Safari 4

[ewx]

I downloaded the Safari 4 beta.

The obvious visual change is that tabs now replace the title bar. AFAIK this feature first appeared in Google Chrome. It seems a sensible use of vertical space.

I have a complaint about Apple's implementation of the idea though: when you have more than a few tabs (depending on the width of the window), the first thing to disappear is the close button towards the left. Fair enough, but when you hover over the tab (for instance to select it) the close button reappears. Since until you're there there's no visual indication you need to avoid that part of the title, the result is lots of accidentally closed tabs. Worse, there appears to be no undo close tab option.

In fact the closed tab will be the first thing you see in the history page, so it's not that hard to retrieve it. But you lose any state that you had in that page (unlike Firefox's undo close tab option, which does preserve at least some of the state).

The top sites page makes is effectively an adaptive bookmarks page, showing thumbs of the dozen sites Safari thinks you visit most often. It's initially populated with the NYT, Amazon, Apple, Wikipedia, CNET and various others. Wikipedia presumably got there for free but I did wonder if the others had to pay and if so how much. As you can see from the linked screenshot it's already accumulated a few of the pages I've visited recently.

The history page uses Coverflow (something that's turning up increasingly often in Apple software). Seems quite convenient and allowing visual recognition of pages is nice.

As in earlier Safaris, text entry boxes (such as Livejournal's update form) are resizable, a nice touch that I wish Firefox would pick up.

The advertised "full page zoom" buttons don't exist, though there are menu and keyboard versions. Zooming in randomly jumps around the page, making it very inconvenient to actually use the feature.

Hovering over a link still doesn't reveal what the destination is, unlike Firefox. It seems like a little thing but actually once you're used to it, not knowing for sure where you're going next makes browsing feel surprisingly uncomfortable.

It actually uses more memory than Firefox (RSIZE is the amount of real RAM used, VSIZE counts swap as well and is generally less interesting). It does seem to use less CPU when idle (where "idle" for a web browser means "running various bits of Javascript"), which would lend a bit of plausibility to Apple's performance claims if it weren't for the fact that visiting a page on Apple's own website took around 30s to load (and then proceeded to lag way behind user input, and SPOD some of the time, when scrolling) where Firefox managed to produce it just like that.

(I think it must be something about that page, since other pages don't produce the same problem. But you'd think they'd test it against its own website!)

Comments

[pne.livejournal.com]

tabs now replace the title bar. AFAIK this feature first appeared in Google Chrome. It seems a sensible use of vertical space.

OTOH I find it a bit annoying occasionally that I can't see the, well, title of a website.

The top sites page makes is effectively an adaptive bookmarks page, showing thumbs of the dozen sites Safari thinks you visit most often.

Presumably from Chrome, too; at least, that's where I first saw that feature.