keep my paper-stored information, I'd like to have it where I have physical control. I also don't like the idea of having to be online to fiddle with the data.
This isn't a problem with Google per se, but with any online data repository. Too much trust is being placed in black boxes, and I am one of those curmudgeons who prefers sneakernets to shoving everything through e-mail.
"Google Spreadsheets supports IE, Firefox, Mozilla, Netscape and Camino but provides no Safari support. ... Which begs the question: Do you trust a third-party web-based application with your data?"
What? I don't follow what Safari has to do with trusting Google.
Safari still has a great deal of maturing to do before it can support "Web 2.0" stuff.
Here's a fun Safari bug:
http://brianiac.blogspot.com/2006/03/safari-date-bug.html
FWIW, it seems to be working with Safari 3 Public Beta. You have to click through the dialog warning: "Oops, sorry Safari is not yet supported. Do you want to continue?" If you go ahead, though, it seems to work.