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I saw a video last night and liked what I saw, but don't know if it'll ever replace FireFox for me as I've dug my roots in here so deeply. It would have to have EVERY feature I use to be good enough.

I'll test it out tonight and see what is up.

Okay, sadly I will not be switching back to Safari FOR BROWSING. I just have too much invested in FireFox in the way of add-ons and extensions. FireFox lets me put anything from the UI pretty much anywhere. And Stylish lets me configure the look of the UI itself via CSS. I have my top portion of the browser set up how I want it and can't change it.



Notice how I have little in the way of buttons. No Search box, replaced by CyberSearch add-on that turns my Location bar into an all-in-one searching finding launching platform. It's the most irreplacable part. No reload button, that's done by double-clicking a tab. If it weren't for this being a laptop I'd remove the back and forward buttons too. Notice my bookmarks are next to the buttons, saving space. You can't do that in Safari. If I could get FF's tabs to be at the top like Safari and Chrome are now I'd save so much more. But for now this is good. FF is just too expandable to replace right now. Safari needs a FireFox style add-on system architecture before it can be replaceable by me. Sadly. I do love how it looks, and the tabs are the greatest thing Google came up with, saving a lot of space.

Plus, FireFox's built-in session storing is the best thing ever. If my browser crashes or I close it, next time I open it, all my tabs INCLUDING their individual histories will be restored AS WELL AS the text typed in textareas and such like this one. That is just not something I could let go.

Coverflow is useless for ANYTHING except iTunes, and I only use it in iTunes for the look. It's useless for images. Icon view shows more than Coverflow does. Apple went too far and thinks way too highly of CoverFlow IMHO. I would rather it just die and stay in iTunes where it belongs. Also, get it out of the Finder. But this is just me I guess.

NoScript and Stylish are a must for me. Also, Tab Mix Plus kicks so much ass. I love SINGLE WINDOW MODE which never lets any windows open separately. Every window gets thrown into a new tab and you never end up with hidden scattered windows. Plus I disabled window resizing scripts to keep my browser from resizing without permission. FF is just too good.

One feature from Chrome that I wish both FireFox and Safari would steal is the Status bar that ONLY APPEARS when it's needed. Loading a page, hovering over a link. It will pop up. It's awesome. Why haven't other browser makers thought of this? Make it so it only appears when needed or when the mouse hovers. Apple, Mozilla group, steal that please! It would save another 16-25 pixels of vertical space.


On the other hand, Safari is a great development platform. I've been working on a game and JavaScript in Safari and the WebKit in general is just so much faster than FireFox. I was impressed when I discovered how fast it could go. So I stick with Safari for game development and for testing stuff. I just can't switch to it for regular browsing. Plus the WebKit nightlies take over whatever Safari UI you have installed, so it's nice to have Safari 4 and the latest WebKit running at once.

I do wish FireFox would put the tabs up there though. Until now I just attributed it to lack of proper API's in whatever they use to program FireFox on both Windows and the Mac. Since add-ons that try to put info up there never work on OS X. Maybe this'll get them to figure out how to do it.


Side note: While typing this, Mail randomly crashed with errors in the console I never saw before. I wonder if I might have to also revert. I hope not, because even if I don't use it all the time, I'd hate to have to go back to S3 but no big deal.


Tell you what, Apple. You implement all the features I mentioned above, the single all in one use Location bar, the ability to put my bookmarks next to my address bar, double-click tabs to reload, auto-hide status bar when not needed, all the tab stuff including single-window mode and everything else and maybe we'll talk.

Did you even TRY it yet? I mean seriously. Shut up, install it, try it out, and if you don't like it, uninstall it. Eventually you will have to use it though. Remember, this thing is going to be final in Snow Leopard. The tabs are handled much better than they used to be.

Here's how Safari 4 handles many tabs:

Based on the windows width, the active tab is wider, with the others smaller to the left and right. When the tabs reach and exceed the end a ... button appears. Click it and it plainly shows all the tabs shown, all the tabs before them and all the tabs after plainly split into sections in the menu.

A close button appears on both the active tab and the one the mouse is hovering over.

Tab dragging is performed by grabbing a special triangle area on the right end rather than the whole tab for obvious reasons. You can drag the window from any tab and it won't switch to it unless you plain click it.

Nothing was smurfed up. In fact, it was made better.

I thought there was a way to put the tabs back...

*edit*

what junior said

Last edited by bratboy (2009-02-26 9:47 am)

Two days and I'm almost got myself trained to using tabs on top. The only thing I haven't broken is my habit of trying to right click open a new tab at the bottom of the toolbar. Then again half the time I tried that when the tabs were at the bottom, I caught myself trying to do it in the bookmark bar anyway.

smilr wrote:

UGgg... I'm not going to be installing THAT one for certain. Tabs on top? NOO way.
You brought us tabs apple. You got it RIGHT. Don't smurf it up now.

Actually, tabs on the top solves the one drawback I've always seen with tabs.   When they're below the toolbar, they eat up extra browsing space!   By putting tabs in the top title bar, they don't take any extra space away from your browsing experience.

On my Linux laptop, which has a wide screen but small resolution, it drives me nuts that having tabs diminishes my ability to actually see the sites I'm browsing.

I've been getting random crashes from Mail too. Not all the time and not at expected times. And it doesn't always happen.

Checking the logs, this is a truncated version with a few duplicate lines removed:

2/26/09 4:30:00 PM Mail[2007] Using Growl.framework 1.1.4 (1.1.4) 
2/26/09 4:30:00 PM Mail[2007] Loaded GrowlMail 1.1.4 
2/26/09 4:31:05 PM Mail[2007] An uncaught exception was raised
 
2/26/09 4:31:05 PM Mail[2007] An uncaught exception was raised
 
2/26/09 4:31:05 PM Mail[2007] NSData* -[WebArchive data](WebArchive*, objc_selector*) was called from a secondary thread
Stack Trace: (
(
    2502873355,
    2468122171,
    2502872811,
    2502872874,
    2439325811,
    2493110883,
    1669253,
    4075187,
    1342192267,
    2524415981,
    2524414868,
    2510446741,
    2510446418
)) 
2/26/09 4:31:05 PM Mail[2007] *** Terminating app due to uncaught exception 'WebKitThreadingException', reason: 'NSData* -[WebArchive data](WebArchive*, objc_selector*) was called from a secondary thread' 
2/26/09 4:31:21 PM com.apple.launchd[88] ([0x0-0xd80d8].com.apple.mail[2007]) Exited abnormally: Trace/BPT trap

If it keeps up, I'll probably go back for now since I use Safari for the WebKit which I can get and have gotten nightly for a while. The UI is great IMHO and it's a huge step forward, but I can go back since I don't use Safari for actual work and any UI enhancements don't really matter much to me. Though I could also remove GrowlMail instead if I had to. But I just got Growl working again, seems a shame to not use it.


I like the tabs on the top because it saves a LOT of pixels in the window that can be used for content. Frankly, it's the best idea Google had in Chrome aside from the auto-hide statusbar that only shows up when it's needed, which is how it should have worked since 1994, and I hope every other browser adopts it sooner rather than later.

Its wicked fast

I say Coverflow has it uses and Apple is finding them but is also trying a little too hard to fit it into other places as well. AFAIC, it works well with touch screen works in iTunes, I works well in bookmark history and finder searches. Anything past that and you are kind of pushing it.

As I said, CoverFlow is only good for the one thing it was designed for. iTunes album covers. Only because it's a way to show off the current song while also showcasing other albums you have.

It doesn't work in the Finder because Icon view shows more in the same space. Even List view shows more icons in the same space.

Figure 1:
At the top you have CoverFlow in two states. Large preview, which shows a tiny bit of the left and right images (Nothing to help at all!) and a small preview which shows more icons, but once again, only the left and right files are even seeable. The rest to the left and right are cut off too much it's worthless.
Below you see List view and Icon view. Both of which show much more info at once in the same space. 16 large icons (Except that goddamned border they decided to put on them in Leopard. Give me an option to turn that thing off! Not all my images are photos, Steve!) in Icon view and 19 small but recognizable icons in List view set to Large.


Safari could benefit if those bookmarks and history icons were icons too.

In CoverFlow the only cover you actually get to see is the current one. All the others are anged and crammed next to each other. It's impractical.

Icon view kicks Cover Flow's ass. And I wish Icon view could actually be set to 256 or 512 size in some cases.

CoverFlow is pretty much eye candy. And I don't understand why Steve (Or whoever) thinks so highly of it.

Images can be bigger than 128 you know. They could make 256x256 sized previews in the History or Bookmarks if they want to. CoverFlow is useless eye candy that doesn't help at all except provide you with a pretty way to look at your media one image at a time.

Give me tiled icons any day. At least as an option.

I just installed it.  I like it.  I don't like that "top sites" thing, but "tabs on top" is ingenious.. Especially on my netbook, where every bit of real estate counts!

Jasoco wrote:

As I said, CoverFlow is only good for the one thing it was designed for. iTunes album covers. Only because it's a way to show off the current song while also showcasing other albums you have.

I don't know about that. IMHO, grid view is way more effective for browsing via album artwork.