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Apple Businesses

Tabs for Safari 66

Posted by pudge from the better-than-nothing dept.
hexgrid writes "A dream come true! Blacktree, Inc. has released Pith Beta 2, 'a utility for Safari that tracks the currently open sites and displays them in a window.' It's not exactly tabs as we know them in other browsers, but serves the same purpose with the added bonus of being more 'Mac-like.'"
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Tabs for Safari More

Tabs for Safari

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  • Typo in title (Score:1, Offtopic)

    by jrbx1 ( 320117 )
    Reads "Sarari" instead of "Safari"


  • Just look at some of the crazy shit those hopped up hippies have put out!

  • Pith != tabs... yet (Score:5, Informative)

    by root 66 ( 72128 ) on Tuesday February 04, 2003 @09:33AM (#5222584)
    While it's true that Pith is a nice tool, it is not exactly comparable to Mozilla's tabs. Some of Pith's shortcomings may exist due to its beta stage, but I wonder whether it's possible for Pith to fully achieve its goal. One major downside is the performance hit caused by the heavy safari window showing/hiding.

    There is a discussion about Pith on MacSlash [macslash.org].

    In other news, Apple has updated it's iMac product line...

    • Re:Pith != tabs... yet (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I don't see how everyone can say it's not quite there yet. It's a different implementation but has very interesting features:

      1. You can hide any window (control click the button and choose hide).

      2. If you see a performance problem with hiding, instead use the same window to display all pages. This is very much like tabbed browsing with the advantage that you don't waste as much vertical screen real-estate.

      3. You can organize the buttons by age, name or order; which is an improvement over traditional tabs.

      All in all I think it's a great implementation; even though different.

      Note: to access the preferences click on the PITH icon on the bottom of the floating window.

      AC
  • Prepare to be "Cease and Desist"-ed. If Apple's planning on releasing Tabs themselves, they'll shut this down. If not, they'll let it live. They don't like other people "stealing their thunder" and accomplishing something they're working on - kinda kills the Keynote where they announce theming or whatever two years after it's been done by a third party.

    Remember the iPod TV Remote Control addon that Apple requested be killed? It'll be cool when Apple comes out with their version, but they're SO. DAMN. S L O W !
    • I wonder what grounds Apple could use to issue such an order. iCommune was killed because it used there plugin SDK, but Pith is AppleScript/Events and completely separate..... Even so, it is works for the time being.

    • Don't be daft (Score:3, Insightful)

      by hobbit ( 5915 )
      Whatever Apple could come up with will be better than this, because it would actually be part of Safari. Do you think they built scripting into Mac OS just so that they could sue people who use it?

    • Re:This looks like a cool hack, but... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 04, 2003 @02:27PM (#5225126)
      Remember the iPod TV Remote Control addon that Apple requested be killed?

      Yeah, the Griffin PodMate. I'm still pissed. I wanted one, but it was too late. And I think you're giving Apple too much credit - they aren't producing nothing to replace it, ever. They're not "slow", they're just not interested. They don't want the iPod extended to a "paltry" RemoteControl. The rule is, "If it wasn't invented in Cupertino, we don't like it".

      I've been a MacAddict since my old PB520 and system7, and this incident was the same old Apple, killing off a good idea, shooting themselves in the head. All these linux guys will soon learn how Apple really is. I can see they're still all excited over osx, but they'll learn. I hope they stay onboard after they get Steved. And I really hope Apple gets a clue and stops killing good projects.

  • pith balls (Score:5, Insightful)

    by sporty ( 27564 ) on Tuesday February 04, 2003 @10:11AM (#5222804) Homepage
    Pith is a utility for Safari that tracks the currently open sites and displays them in a window. If Safari crashes, relaunch it, and Pith can recover the windows that were open.


    Um.. and if pith crashes, can safari relaunch it?

    If there should be tabs for safari, then it should be in the browser somehow, not as a second hand utility. By making it a second hand utility, they become two systems that become dependent on each other. No optimization, no good integration. Look at mplayerosx. It's one app that controls the other. It jsut doesn't feel.. seemless.
    • Um... the point of a good plug-in architecture is specifically so that good functionality can not necessarily reside in the product's base configuration.

      i
      • But it should act seemlessly with the system. Unless pith integrates with the UI, it's just another button launcher.

        -s
        • fair enough. It should integrate with a proper UI metaphor.

          i
          • Well, not just UI. This is not necessarily true for safari, but in general.

            Even in the underlying system, you want good integration. An OS is just a big plugin system when it comes to drivers, no? You don't want a driver that needs special treatment, such as initializing in a funny way, or using internal structures. Abusing casting or using "private" data of the parent system can have nasty effects.

            This is overcome by producing an API for your product, like apple, safari and applescript. You want bad integration? Look at any program that scans slashdot's data through the website. If anyone at slashdot chnaged the formatting any, you'd be screwed.

  • Tabs? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by funkhauser ( 537592 ) <.zmmay2. .at. .uky.edu.> on Tuesday February 04, 2003 @10:38AM (#5222954) Homepage Journal
    Tabs are nice and all, but what Safari really needs us Keychain utilization and stability fixes.

    • Re:Tabs? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Visigothe ( 3176 ) on Tuesday February 04, 2003 @01:05PM (#5224291) Homepage
      > Tabs are nice and all, but what Safari really
      > needs us Keychain utilization and stability fixes.

      Actually, Safari does utilise the keychain. What it *doesn't* do is auto-fill forms.

      If you go to a site that uses HTTP authentication [as opposed to a web form a la /.], it will read/write to the keychain.
    • No one is arguing against keychain utilization and stability fixes. We just want tabs too. I don't even mind waiting for stability fixes and keychain support and autofill and any other features to come before tabs, but I won't be using it until it lets me browse the way I'm most comfortable and that's with tabs.
      • Same here. I couldn't care less about what GUI purists think. Tabs are part of how I work now. And they'll continue to be until someone comes up with a better idea. Nothing else thus far allows me to have several pages of research from various sources open in one browser, everything available at a glance.
  • Before Safari came along, I used Mozilla and rarely if ever used the tabs feature. I'd rather open a new window and then close it or minimize it if I didn't need it right away. The mozilla tabs were simply too buggy for me to bother with. I hope Apple works on compatibility issues before it spends time on designing tabs that work. d.
    • Depends on how you use it.

      I like to use a window for every site and tabs within that site/window.

      E.g., I go to BBC, browse through articles and open any I find interesting in a new tab. After I've opened up everything I want to see, I go through each tab, closing the ones I've read. Any other way would be just too cluttered and would mix up my bbc windows from my slashdot windows.

      For the a-little-above-average joe, I think, it would work well to open up your email tabs in one window, news tabs in another, search results in another etc...

  • Ah so! (Score:2, Offtopic)

    by thatguywhoiam ( 524290 )
    Me likey Sarari! Make good for browse on web of courageous large smarts!

    I'll just toss this on the pile: Seriously, in the name of all that is holy, Slashdot editors.. get some advanced spell checking technology. Do it. Do it now. You need it. Badly.

  • What The World... err, Safari Needs Now is... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 04, 2003 @11:35AM (#5223414)
    ** An obvious way to _export_ bookmarks
    - Using Eterm/Terminal/Xterm to cd, cp, grep is a work-around not a way in a GUI program.
    - When I realized this I immeadiately switched to Chimera before I really built up a bunch of bookmarks.
    - In the process I tried to manually maul the bookmark.xml file. Don't even try. It's cluttered with a bunch of other stuff: history, your IP address, blah blah.

    ** A bookmarks file that just has bookmarks. I don't want my IP address and surfing history burned on to a backup that I throw into a corner of my work disastter.

    ** Tabs: I was going through serious withdrawl for the last week.

    ** Nested bookmark folders: How else are you going to keep your pr0n seperate from the mountains in your pics directory? Although if you insist on using it, create a new folder then click on the button bar icon, then drag the folder to the right pane if you want to add a folder to the button bar... Wait! Wait! I'll bet I could use Property List editor to duplicate that stupid button bar entry, rename it and then... oh my god! where did my bookmarks go. What are they doing in history. Ack cough choke. Please, please, please Mr. Jobe, tell me how to move things from history to bookmarks.

    ** Better bookmark control in general. Creating a new folder in the left and _having to_ drag it to the right pane is the only movement choice (the one time you can do it). People are very used to being to drag things on top of things (e.g. a folder or Rendezvous or whatever on the left) and people are very used to having a hierarchical view (e.g. Windows (not internet) Explorer's left column)
    • What The World... err, Safari Needs Now is...

      The ability to TURN OFF FLASH/SHOCKWAVE! Is anyone else so distracted by animations when they're trying to read text that they have diabled flash/shockwave? Animations are cool, but only when that's what I want to watch, which is less often than I want to read text without some Monkey jumping around waiting to be Punched, or whatever. (GIF animations are off, too.) In my browser, nothing moves, and all is well. Opera, Baby, you are still on top.

      Am I the only one?
  • OK, so the good news is that this is a nice litttle utility that keeps track of all my open windows. In spirit, it is actually *very* similar to a tab-replacement suggestion I made [slashdot.org]. Now, one thing I still really miss is a way to keyboard navigate through the pith list. If this really is just a clever AppleScript hack, then you'd think there would be a way to get keyboard input to work, at least when Pith is the active application.

    As a side note, now that I've been using Safari for several weeks, I find that I'm not having a lot of "no tabs" withdrawal symptoms, but I am having "type ahead in browser window" withdrawl. Every time I have to use the mouse when surfing at a place like Yahoo, a little piece of me is sad...

    • The Pith window never receives keypresses, and doesn't usually become the active application. I opted to do that rather than have it absorb them because after clicking the pith window I kept trying to use the Safari command keys and Pith would just beep and look at me like I was stupid. What sort of keyboard navigation do you suggest? I may be able to rig up hotkeys to work.....
      • The Pith window never receives keypresses, and doesn't usually become the active application. I opted to do that rather than have it absorb them because after clicking the pith window I kept trying to use the Safari command keys and Pith would just beep and look at me like I was stupid.

        Yeah, after I posted I realized that this was probably the issue. This is not an easy problem to solve, I'm afraid. The only way I can see for this to work is if Safari (or any Cocoa app) could be convinced to send apple events to Pith (or any other application that could use them). In other words, if cntrl-pagedown wasn't handled by Safari, but meant "next tab" to Pith, then Safari would pass the event on, and Pith could take a swing at it.

        Alas, I don't think that could ever work. The only other idea would be that if Pith could (optionally) take keypresses, "select" the right tab, do its thing, and tell Safari to focus itself again. So you'd have to do something like cmd-~ to raise Pith, then get to your tab (e.g., cntrl-pageDown/Up to cycle through) and have Pith pass control back to Safari.

        Oh well; it's already *pretty* useful, so I'm not complaining. :-)

  • What's the big deal? (Score:1, Interesting)

    by scrypt ( 565580 )
    Why not just use the Window drop menu to see which pages are open?
    • You're right. I don't really see the advantage of Pith as all it does is swap windows (I'm not a fan of floating windows or palettes).

      I would certainly prefer kbd shortcuts to switch from one open windows to the next (cmd-0 .. cmd-9, e.g.).

  • I Want This For All Apps (Score:4, Interesting)

    by esme ( 17526 ) on Tuesday February 04, 2003 @02:05PM (#5224857) Homepage

    I want a Pith for everything -- a taskbar that displays an icon for each window that's open.

    My one big problem with OSX right now is that it's too hard to switch between windows of different apps. Since I often have a bunch of terminals, several Mozilla windows, plus other random stuff open, I need to do this often. Mozilla's tabs make it easier to get the Moz windows, at least. But I'd like it to handle all apps...

    -Esme

    • For every app that's running in OS X, the dock icon has a menu of each of the windows handled by that app. So switching between different windows in different apps is actually pretty easy, if you know about that feature.

      • Re:I Want This For All Apps (Score:4, Insightful)

        by esme ( 17526 ) on Wednesday February 05, 2003 @01:42AM (#5229547) Homepage
        I should have been more specific -- I want single-click access to every window, like the Gnome taskbar (if you turn off grouping) or the Windows taskbar give you. (I never thought I'd find myself complaining about a usability feature that's present in Windows and Linux, but missing from OSX).

        In fact, I started to write my own taskbar, but I was trying to do it in Java (b/c I don't know Obj-C). The Java APIs will get you a lot of stuff, but crucially won't let you talk to the window server to get the open windows. There are some classes that let you register to receive application lifecycle events, but I couldn't get them to work, either. Maybe I should check out Real Basic to see if it can talk to the window server.

        -Esme

    • Re:I Want This For All Apps (Score:4, Informative)

      by 3-State Bit ( 225583 ) on Tuesday February 04, 2003 @07:23PM (#5227613)
      command-tilde switches between open windows of a given app. As long as you only have 3-4 that's okay, but the point is that each of those 3-4 safari windows should be able to hold potentially dozens of tabs.

  • Fluxbox Tabs (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I recently started using the fluxbox wm on other *nixes and I must say that I really like the tabs feature. This is applied to all windows and not just web browsers. Since OS X doesn't have virtual desktops, I would find this even more useful to organize the plethora of windows that I have open at any given time. Check it out at fluxbox tabs [sourceforge.net].
    • Hmmmm. Useing Metakey+Tab to navigate windows has been part of almost every windowing system forever. (windows3.1+,OS9,etc) Except blackbox, which is why fluxbox is so great. I really wish they would add some kind of dock thingy though. Or a selection box like in windows, instead of flipping the window as soon as you hit shift-tab. That would make it easier to use on my sparc and Indy. (slow displays)

  • Holy Crap! (Score:2, Funny)

    by cpsc2005 ( 629087 )
    It's the "Window" Menu with little pictures! Wow, this thing is great!

  • They're Tabs, Jim, (Score:4, Funny)

    by Tumbleweed ( 3706 ) on Tuesday February 04, 2003 @03:32PM (#5225805)
    ...but not as we know them.

  • Not a real good idea (Score:2, Informative)

    by rgraham ( 199829 )
    Apple has stated that developing apps for or that include Safari is not recommended since they anticipate a lot will change between now and when they release vesion 1.0.

  • OS 9 App Switcher (Score:2, Interesting)

    by hnoon ( 595720 )
    It'a kinda like the old drop-down, tear-off App Switcher in Mac Os 8/9.

    The tab interface still needs significant improvement on all the browsers. Quite often I want to close a tab by clicking on the little x but instinctively move my mouse up an extra inch and close the window instead. There go all them pages I opened up.

    The only reason I still use tabs is because of good old ctrl-t and ctrl-f4.

  • AMD logo (Score:2, Insightful)

    by TQBrady ( 548381 )
    What's with the AMD logo on this story?
  • I don't get the need for tabs. If you use the dock to handle your documents and apps, doesn't it provide the same benefit that tabs are supposed to provide. I just don't see how tabs integrate into the greater design philosophy behind the Aqua interface. Looking at Safari as part of a greater integrated UI, the idea of tabs seems remarkably out of place.

  • why tabs? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by euggie ( 642977 )
    IMHO tabs is probably one of the biggest UI blunders out there these days. Sure, it's all fun and games if you are running at 1600x1200, but most luser folks run at 1024x768. At that kind of resolution if you have more than handful of tabs in the same window, the tabs are crunched so closed together you can hardly read the title. So what's the point?

    I don't see the point of this whole Windows-within-a-window deal. It's not like you can actually read anything besides the active tab anyway. If you have Safari's SnapBack, you're not going to need tabs to help you keep track of where you are.

    Besides, if you bothered to read Apple's Safari page at all--or watched the keynote for that matter--you'll know that Safari is built for _speed_. Keep the Netscape/Mozilla-style bloat out.
    • Apple is phasing out their smaller monitors. I would agree that most PC users are at 1024x768 - but not mac users. Last time I checked Apple was not about supporting older tech trends...

      Tabs are faster to switch between and use much less system resorces. Open 10 insteresting pages from a google query in one window...

      Tabbed browsing would not slow down safari once developed fully. Ya, Mozilla and Netscape are bloated - but that has nothing to do with tabs. Ever heard of Chimera?

      Apple would be insane to leave out tabs...

  • I like PITH tabs better than Chimera/Moz tabs! They're just much more efficient/good. Instead of shrinking the text area, it just increases the window, which eliminates the "But if you have more than 4 tabs open they're useless cause you can't read them!" problem. In fact, thanks to PITH, I've ditched Chimera in favor of Safari.

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