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.

Not the first time

[CottonEyedJoe]

Apple has been doing alot of listening lately. The Apple menu was replaced in 10.0 (it was an ornament in the Public Beta), spring loaded folders reappeared in Jaguar to much fanfare. They even listened on the unix side... bash replaced zsh as the default "bourne" shell around the jaguar release (possibly a bit sooner I use ksh and didnt pay that close attention). Now if they would only listen release the "G5"... In whatever form it takes.

Re:Tabs? of course

[sporty]

Did you provide proof of some kind?

Did you use absolute statements? (Bush will definitely go to war vs most likely)

Unless you didn't do those two things, your opinion would be unpopular because you had no authority (proof) or no logical argument. Not that what you said waranted to be modded down, as if mod points were money, but if people don't find reason to agree, they won't agree or just not care :)

Not to nitpick but...

[ubiquitin]

...can the new Safari beta be able to bookmark a set of tabs all at once? Chimera/Navigator does this, so that in the morning I can load about ten top news pages (including slashdot of course) all at once which saves a LOT of time. I'll be sticking with Chimera until Safari gets multi-tab-bookmarks.

Re:force Open New Window to Open New Tab

[klui]

I hope not. Open in New Window should do as it says rather than doing something else.

You're right. Tabbed browsing should be integrated properly and what you've suggested is not what I would consider "done right"; in fact, it would baffle new users even more.

Re:Not yet, mate...

[Erik K. Veland]

Now let me just put you back in a tabbed window here in v62 of Safari.

The comment was in case Apple should care that he was using the leaked beta, which they don't. Well, not much anyways. The "uh" was to hint at that he wasn't really telling the truth.

Re:Tabs? of course

[sporty]

What exactly is wrong with using absolute statements?

Well, because making absolute statements can be very harmful or just wrong. Like saying

Microsoft has done nothing good... or..
Bush will go to war... or..
This company will go bankrupt.

Do you have some fore-knowledge? Also by making absolute statements, you weaken your argument. Or can we now say,

All mp3 users are pirates...
All pregnant teens were irresponsible...
All linux users are zealots...
All geeks are fat and ugly with no social skills

Re:Oh?

[mgaiman]

The difference, though, is that on Windows you have the Taskbar at the bottom of the screen that allows you to switch back and forth between windows easily. You only really need to have tabs when there isn't an easy way to switch between windows. Tabs allow you to easily have a running list of all open browser windows and to switch back and forth, something that the MacOS window cascade has difficulty with.

Please don't get me wrong, I love OSX with a passion, but this is just an area where the windows taskbar shines over the dock. It doesn't happen often.

Tabs are essential to the mac browsing experience in my mind.

Couldn't they think of anything better?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well the site is hosed, but while we're on the subject, is there any better solution than tabs?

When you think about tabs, the history list, SnapBack, and bookmarks, you can see they are all a bit similar. They all take you to different pages. Tabs are treated specially. Maybe they shouldn't be?

Different ways to think about tabs:

* Per-window, per-session Bookmarks that retain form entries and other state.

* "SnapForward" .. pages you want to jump to in the future, rather than the past.

* nonlinear per-window history list .. again, tabbed windows are sites you want to add to the list, so you can visit them in the future.

I guess what I'm saying is, I wish Apple or someone would think about the "essence" of tabbed browsing, and come up with something *better*.

And the "tabbed browsing is MDI is evil" folks might even like it. Hint: think about each browser window representing a *browsing session* rather than a *web page*, and it will go down easier. (As if web browsers are poster children for GUI design in the first place).

Maybe Apple thought about it, and decided that tabs were best because they were familiar to people. But that's not Apple's style.

Now I'm not complaining about Safari specifically, in fact when the official Safari with tabs comes out, I will have little reason to use any other web browser, but I can't help thinking the tabbed browsing interface can be made even better.

Re:Windows Ho!

[NaugaHunter]

Umm... no. They wrote a Windows interface for the iPod because a) it is a relatively simple, specialized file manager and b) it sold iPods. Apple is a hardware company. The iLife apps exist as a bonus to Mac users, an incentive to upgrade or switch to new Macs. It costs money and time to port software, and you know that iPhoto and iMovie are heavily invested in Cocoa, Quartz and other Mac-exclusive properties. Porting even just iPhoto would involve porting all the exporting/publishing options, plus support hundreds of camera/hardware combinations. They do not have the software engineers to do any of these ports, which would in the end on deter people from buying Macs since the price difference with PC's is much more than the $100 or even $150 you suggest.

Given the overall progress on the iApps, not to mention Safari and OS X in general, I personally think they are managing their development projects pretty well. They are riding out the recession better than most companies, and the more distinct software solutions they develop will make their products look even better when the recession ending combines with Windows DRM backlash. OK, that last was an unprovoked slam, but it is something to be aware of when looking at the big picture. Apple has said and acted in varying degrees that they want to give customers tools, not restrictions, and I think they just keep subtly positioning themselves to jump when the axe falls.

Of course, that's just my hop^H^H^Hopinion. I could be wrong.

Re:Thinksecret down?

[b3uk]

or simply /.ed?

I have it and its blazen

[Anonymous Coward]

Luv goes to the KDE developers for this beautiful browser.

Re:Tabs? of course

[Kplusplus]

Apple has always included the most requested features by users. That is the reason why the Mac OS is so good in the first place, it has what users want in it. If you request any feature in any Apple product enough you do get it.

How you think this is in any ways like Windows is beyond me. Tabs are not in IE, neither on the Mac nor on windows. Tabs are a Mozilla/Opera invention, much better on Mozilla's side. They were improved in practice in Chimera with quick key shortcuts to navigate from tab to tab and Safar has inherited these. Try Command-Shift-Left, Command-Shift-Right, they will cycle right and left through your open tabs.

However, if you prefer a company that doesn't listen to its customers, and would rather do what they want then waht users obviously want, then I don't see how you could like Apple, the company, not its computers.

Re:Tabs? of course

[Alan Partridge]

wrong

the MacOS was good because it was designed by people who CARED. they cared about efficiency, user feedback and aesthetics. MacOS is such a creaky UI because it's in the business of capturing users from Windows, so it aims to emrace UI conventions that they're familiar with - Apple seems to think that this is the way forward, I think it's a step back.

To paraphrase Akio Morita "why would we ask consumers what to make? They don't know what's possible."

Re:Tabs? of course

[Kplusplus]

THe MacOS is still all those things except not some things are different then before. You can't possibly think Apple doesn't care since I personally think that the changes in Mac OS X all make sense.

Efficiency? 10.2 is super optimized, and as to UI efficiency I have seen nothing that would suggest that X is less efficient in this regard. Hell most of the time its faster with things like global window switch keys( Cmd-~ ), and applicatino switching ( Cmd-Tab ), add to that the familiar Mac OS way of doing things.

As to familiarity with windows. Almost all the things you could argue are windowsesque are from NeXT and thier implementation of them predate Window's.

Apple has always thought that the user is more important since they will be using it all the damn time. I don't have a qoute unfortunately.

Re:Not the first time

[CottonEyedJoe]

I didnt say it was the default shell I said it was the default "bourne" shell.

Re:Tabs? of course

[Kplusplus]

9.2.2 is less stable than 9.1 first of all and that is because its only a build to appease the demands of Mac OS X. As to optimization, 9.2.2 is the result of over 10 years of optimization and computers growing magnitudes faster over that time. 10.2 is 2 years worth of optimizations, and the amout of optimizations that have already been made more than surpass those for 9.

QuickDraw meets its older and wiser brethren Quartz and Quartz Extreme.
The organization is the same if not better.
System Folder = /System
Applications Folder = /Applications
Apple Extras in /Applications
Users = /Users
Yes the /Library I can't sompare to 9 but it is much better than fropping stuff directly into te sytem folder since all the non essentla and third party stuff sit outside of the folder of stuff your computer needs in order to run.

And Copland could not have possibly been great besides OpenDoc which was a nice idea, there is nothing much that it would have bought us since we would still be basically using 9. And if you think Apple has trouble starting from a base like NeXTStep 4.4 what if they did try fro mscratch I think there would be a lot more bitching all around. I just don't think Apple could afford that misstep.

Apple: THANK YOU for listening, and PLEASE,

[3-State Bit]

remember to allow us to bookmark tab-groups.

Tabbed bookmarks are live-and-die for me.

PLEASE remember to allow us to bookmark groups of tabs!

I'm writing on Safari now, but if I wanted to get serious work done I would have to open Chimera (where all my bookmarks are, almost all of them tab-groups).

Thanks a million for listening to us!

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Tabs? of course

[fault0]

Uh, what the fuck? Internet Explorer doesn't have tabs. Tabs are as tied to Windows as it's tied to Linux or MacOS.

Re:but there _is_ an easy way

[tapin]

to switch between all windows of the current application in OSX, Cmd-` cycles through them.

If only that were the case.

One of my usability peeves with OS X: Cmd-tab switches between applications, not windows. That's fine. Cmd-backtick switches between windows in the current app. That's fine too, even though I have to say I was more used to alt-tab doing both for me in other OSes.

The problem arises when trying to keyboard-navigate to windows of an app that are minimized to the dock

Unfortunately, cmd-backtick doesn't "switch between all windows of the current application". It only switches between all non-minimized windows of the current application.

Now, given that I don't have multiple or virtual desktops, I'm forced to hide unused apps and minimize windows of apps that I'm using, just to keep my desktop reasonably organized. And it still doesn't work too well. Ah well.

Re:Oh?

[Peer]

The difference, though, is that on Windows you have the Taskbar at the bottom of the screen that allows you to switch back and forth between windows easily

Well, Microsoft(R) changed that in Windows(R) XP. So, they already found out that is _not_ an easy way to switch between 3 apps and 13 browser windows.

Re:Argument for tabs

[scrutty]

Windows cause quartz to maintain a buffer proportional to their display area for drawing into. Views do not.