New Safari beta out yesterday… maybe this will quiet all the tab freaks. I started using Safari as default browser with the first beta, so I’m not in the “is this good enough to switch for?” camp. Of course it is. One complaint about the tabs implementation though: Having trouble getting used to the fact that Cmd-click opens the link in a new tab but doesn’t bring the new tab to the front — Cmd-Shift-click does that. Cmd-click has always opened a link in a new window in IE, Chimera, Safari… so this seems like a departure, an unwelcome extra step. Is there a UI reason for this? Anyone else have trouble with it?
Update: Aha — in the prefs, turn on “Select new tabs as they are created.” Enabling this option changes both the behavior and the hotkey mapping, so all stays copacetic. Bril.
On trying to convert you to background tabbing: I like the fact that the tabs are brought up in the background. Here’s why: When I’m reading through a page that contains a link on it, I don’t want to interrupt the thread of thought required for the current article, but I might want to check out what the link says, so I open the link up in a new tab and check it out when I’m done with the orginal article.
This works well when you post your “quickies” type entries. I open up all the links that sound interesting in the background. That way I don’t have to keep switching back to open another link from your site.
This also works really well with dial-up as some pages take long to load: by the time you are finished reading the original page, the background page is ready.
I am a self-confessing “tab freak”. After using them for a few months in Phoenix, it’s hard using any other browser.
Come to the dark side!
Ah, don’t get me wrong – I really really dig tabs too. What I meant by “tab freaks” is that beta 1 appeared after Chimera had already gotten a lot of people hooked on tabbed browsing — so much so that they wanted to stay with Chimera rather than switch just because Safari didn’t have tabs. To me that seemed extreme — we had done fine without tabs for the past eight years and suddenly they were so indispensable we wouldn’t use a browser without them? This seemed extreme to me.
Anyway. Good points on loading up a page in the background for later reading. I guess that’s just habit — I click the link when ready to ready so having to select the tab afterwards was a pain. But it’s a user pref, so we all can have our own strokes…
Why do you tab freaks prefer tabbed browsing rather than opening new windows? OS X has a nice window switching system, but tabs are custom and are only implemented in Safari. I like that all apps change active document in the same way.
If you want to load links in the background, just shift+cmd+click them. Which are the advantages of this tab approach?
gh: I take it you haven’t used them yet? Using the tabs allows for easier desktop management. You don’t have to cycle through all your open windows to find the pages that you opened: they are all right there within the same application window, titled by the title tag of the page.
I just bought a 12″ Powerbook two weeks ago, after never using a Mac before. I use safari for browsing now since it has tabbed browsing. Throughout the day, when I see an interesting link, I’ll open it up in a background tab. If I’m leaving work for home, I put the Powerbook to sleep. When I get home, I’ll maximize the Safari window (I usually don’t quit the application) and all the links I found during the day are there for me in one application window.
well, howbout staying with chimera not just because of tabs, but becasue half the sites i visit don’t render properly on safari? that’s why i keep 3, yes *3* browsers in my dock. as much as i’d love to get rid of IE, it’s the trusty one for sites that don’t play nice, the last resort, that i have to resort to all too often.
lots of little niggling bugs with safari, that i’ll be curious to see if fixed.
baald
gh – its not just browsers that have “tabbed” browsing. lots of other apps have multiple documents open within their parent window (which is half of tabbed UI) even if they don’t arrange them nicely and tab them. and AFAIK, the UI conventions are maintained — cmd tab switches between them.
baald
meant to say [modifier]+cmd+tab switches between them
I like tabs. They’re great for blogging. But the new Safari release seems to have some odd rendering bugs compared to the last one…
OK, I’ve used the tabbed feature for a while now. The big advantage in my opinion is that the window position and size of the browser for new documents is very predictable, well, it is the same window, after all. This is a big advantage over using multiple windows, opening those in the background for some reason pushes the new windows a few pixels to the side, enough to make the elevator invisible. Some times windows are arranged with quite random differences horizontally and vertically as well.
The bad: Titles become very truncated at 10 or so documents. With sites using the “Site Name: Article” naming scheme, this is a pain. A window menu does not suffer from this, since it can be wider. The (very minor) second flaw is that the tabs are very ugly, active tabs look like they’re changing the visible content of the toolbar (what’s up with the upside-down look?), and passive ones looks completely different. Camino’s tabs look and feel better, but Safari’s are more responsive speed wise.
I would like windows opened in the background to have the exact same size and position as the original window. That would be my ideal setup.
baald, do you find that this beta does a better or worse rendering job? I’ve found bugs rendering bugs here and there with the previous beta, but very seldom need to go to IE for anything but banking. Have you tested your buggy sites to compare previous beta to this one?
Also, I’m loving the forms autofill in this version – forgot how much I missed that.
(and you were being hyperbolic when you said “half” the sites weren’t rendering properly, right? ~1% would mirror my experience in that dept.)
wha…me exagerate?
anyway, yeah, it’s just a few. some framed sites. certain inline elements i supect. then theres my work webmail — it’s too much money for us to renew our certificate for an internal server, so the security certificate is invalid. and safari doesn’t give you a way to accept an invalid cert and contiue browsing that site.
the thing is, it rarely just misaligns something or whatever – if it’s not getting it right chances are that it’s blocking a lot of content as well, which is frustrating.
haven’t checked out the new safari yet, about to right now.
i am definitely seeing way more sites fail to render properly than with the previous beta. some examples are such mainstream sites as http://games.yahoo.com/. My own http://x-pollen.com comes out all funky, but that could be my own fault.
I’m not seeing what’s being misrendered at games.yahoo or at x-pollen. But maybe I’m not familiar enough with them.
I’m happy to see that sites that had great swaths of blank space running across them are fixed.
woi buat la game banyak sikit