Linked by Thom Holwerda on Sat 28th Feb 2009 11:47 UTC
Apple A few days ago, Apple surprised everyone by releasing the first beta of Safari 4, the company's latest version of their WebKit browser. While I generally love Safari on the Mac (my browser of choice on that side of the fence), I've never felt as comfortable with it on the Windows side of things. In any case, this latest beta has made a very bold move in the interface department, and I'm sad to say that it's not for the better. Let me explain where it went wrong for Apple.
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Tabs & progress bar
by Nanotube on Tue 3rd Mar 2009 23:14 UTC
Nanotube
Member since:
2008-05-11

I find the new Tabs less comfortable then the old ones.
What bugs me the most is that quite often I click on a Tab just to find the entire window moving. That's of course due to the fact that the new Tabs function also as the caption bar of the browser.

That is completely annoying.

The other thing that I do not like is the removal of the blue progress bar from the address bar. Instead, there is now a spinning wheel indicator that does not show how much loading time is left. I had to manually change this using Unix commands in the Terminal. Now I have the blue progress bar back, but when a page loads the spinning wheel is shown on the right side of the loading Tab which is quite ugly. It looks broken.

I agree with the post writer (Thom). Apple didn't quite think this UI through.

On the other hand, the browser itself is wicked fast and stable. It performs better then Safari3 and crashes are quite rare. Safari3 used to crash on me at least once a day, Safari4 PB crashed only ONCE since install and I installed it the moment it was released to the public.
I guess it's more than a week by now.

In short, it's the best browser on the Mac albeit with some UI issues.
Cheers.

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