Safari Beta Leaked, With Tabs

ollie_ob writes "Seems a bit too good to be true: Apple listening to its community and implementing the features most requested? Apparently a build (v62) of Safari has been leaked into the wild, and has tabs -- though not fully implemented yet -- and primitive support for autocomplete in forms. The Think Secret rumor site has the scoop." It is not merely a rumor, I've confirmed it. It works nicely, too, in a brief test. Then I, uh, deleted the copy I looked at.

Hooray!

[tamen]

Tabs ho!

You need to activate the debug menu. While Safari is not running, write this in the terminal:
defaults write com.apple.Safari IncludeDebugMenu 1
Start Safari (Beta .62) and choose "Tabbed Browsing" in the debug menu.
Command-T will open a new tab as will right clicking on a link and choose "Open link in new tab". Command-W will close the tab you are currently using. Command-shift-right/leftarrow wil choose the prev/next tab.
One thing though, tabs slows down the gui, not page-load-time, but it takes longer to switch between tabs than to switch between windows. Also, if you have, say, 5 tabs in one window and are looking at the last (the one most to the right) command-shift-rightarrow will not cycle you back to the first tab. Another thing is that Safari sometimes closes the whole window instead of just the tab when you press command-W.
Ive got only small complaints, Im very impressed they got it working so well already. Cant wait for the final.

Tabbing is a nice feature, but Ive kinda got used to not using tabs after shifting to Safari. well, Ive just got to get used to tabbing again ;)

Re:Hooray!

[sapporo]

Cmd-click will open a link in a new tab
Cmd-Shift-click will open a link in a new tab in the background
Cmd-Option-click will open a link in a new window
Cmd-Option-Shift-click will open a link in a new window in the background

How did I find out? When you hover over a link, Safari shows you what it would do if you clicked that link in the status bar. Very convenient.

Argument for tabs

[elliotj]

According to an off-the-cuff test I performed a few days ago, tabbed browsing can cut your RAM requirements in half and greatly speed up your system.

On my Mac I opened Chimera and filled up the window with as many tabs as it would allow (16 in a single window). All windows displayed the Slashdot mainpage. My Slashdot prefs are set to show all stories from all sections.

I checked the system usage in the Process Viewer app:

Navigator %CPU 9.00 %Memory 11.20

I then closed all the windows and did the same thing, this time opening 16 SEPARATE windows. Again with Slashdot's mainpage loaded in each.

Process Viewer showed:

Navigator %CPU 9.20 %Memory 22.40

So, according to this unscientific off-the-cuff test, you cut your RAM requirements in half by using tabs. YMMV.

I noticed this the other day when I opened over 50 different images in different windows. My Mac almost ground to a halt. I then opened the same images in tabs (in only a few windows ... again Chimera limits you to 16 tabs per window), and my performance was great.

So, to all those who think tabbed browsing is purely a matter of personal preference, I suggest that there is at least a reasonable performance based argument for it.

to activate the Safari debug menu, do this:

[ubiquitin]

1. Quit Safari.
2. Open a terminal and type:
defaults write com.apple.Safari IncludeDebugMenu 1
3. Relaunch Safari.

Re:Not to nitpick but...

[tamen]

No, notyet. But as you say yourself, this is a beta, and not even a public (though it might seem like it) beta at that.
Im sure there will be bookmark-groups when it is publicly released.

Re:Everyone?

[ollie_ob]

To prevent massive Slashdotting I'm not going to link directly to the beta from here, but if you go to Dave Hyatt's weblog and have a look at the comments for the most recent story, there's apparently a working link there. Ollie

Re:Upside Down Tabs???

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, that's because "Safari's tabs are attractively designed and fit with the platinum interface motif." The article then describes what you noticed: "The highlighted tab has the appearance of hanging down from the toolbar above it." Not exactly intuitive or logical, but damn, doesn't it look great? Gotta love when companies put expensive shiny brushed metal front plates on their products.

Re:Everyone?

[transient]

He speaks the truth. I just downloaded it from there.

Re:Argument for tabs

[moof1138]

No. This is not guesswork. A window is inherently a much more heavyweight entity than a view inside a window, and will necessarily consume more RAM. Take a look at the cocoa docs for all the components of a NSWindow. Assuming that the tabs are subclassed NSView, take a look at what is involved there. Beyond that, windows are double buffered, have border transparencies/shadows and other RAM-hogging aspects not associated with a view. In OS X, more windows inherently means more RAM. If a window with three tabs ate as much RAM as three separate windows in Safari, that would indicate extremely crappy coding, and I guarantee you I would not use the browser based on that fact.

Re:Oh?

[troc]

They are using a leaked "internal" build of Safari, not the public beta you can download from Apple.

HTH

Troc

Re:This is Great News

[entrox]

Care to back up your claims with a few facts/numbers instead of pulling things out of your back?
Here are some numbers from my machine (768MB RAM/128MB VRAM):

New Safari opened: ~9MB.
Slashdot loaded: ~13MB.
New window opened: ~16MB.
Apple page opened: ~18MB.
New window opened: ~21MB.

So what do we see? A new window takes up around 3MB. Is this "uneconomical", like you say? No, I rarely have more than 4-5 windows open so this is merely a drop in the water. Memory is cheap these days you know...

Re:Oh?

[prinzip]

Just to point out:

- Mozilla run on windows, many people use it and it have tabs

and more important:

Apple didn't create tabs idea, it came from Mozilla, then from Linux And Windoz...

Re:Oh?

[ptaff]

If you could open more than 4 windows without making the OS crash, the taskbar would become so cluttered that it would make it unusable.

I also despise the XP-way of putting all IE windows on the same taskbar 'button': 2 steps that could be made into 1 with a tab.

My 0,02$

clarificiation

[X_Caffeine]

In Mozilla browsers, when a link is defined like [a href="blah" target="_new" ], clicking on this link opens the new page in a new window.

When a user is using tabbed browsing, they are aggregating all of their windows into a single window. Clicking on "_new" links in tabbed browsing mode should open documents into new tabs, not new windows.*

"Right-clicking" and selecting "open in a new tab" is not an acceptable solution because it is unintuitive, not all users even have right-buttons (don't tell me to explain keyboard shortcuts to my grandma), and if a user in unsure of which links open into new windows and which ones are normal links, they need to adjust to a habit of right-click/open-new-tabbing EVERY link they encounter. I think you can agree that's pretty absurd behavior.

*an exception might be made for links that trigger new windows with specified sizes (like those small comments windows many blogs use)

Re:Everyone?

[Anonymous Coward]

as of 10:00am central time today (monday), the link works. I have tabs in safari baby! yeah!

Safari 4 All

[Anonymous Coward]

Get your Safari Beta (with tabs!) HERE:

http://www.domestikalien.com/imagenes/safari_v62 .d mg

origin of tabbed browsing?

[Tumbleweed]

I thought it came from Opera first?

Re:What about Keychain integration?

[brarrr]

i started using safari v62 w/ tabs on saturday... and it has keychain integration in its infancy - it asks for permission to decrypt the correct passwords when entering sites, but does not place them in the fields as required. so its coming, but slowly.

v62 is the first i've started using safari, and am liking it about the same as chimera for now. once there are prefs to open tabs in teh background, and a way to open up multiple sites in different tabs at the same time, i'll switch for good.

another benefit of the debug menu is being able to specify which browser you are represented as - so going to wellsfargo.com i can say i am MSIE and they let me use the site.

but there _is_ an easy way

[-ndi-]

You only really need to have tabs when there isn't an easy way to switch between windows.

Don't get me wrong, I am all for tabs, but there is an even easier way to switch between all windows of the current application in OSX, Cmd-` cycles through them. This may be common knowledge, I just thought I'd point it out for completeness...

Re:Hooray!

[sergeantmudd]

You don't need even the debug menu unless you wanna turn tabs on and off on the fly. (Which you might because clicking on a link opens a new tab, not a new window, which some might now like in all cases) In terminal just type

"defaults write com.apple.safari TabbedBrowsing 1"

Re:Now, if they would only release Linux?

[Kplusplus]

Actually... You can you your /etc/groups and /etc/passwd files to create users in X. All you have to do is go to /Applications/Utilities/Directory\ Access.app

Then check BSD Configuration Files on.
That is all since lookupd is configured by default like so: Cache FF DNS NI DS

Notice that Flat Files show up before NetInfo.

By turning this on you also get /etc/fstab, and /etc/hosts not being ignored. Happy UNIXing in Mac OS X.

P.S. This only exists because people like yourself complained during 10.1 and Apple added it for 10.1 so people whenever you feel something is subpar or could be better, http://www.apple.com/macosx/feedback/. Let Apple know.

Mirrors, md5sums, and some notes...

[phyxeld]

It's for real. I'm writing this in it now. I'm a bit paranoid, so I scoured around for multiple coppies before running anything. I've gotten it from all three of these urls:

http://www.domestikalien.com/imagenes/safari_v62.d mg [domestikalien.com]
http://www.jfedor.org/misc2/safari_v62.dmg [jfedor.org]
http://www.soopah256.com/~jonathan/safari_v62.dmg [soopah256.com]

and they all had the same md5sum (eca1fe732e242786744edf5e434b2330). The disk image file itself has an apple liscense, so I think this really is an official apple beta.

Tabs are off by default, but can be enabled in the Debug menu. Once enabled, cmd-T makes a new tab, as does cmd-clicking on a link. I'm a big fan of chimera's cmd-[ and cmd-] for moving between tabs; mozilla's lack of support for those shortcuts has always bugged me. Safari v62 doesn't use those keys, but it does let you move between tabs with cmd-left or cmd-right (arrow keys). Yay safari! I wonder when we'll see the real release of this beta...

command ~

[Dokushoka]

Faster than a mouse, you can switch pages, and without the clutter of tabs.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Tabs vs. Windows? Bah

[Anonymous Coward]

Um...if you'd been paying attention, you'd have seen that there is a shortcut. Cmd-Shift-Right/Left will switch back & forth between tabs (at least, I believe that's correct; I'm not at my home computer with Safari v62 right now to check).

Dan Aris

Re:Argument for tabs

[scrutty]

Your point is correct. I was really just pointing out a simple linear relationship between quartz top level windows and memory consumption that might explain the "more windows use more RAM" observation, made higher up the thread. Certainly a window consumes more of your free memory than just that occupied by an initialised instance of NSWindow.

My solution is too cram as much RAM into OS X machines as they can take :-)