I come across so many sites that allow you to resize the text area in Safari, and quite frankly it annoys me. The feature of Safari doesn’t annoy me at all, it’s the way designers haven’t planned for the odd user to resize the comment textbox or some other textbox, so that when it happens it messes with the whole page.

A way around it? Well, for starters ask yourself why the user wants to resize the text box in the first place. If there is a reason, you need to re-jiggle your design. If there isn’t, you can use CSS to prevent the user resizing the text box, so that it doesn’t mess with your page.

textarea{
   width:200px;
   min-width:150px;
   max-width:250px;
   height:200px;
   min-height:150px;
   max-height:250px;
}

An example of this:

I am originally 200px high, and 200px wide. You can resize me to within 50px either way.

Safari obeys these rules, and stops the use resizing a text box further than you’ve specified, thus not screwing with your design, while letting the user change the textbox size to a certain extent. Try it on my comment box below.