Apple's Safari 4 UI changes hint at plans for Snow Leopard - Page 2

uhm... no. tabs are useful for organizing thoughts and keeping tasks separated from one another.
if one were to just use expose or spaces, there would be a lot MORE mouse movement and it would be much harder to keep things organized (moreover you'd end up with a LOT more spaces.

The Tabs on Top thing is still a bit irksome to me. It seems like a good idea but it just feels a little odd, IMO.

If I could just get Safari 4 to actually remember my passwords or at the very least keep me logged in, I would switch from Firefox 3 this second. Is there something I can do about those issues or do I have to wait for the final version?


Looks interesting and promising. At first glance it actually reminds me a little of OS 9's Launcher, with it's tabbed groupings. I suppose that if this is the direction apple goes in, those tabs will have to be spring-loaded, so you can drag 'n' drop stuff in-between tabs and windows.

there is more mouse movement when it comes to re-arranging tabs though, or dragging them into new windows. you can't dismiss that issue, and I use that feature (dragging of tabs) a lot.

not to mention that the visual queue of "I've opened a new tab" is far less dramatic with tabs on top.
I like the tabs on top, but honestly, in the last 24 hours I've thought at least 5 times "wait a minute, I just clicked that link but where the hell is my new tab? ooooooh, right.". Hopefully the new clue will become ingrained with practice.

And those of us stuck using PCs at work would be totally screwed... There's a reason one of the biggest reasons people loved FF over IE was because of tabbed browsing...

My mail keeps quitting on me as well. There must be something in Safari 4 that causes it. I did redo the Mail server info after I could no longer send mails. That is now fixed, but the quitting continues.

Agreed. What we need is a "Tabs Exposé" feature to show us thumbnails of all currently opened tabs, allowing us to click one and be taken to that tab.

I've already sent this in as a suggestion to Apple. If you agree, please do the same.

I agree it wont be hidden but for a different reason. Knowing how much of the page you are seeing and how much you have left to scroll through is a wonderful visual queue. there would need to be a suitable replacement for that queue before they got rid of it.

Also, worth a note: that moving of the "refresh" button is gonna kill me. I mean, I like it and all... but my brain needs rewiring.

The changes are quite impressive. I particularly like "tabs on top" and the possibility that applications can have scroll bars that hide themselves until mouse over. Scrivener already has that in full-page view, and it's marvelous. Making other elements of the UI appear and disappear (if the user wants), would be a good idea. Just be sure and make it optional. At times I use the scroll bar to tell me where I am in a long document.

Suggestions:

1. Make the selected tab in "tabs on top" extremely obvious. Tired, I misread tabs in the current interface. This doesn't fix that problem. Enhance the contrast between the two or at least let us select enhanced contrast as a UI option.

2. Make implementing full-featured tabs so easy, every application developer will want to include tabs. Ditto the other UI changes, so the changes begin to appear across all applications. Apple should never forget that they get more bang for their buck when they make improvements available to every programmer and not just in one Apple application.

3. Give us more full-screen, hide-the-clutter abilities.

4. Integrate Growl-like notifications into OS X. You've waited far to long to do that.

5.. OS-X's text-to-speech is clumsy. It only lets us choose to read an entire document starting at the beginning or selected text. Read starting at the cursor and stop on command would be very useful. Read displaying what is being read in a large-text pop-up window would help those with visual problems and make proofing much smoother. And a real plus would be the ability to read either to a file or into iTunes for later listening.

6.. It's not UI, but the GREP search and replace Adobe added to InDesign is so useful, the same features need to be available in every OS X text application. The basic code must be open source, so it shouldn't take that long. Add it to the text features of OS X and do it cleverly. Build in some useful text clean-up routines, add the ability for users to exchange S&R routines, and include the ability of one S&R to call the next in a series. Given how much computer work is done with text, that'd be a big timesaver and leave hundreds of Windows applications looking impoverished and feature-poor.

So is it safe to assume you open a new window for every single website in Safari?

What about being able to Command-click the title bar and navigate the site's folder structure? Is that still an option?

that better come back... I love that feature in every app that it's in.

Are you clueless because you're a windows user, or a windows user because you're clueless? hmmmm.....

The removal of menu bar in Windows is part of the "looks like Windows" "feature," it's following the new MS paradigm as you can see in Media Player, IE8, the new Office, Vista's explorer, etc. Chrome has also adopted this.

Obviously, the other reason you'd be clicking in the tab bar is to move the window around- oh wait, I'm guessing you probably like to use things in "Maximize" mode. :'/ Hence, the need for the corner in this new implementation.

Mac USERS don't like full screen apps because we're so used to drag and drop. I want my other windows and my desktop to be visible at all times, so I can move items between apps. Full screen makes this impossible.

In some cases, full screen makes sense, but most of the time it's a tremendous waste of space.

You might consider taking this opportunity to learn the keyboard shortcut: ⌘R

Keyboard shortcuts are always faster than mousing to buttons!

Do people really feel the need to move windows around that much? I tend to set my windows in one place, and then they stay there forever. Between Exposé and Spaces, there's almost never any need to actually move a window, particularly not a browser window, unless some lame site decides to resize my whole window without my permission.

Control + Tab will switch tabs for you. No need for the mouse.

At least in IE7, you can still access the menu bar if you need it by pressing the ALT-F key combination to pull up the File menu (or whatever other ALT-x combination you'd normally use to reach the relevant menu). Alternately, you can just press the ALT key by itself to bring the keyboard cursor focus up to the menu bar without opening any individual menu.

Either way, the window reconfigures itself to make the menu bar visible.

All this is consistent with Microsoft's longstanding user interface conventions for accessing Windows (and MS-DOS) menu bars via the keyboard. The only difference is that now the menus are hidden by default whereas they weren't before.

I notice that Safari has the same behaviour - the menu bar is hidden by default, but the ALT key reveals it.

EDIT:
Pleased to see that when you switch the Windows theme over to the Classic (Windows 98) mode, Safari still fits in quite nicely. The toolbar and address bar still stick out though - not quite the right shade of grey. It should use the background colour selection from the Windows control panel. I don't like that the name Safari doesn't appear anywhere in the title bar or the task bar.

You can right click on any toolbar and select "Customize Toolbar." No need for the pill button to do that.

Yeah, I really don't like that either. Usually, I had to access the button to *stop* a refresh, in which case (at least on my installation), it was a small "X" button to the immediate left of the address window. Now there is a small "+" button in the same place, that can't be moved and makes the bookmark. I keep hitting the + instead of the X. It's just way too visually similar.

If Apple just gave us the option to have a separate refresh button, a proper progress indicator, and the ability to remove the ugly "make a tab" button, I'd be happy. In other words, if one could actually just use the customise toolbar dialogue to actually *do* some customisation.

If you remember, in earlier versions of Safari there were a lot more options in that dialogue, now there are just a few extra buttons to add in, and one giant button that is five things mushed into one. The "default set" on the bottom is getting to be almost identical to simply moving that one "button" that is now the address field, search field, refresh button and bookmark button in one, and the "add tab" button is not even a choice.

I know Apple is all about intelligently limiting choice to provide a better experience but this is getting a bit ridiculous IMO. Sticking the bookmark button in there as a mandatory thing has no reason behind it at all, it's not like there isn't yards of space in the toolbar. This is iPhone thinking being applied to the desktop me thinks.

I seriously recommend 1password to free yourself from the tyranny of passwords and user logins forever - it uses keychain so it's not gonna stuff your mac ever! Works with Safari 4 beta as well...

There is a Growl HTML email incompatibility with Safari 4 (see the Growl forum discussion Safari 4 Beta broke GrowlMail). This can be circumvented by turning off the Growl email support (in the Growl preference pane) and deleting the Growl email plugin manually (delete "Library/Mail/Bundles/GrowlMail.mailbundle/" and/or "/User/You/Library/Mail/Bundles/GrowlMail.mailbundle/").

I like Safari 4.0 beta a lot so far and it works as if it's a final version with no problem at all, well probably except that I can't delete mails from Hotmail which I don't use.

While it takes some time to get use to the "tab on top" and I have to be more accurate when I wanna drag a tab instead of the window, I am liking this change. But I think it would be applaudable to add an option in preference for users to enable it or turn it back to where it was.

I use keyboard shortcuts for EVERYTHING (so, yes, I do know that one). except when I'm eating. that's when I use the mouse.

I'm sorry to bring this up, but on seeing those pics, I hear the voice of Steve Jobs in my head.

"Tabs on Top look UGLY"

Steve can't be too well



--

Get Better Soon Steve.

Zoom In, "command-+" works better on this site in particular.

Thank you kindly - I'd like my button back though....

cmd-R (it becomes automatic, like cmd-s etc) , or right click / reload (within any web page except on images or on the tab itself)

Generally speaking I think people are VERY quick to judge it. Live with it for a week and see.
I like the tabs on top though I have to agree it looks messy. But then I didn't like the look of tabs below either. Flipping through the tabs using ctrl-tab is good but it would be even better if it worked like cmd-tab (bar appears listing current apps open)

I couldn't take it anymore - I've put the Tabs back to where they were.

The Refresh button can be returned to the tool bar if you turn off the new 'loading' display.

0 (zero) will get you back to default magnification, just like the Adobe apps and Preview etc.

The zoom is an outstanding feature IMHO

SnapBack seems to be borked under Tiger

Umm, wow. Where to start. First off - quit being a prick... I've been a Mac user my whole life and own one to this day. However, I can't use a mac for work because engineering applications aren't on the Mac...

We don't have any of the new MS software here at work (just like most major companies) because it's crap so I didn't know MS went to that.

Being able to drag the tabs isn't some kind of moving the window stuff it's a FF feature that's been there since version 2.x. You can click anywhere on the tab and move it around - you don't have to pick some corner.

Also, I do use most things in maximize mode - I actually find I use it more on my Mac than anything since I've got Spaces and Expose to show me all the windows. (Note, I almost never move the windows but yeah, I guess that'd be an issue when trying to move the whole thing rather than just a tab). I guess my beef is with this windows on windows crap. No need to be an @ss about it...

People like you are the reason people think Apple users are @$$holes...

The point is that it's presented as a new feature for browsers: "Rather than only bumping up the size of text and destroying the layout of the page, as web browsers have historically offered to do".
In the history of the browsers we know, it may be that a majority of the time, it was only text zooming that took place. But saying that anything has historically been the case within the short period in which browsers have existed implies that the change is (almost) brand new, or that its occurrences are very far and in between, and short-lived.
This feature, to the best of my knowledge, does not meet those criteria.


The only instances where I've read about resolution independence regarding anything OS X-related were linked to the potential move of the whole OS to resolution independence.
As the previous paragraph in the article mentions features likely to come to OS X in the future, I naturally assumed the author implied that a link between "resolution independent Safari" and "resolution independence in OS X".


By the way, in my previous post, I meant "and" instead of "so", hence the juxtaposition of two ideas that do not seem to be cause and effect.

Actually, AppleInsider is the very first site I have come across with Safari 4 that *doesn't* re-size properly. '

I guess the table widths are hard-coded in some way because all I end up with is a column a couple of hundred pixels wide with gigantic text in it.

As someone who has always avoided using tabs in web browsers because the tab bar wastes precious vertical screen real estate... I love the tabs on top concept!

Jim

I can zoom in and out and re-size, no problem. Having said that, I was amazed to see that this page has more than 100 tables in it. The HTML also uses attributes such as cellspacing and padding. Legacy cms, I suppose.

Can someone points out what font it is on the title bar? Thanks!

I don't like the Tabs on Top. It's ugly, cluttered, and makes the ergonomics slightly worse... a lose, lose, lose situation.

By ergonomics I mean that now you have to "reach" further with the mouse pointer to get up to the tab bar than you do in Safari 3. If they would make the keyboard shortcuts for "next tab" and "previous tab" something reasonable the ergonomics might be forgivable. (In Safari 3 switching tabs requires not only hitting 3 keys at once --- command, shift and left- or right-bracket, but also doing so with your right hand that's presumably on the mouse, or at least looking down and repositioning your left hand to the right side of the keyboard -- talk about an inelegant solution.)

This forum doesn't support images but hopefully this cross-posting will work.


that's what I see when i use Cmd +

Tabs on top don't bother me.

If we're to take the metaphor of tabs directly from a physical filing system we'd see that all relevant files would be in their own tab at the very top for easy viewing. I think the argument for/against tabs is simply one of preference and has little bearing beyond.

I certainly think Safari 4 certainly is a bit more space efficient and even with the avg sized monitor moving to over 20" it's still nice to have efficient UI even if that means a wee bit more clutter.

But the default action of opening a link in a new window is driving me crazy. My default action in FF is to open links in a new tab...

Love the zippiness of S4