Apple backtracks on Safari 4.0 tabs on top, ZFS - Page 5

They moved it inside the url location field for some reason

Interesting points.

So Apple, bring back tabs on top!

Many people properly know much more then i Do. but a few point.

ZFS really is an FileSystem for Server Space. Since Apple is an Consumer company, how do their BEST selling products benefits from it, Macbook, and iPod / iPhone ?

ZFS - is not energy efficient. the amount of CPU cycles and memory required simply doesn't suit the current Consumer Mac.

ZFS is good, very good for servers, but how much revenue does apple earn from Servers?

TimeMachine and Snapshots, there are many other file system. Especially those Log Based FS that seems to have generated much more interest. NILFS2???

Orcale is already working on an GPL version, or GPL equivalent of ZFS, what will they do if they have acquire Sun?

By any means, Apple will simply let ZFS develope by the community while using as little as its own resources as possible. Once it is ready i am sure Server version of Mac OSX will get it

Btrfs is years behind ZFS in development.

This strikes me as a licensing issue depending on the merger and as a technological issue to determine how best to leverage ZFS in Xservers and future hardware that working with XSan makes sense.

i wish Safari made each tab a separate process, a la Chrome.

Tabs on Top would be good too, as long as it looked better than how it was before.

Looking forward to Chrome when it supports Flash!

Exactly. I'm with you there. I'd rather have two 250 GB drives than one 500 GB in my system. The HDD guys at Toshiba should refine the iPod drives and Apple should make adding such a drive (or two) to a laptop real easy. A 1" 200 GB drive with the speed and reliability of today's 2.5" drives should be their goal. And Apple? How about a laptop with 4 HDD slots in the back and ZFS managing their size? One could even start with smaller drive sizes, add more when space is needed and upgrade (the "old" ones) when larger drives become available. You'd never run out of space. Which is the drobo concept - but that is a different story.

I couldn't agree more. The tabs at the top may save some screen space, which would be important if Apple were in the business of selling NetBooks, which they are not.
I have routinely 20-50 browser windows open with a variety of tabs in each. It becomes a NIGHTMARE trying to find a window with tabs on top, because the visual clutter it introduces at the one point in the GUI where you want boring calm, a place to lock onto, and grab/drag.

Similarly, the entire hover button/control thing is an abomination. It started out to "wow" people with silly-ass web page design: "Oh, it's animated..." So what?

The next thing was that buttons became flat and only started to stick out when you were over them, which makes buttons hard to distinguish from window decorations, such as company logos and other fluff.

Now Apple manages to get another step worse, by COMPLETELY HIDING the buttons! There's only one word for this: RETARDED.

The point of controls is that they should STAND OUT as such, you shouldn't have to go on a hunting trip to figure out where controls might be hidden. Have you tried lately to scan your screen surface with the mouse cursor to see of somewhere a control might be animated into existence when you by accident happen to mouse over it? Well, that's going to be your future routine if that sort of stupid thing becomes even more ubiquitous.

Someone needs to remind Apple of the fact that just because you CAN doesn't mean you SHOULD do something.

I urge people to submit feedback on that issue, or else GUIs are going to degrade even further.
I don't care about the cool factor, I care about usability. Period.

Parts of the above post were bolded for comic relief.



Massive Edit:

Do you honestly believe that Apple makes the close widget appear and disappear simply because of the "cool factor"? If so, then I would seriously doubt your ability to rationally evaluate just about anything. It may be a mistake to hide the controls, but the motivation clearly isn't that stupid. If I were to hazard a guess, the controls are hidden because when lots of tabs are in use, very little screen real estate is left over for the page title.

As for location of the tabs, I personally feel that they belong above the address bar but below the title bar. The absence of a true title bar was the real problem with tabs on top, not their location. The motivation for putting them on top would be that then they encompass the address and button bars, both of which apply to the currently active tab.

Tab location doesn't have anything to do with screen real estate. The merging of tabs with the title bar is what dealt with that. Somehow the Mac community seems to be obsfucating the two concepts right now. Hopefully the two separate subjects will become recognized as such by the forum masses. It would lead to much more productive UI discussions

No loss at all. If you seriously use the web as a research tool, you end up with dozens of Safari windows with dozens of tabs each (yes, something like 300 open tabs in 50 windows).
The visual clutter, and the difficulty of visually identifying windows that the tabs on top create renders Safari useless for serious use.
Had it not been for the hidden preferences in Safari 4 beta, tabs on top would have been the death-knell for use of Safari around here.
Now, it's usable again. However the tab close buttons that require mouse hover to even become visible are an abomination, gratuitous use of visual effects where it impairs function.


Referring to Hackintosh NetBooks. Have one myself, since Apple refuses to make a product in that category. But even there I wouldn't want to have tabs on top.


Yes, but I like buttons better. The add bookmarks button which I essentially never use (it's easier to drag a URL right into the bookmark folder in the hierarchy where it should go than to deal with the add button and the drop-down list) is much too prominent, and the stop/reload button overloading I don't like much to begin with, and the new placement is unintuitive and hidden away, unacceptable for the one button I probably use more than any other in Safari.


Just because a feature is there doesn't mean you have to use it. That's like saying TimeMachine uses disk space like crazy. Sure it does, but it's still efficient use for what it's supposed to do.
The whole point of ZFS snapshots would be e.g. to have a faster more efficient implementation of TimeMachine. There's little point in snapshots on a regular drive, but a TimeMachine volume would benefit (as of course if you have a large storage pool with RAID-like redundancy enabled and thus don't even want to bother with a separate TimeMachine volume, which means in such a case TimeMachine could serve as interface using directly the volume's snapshots for backups.
Also, since Snapshots are copy-on-write, the space consumption is quite efficient.


That presumes you use snapshots. There are however other features that a laptop user would benefit from: ZFS has built-in file system compression, which would allow for more efficient disk use, and further it has optional RAID-like distributed parity, which will protect against data loss when individual blocks go bad (can't help you against catastrophic drive failure, of course, but it's better than nothing, and prevents creeping data corruption)


Did you know that even the lowliest of Apple computers is now a multi-core 64-bit CPU with up to 8GB of RAM?
Further, ZFS, like other file system features in the past (HFSX, journaling, ACLs) will show up in Mac OS X Server first (usually still around as a hidden feature in the client version), and then show up with a user-friendly GUI a release later. By the time 10.7 ships, CPU speed and memory consumptions won't even be an issue on NetBooks anymore.


See above


That's why you can enable file system compression.


Of course, but again, ZFS offers many features, most of them optional, so you can create a pool with whatever features are meaningful in a particular context. Hence ZFS is perfectly scalable from single drive laptop use to server use with several dozens of drives in the storage pool.

And yes, ZFS is still being worked on, at least it was as of a couple of weeks ago, when I talked to one of the software engineers who work on it.
If it's dropped from the initial release then either because Apple wants the legal situation around ZFS to clear up a bit before sticking their neck out to be sued, or because they don't have it quite yet where they want to have it for release. In either case, there's a lot of time till September, and like many other things, Apple has released new features in point releases if they weren't fully ready for initial release.

No need to panic. The iPhone App Store makes more money and is thus more news worthy. Apple is all about staying on message, the message being to focus on where the money comes from. Other stuff just silently shows up or "just works" without much pizzaz.

I really want tabs up top, too. You got to easily see all your tabs and not just the one your open on and it didn't consume extra real estate. I was really disappointed that it isn't even an option.

I don't even like that Loading springs out instead of just quietly spinning. Again, it could have been an option.

I don't like this endless cow-towing to the uniformed and uninitiated.

I've embarked on a new crusade... to make Mac forum mongers aware that tabs being above or below the address bar has nothing to do with screen real estate. That's right, tabs take up exactly the same space whether above or below.

What takes up less space is the removal of the window title bar. Or perhaps you could consider it the merging of the title bar with the tab bar.

If we are to provide valuable critiques and feedback to Apple, it would be most productive if we clearly distinguish between the two.

With Safari 4 beta with the tabs on top there was a "plus" button on the top right that you clicked to create the initial and subsequent tabs. In the new Safari 4, the plus button is gone for creating the initial tab, but is there for subsequent tabs once the first one has been made. As it is, I now have to press command-T to create an initial tab. Is there any work around for this?

Hooray! There is someone with some sense at Apple.

The tabs-in-title-bar was absolutely the worst thing to come out of the Safari team, possibly even Apple itself in the past 3 years. It was just wrong on so many levels - crappy design, poor UI, breaks HID guidelines and, most of all, was a PITA to use. Good riddance to bad rubbish, I say.

that I reported than change the tabs location again.

http://www.batstrading.co.uk/book/EMGl/

used to work fine in Safari 3, broke in 4 beta which I reported as soon as it came out. I keenly try the final Safari 4 out only to find its still broken.