[montgomery_burns]

ScarCrow28 said:

I'm one of the few who actually LOVE the new tab bars. The more web page real estate the better. You guys must be getting old and stubborn. Sure it's different. It's a change. Change is hard for some. But give it a few weeks. It might grow on some.

P.S. FINALLY a proper page zoom! Apple has been paying attention to competition. Now if only they can save sessions like Firefox and remember which windows were minimized to the dock during every launch like Firefox 3.2 nightly's... Until then Firefox is still my #1.

Firefox and the tabmixplus extension still OWNS in the tab function department. But I do love the new update to Safari.

Well, the lack of Firefox features in Safari simply means that Safari is a change from Firefox. Considering that you are the one lecturing other people about accepting change, it is ironic that you are wishing for Safari to work like Firefox. Change must be hard for you. You must be the one who is getting old and stubborn.

[XMattingly]

"... the tabs have now been moved to the top of the window, à la Google Chrome, giving you a tiny little bit of extra horizontal real estate."
I think you meant to say, "vertical real estate".

[androulidakis]

Didn't there used to be a little arrow to the right of the url that allowed you to go back to the origin page? I don't seem to find that using the Beta.

[doglesby]

ScarCrow28 said:

I'm one of the few who actually LOVE the new tab bars. The more web page real estate the better. You guys must be getting old and stubborn. Sure it's different. It's a change. Change is hard for some. But give it a few weeks. It might grow on some.

I'm reading a lot of sometimes heated rejections of tabs in the title bar; but they aren't telling you how you should feel, that's just obnoxious. Yes, you can see a whole extra line of text. That people prioritize a title bar that behaves like every other window on the OS isn't curmudgeonly, it's a priority inversion from your own.

What most people seem to be missing is that title bar tabs make vastly more sense on Windows than Mac OS X. On Windows, many users maximize the window they are working in (I've seen the IT guy at work do it every time he tries to map the printers on my system). In that mode, you get a Fitts's Law benefit from tabs in the title bar, an improvement you don't get on Mac OS X because Apple wisely put the menu bar up there. So the only benefit on Mac OS X is the vertical (not horizontal, Aayush) space. But you could get the same benefit by just eliminating the title bar. At least everything you might accidentally do on the toolbar is reversible or harmless. Then you could have tabs that you can move from anywhere on the tab (rather than a handle which universally means resize, not move), the same truncated view of the page title, and more real estate. All Apple needs is a Hide Title Bar option in the View menu. If it isn't going to behave like a title bar, you might as well get rid of it.

[blitz]

Good points doglesby.

I am not keen on the maximise view in Windows. A seasoned Windows user I was with the other day accidentally pressed something on her keyboard and spent the whole day in that maximised view with no obvious way to turn it off.

If you need to use a GUI, let it be simple and clean interfaces. This is what Apple did with the likes of the early GUI's (System 7 is by a lot of people reckoned to be close to perfect). I'm not saying we go back to that, bit it was supremely crisp and pretty much idiot proof (to this day, I still can't work out what the green button in the Mac OSX menu bar is supposed to do - who uses it, ever?). The other thing about it (even the more 3D OS8 and 9) is that the interface itself does not detract from the task at hand. As a designer, all the 'sweetie' buttons and even the window shading is just excess noise to what is going on in the window itself.

The new tab bars may be good for Windows users (who, let's face it, are far more used to non conforming and clumpy cluttered interfaces than Mac users are), but they break Apple's own interface design specification. On a Mac they are still fiddly to use as the grip area is reduced to a tiny corner triangle. Even in a single tab there is an extra two icons or controls on the top of the tab bar. This is added clutter. The old tabs could be simply moved without the need for the triangular 'grip' and had one simple close button.

The other issue comes from a general Mac OS interface issue. In the 'olde days', The front window was distinct and the background ones greyed or muted down. The latest Mac OS does not mute out the background windows very much and relies on the soft drop shadow to give 'depth' (which does not work at all on a dark desktop or if your windows are stacked almost exactly on one another. With this kind of design (the top tabs), if you have two or more Safari windows open and the frontmost window is slightly lower than the back ones, there is just a mess at the top of the screen. It is a visual overload of triangular grips and + symbols and you have to look very hard as to which bar is which.

My point is: the top of the bar has always been a window 'grip' - in every Mac OS ever made since the Finder was invented. This piddling around with the basic thing that makes Mac windows so tactile needs to be thought out a little more carefully than the Safari 4 dog's dinner that is being offered.

Opinions (for comment?) on other new Safari 4 items:

Top sites - hilarious, OTT, but slightly childish eye candy. I love it for its humour, but nothing else. It is a bit ugly, but cute in the way a ten year old might have made it.

Bookmarks with coverflow. I rarely use cover flow in iTunes and never in the Finder, but it is a fun idea. Bookmarks are notoriously hard to organise and Safari was always lacking from day one. This use of cover flow is better - a little bit. I can't seem to get any of the preview pages to show unless I visit the bookmarked site - not very handy if you have a lot of bookmarks!

The blue load bar in the address field. Bring that back, that was inspired interface design (as well as being very cool looking). The little 'gear' wheel is just overused now!

[ProbFrank]

After changing to Safari 3 tabs via Terminal, how would I go back to Safari 4 if I feel adventurous. I already uninstalled but tabs still on bottom of bar.
Thanks,
Frank

[Dan Moren]

ProbFrank said:

After changing to Safari 3 tabs via Terminal, how would I go back to Safari 4 if I feel adventurous. I already uninstalled but tabs still on bottom of bar.

Just repaste the same command, but change "NO" to "YES":

defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugSafari4TabBarIsOnTop -bool YES

[ProbFrank]

Thanks!
BTW Not all coverflow bookmark pages load. Os there away to do this manually?

[doglesby]

blitz said:

Good points doglesby.

>(to this day, I still can't work out what the green button in the Mac OSX menu bar is supposed to do - who uses it, ever?).
The zoom button? I use it so much, I've mapped a keyboard shortcut to it. It does exactly what it does on System 7 (where it was on the other side of the window). It's the yellow minimize button that Mac OS X added.

[phase1geo]

I think that going forward perhaps Apple should rethink how windows are moved. Instead of using 1/4" of the top of the window to move windows around (which can be annoying on a laptop to grab a hold of), perhaps holding down the third mouse button (or the command key or something like that) when the window has focus and moving the mouse would move the window about.
This type of interfacing seems intuitive to me. If I have a piece of paper on my desk, I'm not limited to grabbing the very top edge of the paper to move it. I can simply press down anywhere on the paper and move it about. It seems to me that windows should work that way as well. If window handling were done in this manner, the "title bar" area could be used for other things (like more intuitive tab usage and the like).
I believe that the new MacBooks have a gesture now that works like this. Simply move the mouse pointer over the window to move and use three fingers to move it. Why can't the desktop work in a similar manner?
Just a thought.

[doglesby]

Yeah, I think someone else said that :)

[XMattingly]

Quote

{size:10px} phase1geo wrote: Instead of using 1/4" of the top of the window to move windows around (which can be annoying on a laptop to grab a hold of), perhaps holding down the third mouse button (or the command key or something like that) when the window has focus and moving the mouse would move the window about. {size}

I agree, and I think we're definitely headed in that direction eventually. Apple has a tendency to "follow the lead" of their best selling products, and since that is laptops I think we can expect more GUI functions that behave like real world objects.

[yugenro]

Why can't you just have the Tab Bar right beneath the Title Bar? That would give you the Title Bar, AND the Tab Bar would then apply to everything underneath it, including the Back/Forward buttons, the Home button, the URL field, etc...

[mpole]

Now with all these terminal commands for Safari does anyone know of any good ones for iTunes especially one that will allow itunes to keep playing podcasts one after another instead of stopping after each. Huge nuisance when I'm listening to 5 min podcasts and yes i know i can throw them in a playlist and they will play but would be nice to circumvent that.
thanks.