Apple’s Safari web browser will soon be equipped with a tabbed browsing feature, the notoriously precise Think Secret has confirmed. New pre-release betas that are being tested include this capability (after activating it from a debug menu), which is one of the most anticipated additions to the upstart browser.
Safari to Get Tabbed Browsing
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Cool. I wish I had a Mac to try out Safari with
. Nevertheless, even as a PC user, the ongoing Safari development makes me very happy: all those backports into KDE.org’s KHTML tree make Konqueror better and better. By the time KDE hits 3.2, I probably won’t use Mozilla/Phoenix anymore.
finally…
Since tabbed browsing is so useful, why limit it to browsers. Perhaps apple should come out with a general api so tabs can be used with any application dealing with multiple documents such as text files, word documents, images, etc..
in a few years when apple gets done with fixing the problems in it. then we can all have lighting fast browsers no matter the platform.
they are.
But it depends on the browser. I use them quite a bit when I’m using Galeon on GNU/Linux, or Chimera on OSX. I don’t use them very much in Mozilla/Netscape, because I don’t like the way that they work there.
Concerning tabs in Safari, I don’t like the behaviour of the tab-complete. They’ve set it up so that the autocomplete works like IE (broken), and not like Mozilla (the right way). When I’m typing in a URL, I don’t want to have to use the arrow keys or the mouse.
Well, it’s not only Apple working on KHTML. That’s a bit unfair to the KDE people. In the past weeks, Apple picked up a lot of things from the KDE tree (like a whole new CSS parser), and vice-versa. It’s a combined effort, and that’s a really good thing in my book.
This is really good for Safari. Had it not been for the superior rendering quality (if not speed) of Gecko, I’d leave Chimera/Camino/Navigator when tabs truly are part of Safari.
Now all we need is cookie support!
I think that tabs could be one of the single biggest reasons people leave IE for browsers like Safari and Mozilla. It was the case for me. Mozilla is not as fast as IE on my XP machine, but the convience of having one window open with 10 tabs instead of a stack of IE windows cluttering my desktop more than makes up for the difference in speed.
To be fair, there are hacks that will give you tabs in IE, but they aren’t easy to find and the ones I have installed have been much less than impressive.
Well I fear that the latest I.E. will have tabbed browsing capabilities (theres no reason not to, thought don’t expect things such as pop-up blockers) and it would hurt any non-computer saavy people who don’t currently use IE exclusivly for the tab feature. BTW, people are mentioning galeon, its worth noting that theres a new gnome browser using gecko called <a href=”http://epiphany.mozdev.org/“>epiphany
I’m still sticking with Chimera.
[i]Well I fear that the latest I.E. will have tabbed browsing capabilities (theres no reason not to, thought don’t expect things such as pop-up blockers) and it would hurt any non-computer saavy people who don’t currently use IE exclusivly for the tab feature. BTW, people are mentioning galeon, its worth noting that theres a new gnome browser using gecko called <a href=”http:// epiphany.mozdev.org/”>epiphany [i]
and epiphany looks like this http://signal.fearmuffs.net/Screenshot3333.png and the new site for epiphany is due any day now.
and guess what we’re getting a snapback like function soon ;P
What I really hate from these GTK+ apps is that I can’t put on the same “line” the icons and the url widget. The way it is now, we have the icon line having lots of unused space and we have no way to move the URL line next to the icon one. I have the exact same gripe with Nautilus.
I hope the Epiphany devs read this and put the url widget next to the icons, because with the tabs, you already lose a lot of screen space, and we all know that documents are long, not wide.
What I really hate from these GTK+ apps is that I can’t put on the same “line” the icons and the url widget. The way it is now, we have the icon line having lots of unused space and we have no way to move the URL line next to the icon one. I have the exact same gripe with Nautilus.
I hope the Epiphany devs read this and put the url widget next to the icons, because with the tabs, you already lose a lot of screen space, and we all know that documents are long, not wide.
you mean like this ;P
http://signal.fearmuffs.net/screen44.png
I looove Safari and now I’m getting the one feature I really like about Mozilla. I’m stoked!
Yes, I meant like this. But how do you do that? Nautilus doesn’t let me do it (I don’t have Epiphany installed to try this btw). Is it coded like that on a per app basis?
Yes, I meant like this. But how do you do that? Nautilus doesn’t let me do it (I don’t have Epiphany installed to try this btw). Is it coded like that on a per app basis?
well it’s fairly easy in epiphany.. i couldn’t get it into the same position in nautilus so i put nautilus location bar at the bottom.. I’ll have to file a bug on this…
I am trying to build Epiphany right now, but it is not easy, because Red Hat 8.1 doesn’t have gnome-common which is needed to build gnome apps from the CVS. I downloaded a gnome-common from the gnome CVS and installed it, but when I try to make the app, it asks me for mozilla-gtkmozembed. Where do I find that one? Google didn’t reveal any download/CVS locations in the exact.
Wow, looks nice, must be GTK2 (not installed on my system) that makes it look like that. And which window manager/desktop environment are you using? Looks pretty darn nice. Just wondering. Sorry for the off topicness.
I doubt that the moderator wants a link to where to download the new beta posted, but apparently the moderators of Macrumors.com don’t care. So if you head on over there, someone has posted a link in the forum
Got it, it is part of the mozilla-nspr-devel-1.2.1-0_rh8_xft.i386.rpm which is not part of Red Hat.
Note to self : remember this for the next time someone tries to pull “Debian isnt the only one with apt, and they work just as well!”. I think not. Not trying to push debian here, just taking a stab at apt for non-Debian distros (yes there’s a difference).
What’s the difference? Red Hat has a reason why gnome-common is not included ( http://lists.gnome.org/archives/gnome-hackers/2002-October/msg00103… ), as for the devel of nspr is just not included, maybe for space contstraints on the CD. In this specific issue, Debian is no better or worse than Red Hat. It is just that Red Hat has space constrains and they have to pick what they should include and what not, Debian is not a company to care about all that, they just throw them to the apt repository.
The simple fact of the matter is, you went hunting around for RPMs, did you not?
Not really, I got gnome-common from the CVS directly, the only RPM I downloaded was from Mozilla.org. But this is normal, because Epiphany is not an application that is released. I downloaded its CVS version, not the .tar.gz they offer.
If that was Debian, it would be the same thing, I would just need to find a *specific* nspr-devel package, which might NOT be part of apt yet! In other words, both platforms have their goods and their bads.
Opera has the best tabbing system Ive used, in particular because it lets you structure them vertically.
Safari had a great chance to use a drawer to put tabs in.
I personally find that vertical tabs are much better,
a) you can have a lot more tabs open and still be able to read the title’s
b) most web pages present information vertically, and Im loath to loose a whole extra line of text, while they make horizontal layouts targeted at 800px wide, so on a wider screen there is lots of space for tabs.
>Safari had a great chance to use a drawer to put tabs in.
I saw a mockup of this for Safari. It just doesn’t work well and it is NOT intuitive at all, the mini-pages are not clean enough to let you know which page is which, and also, this solution takes way more screen space. The traditional tab widgets are more efficient for this job.
I too really like the tabs in Opera. When I was using Phoenix, I didn’t really use the tabs feature, as it seemed more out of place to me .. kind of like an afterthought that was thrown in at the last minute. Same holds true with mouse gestures, they work much better in Opera, IMHO.
After having used Phoenix & Opera, besides the mail program, I don’t understand why anyone would still be running Mozilla?
Tabbed browsing is the best thing since sliced bread, I have beem running it since Mozilla added it (.93 I think) and I love it under win2k XP and Linux. Chimera for mac has tabbed browsing. But Macs only have one button which limits the features usefulness. Maybe now apple will finally add the second button and scrolling wheel mouse Macs have needed for years.
Or maybe you’ll do yourself a favor and go buy a better mouse ? If you spent all that money for a Mac why not buy a $30-40 a nice mouse.
>>Or maybe you’ll do yourself a favor and go buy a better mouse ? If you spent all that money for a Mac why not buy a $30-40 a nice mouse.<<
Not so easy on a laptop. Computers shouldn’t come with hardware that the user throws out and replaces first thing. If apple doesn’t come out with mouse options in a year there will be others making replacements for the laptops.
Since tabbed browsing is so useful, why limit it to browsers. Perhaps apple should come out with a general api so tabs can be used with any application dealing with multiple documents such as text files, word documents, images, etc..
It’s called Multiple Document Interface (MDI) and Windows is moving away from it. It’s not very good from a usability point of view.
by getting Dave Hyatt to the development staff of safari, Apple got both: KHTML and Gecko. It was crystal clear that Hyatt is going to bring many features of Gecko to the Safari project.
Apple wanted to have the rendering engine from KHTML and the features of Gecko right from the beginning.
The sad thing is, that because of the different licensing of KHTML and Mozilla Hyatt says (http://www.mozillazine.org/weblogs/hyatt/archives/2003_02.html#0025…) that he is not able to let Mozilla profit from the new features he created in Safari. I think this has to be corrected soon, cos both projects should profit from each other.
It’s called Multiple Document Interface (MDI) and Windows is moving away from it. It’s not very good from a usability point of view.
@danlu: Could you substantiate that claim a little. If it’s not good, why is everyone so interested in tabs in the first place. I know that some implementations of MDI are horrible. But that doesn’t mean everyone should jump on the “MDI is BAD” bandwagon.
Nice to see Safari get such a useful feature that so many people want. If it had session management I’d probably use it, rather than sticking with Opera on Windows or Galeon in Linux.
Tabbing isn’t the same as Windows MDI. The main problem with MDI is that as it contains all the windows of an app into one large window so you can’t mix windows of different apps easily. With tabs you can simply not use them and have individual windows if you don’t like tabs. Even if tabs were a feature of every app, I could still put windows from different apps side by side, or spread photoshop windows over my two monitors.
‘After having used Phoenix & Opera, besides the mail program, I don’t understand why anyone would still be running Mozilla?’
I can:
– Opera’s rendering engine isn’t as nice as Gecko (including version 7—I’ve even found bugs in version 7 that weren’t there in 6. And don’t blame buggy HTML. I read the damn code, I used the W3C CSS/HTML validators on it).
– Opera is propriatory(sp).
– Opera doesn’t do tabbed browsing. You either get MDI or SDI, but you can’t mix and match. When I use Opera, I feel like I’m in a cage. I get the same problem as with IE, except that in the browser window, not the taskbar. I like to group my windows by subject. (This may’ve changed in version 7; I didn’t check it out much.)
(Aside re: my last point: I want an extra button on my mouse so I have one that opens in the same window, ignoring any idiot webdesigner’s js/target=”_blank”, one that opens in a new tab, one that opens in a new window, and one that opens the menu. I know they exist but I dunno if you can convince Galeon to do it. I’d be happy just to get rid of the idiot webdesigner’s forcing me to view their webpage in a new window. Argh! The only feature of Mozilla I want to see in Galeon. *goes to check out Epiphany and see if they have it.*)
Can someone (Eugenia) explain me why, usability-wise, tabbed browsing is so useful?
Oops… I forgot a ‘maybe’ and a question mark… let me rephrase it:
Can someone (Eugenia maybe?) explain me why, usability-wise, tabbed browsing is so useful?
Tabs are useful because it is a more convenient way of organizing windows on a screen. If I am reading 3 different webpages and I wanna switch between them, I have to reach for the mouse, find alittle corner of a window sticking out, click on it and reposition the window. Tabs streamline switching between windows. As for saving screen space, I think people greatly overexaggerate those benefits, before Safari had tabs I would just leave windows behind other windows, it was harder to switch between windows, but not that much harder.
Is Opera really a tabbed interface?
I’m using Opera 6.05 (paid for too!) and I don’t think it has tabbed browsing: what it does have is an MDI interface with a “Window Bar” more like a toolbar than anything. I realise that the difference between this and a tabbed interface is small for the way that Opera have designed it (to most intents and purposes, it works in a very similar way), but difference it is.
btw – with the tabbed interface, you cannot resize windows on an individual basis: only the whole lot (which isn’t a bad thing imho). I must confess to preferring the “pure” tabbed interface of Galeon myself – I like the “window close” buttons being on each tab which can reduce the amount of clicking I want, whereas with Mozilla, I have to focus the window before I can close it: annoying on a struggling computer!
MDI interfaces are not desired for a number of reasons: if the user has a large monitor or more than one, then the MDI interface forces the user to using only one screen. I understand that it is easier for the programmer, but not so good for the user.
And I think that MS is trying to drop the MDI interface gradually too. They certainly aren’t too happy with it: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dn… (near the bottom).
It’s quite simple. For it’s file formats. The bookmarks are stored in a non standard way and as of yet you don’t have a straighforward way of importing your Opera mail into other clients if the need arises tomorrow.
Mayuresh
“nonstandard” it might well be, but it’s easily parsed, which is what’s really important. I have both Opera2HTML and Opera2XBEL software on my homepage, so I can guarantee you that your bookmarks won’t be “locked in”. From XBEL you can go to basically anything.
The mail in Opera 6 (don’t run 7 yet) is basically “mailbox” (plain text listing all mail /w headers) — with added files for index which would be useless for importing anyway — which again, is easily moved elsewhere.
I’m glad Safari is going to have Tabbed Browsing and perhaps Forms Autofill. Beyond continuing to make it faster and bug free, I hope there isn’t too much feature creep.
I doubt IE would have tabbed browsing. Reason: Microsoft have been pushing SDI for a very long time, tabbed browsing is a step towards MDI.
Hi,
it’s done 🙂
My Safari Wish List with many pictures & comments is online!
http://www.robs-world.de/software/safari
Don’t miss this, 🙂
Rob
“Perhaps apple should come out with a general api so tabs can be used with any application dealing with multiple documents such as text files, word documents, images, etc..”
They already do, it is called an NSTabView
“http://developer.apple.com/techpubs/macosx/Cocoa/Reference/Applicat…
Every OS I know has a tab’ed view of one kind or another.
because I open new links in them, continue reading the current page, thenn switch to the next one. Or, I open a bunch of links at once, and read each one as the next one is being downloaded. Also, instead of multiple windows, which like to change their position, my browser stays in place and I just close the tab after im done reading it.
In Opera 7 you can have multiple main MDI windows, set windows to always maximise and it works like any other tabbed browser. Personally I much prefer MDI as I like being able to have different sized windows, without cluttering the taskbar. I also like to be able to place windows side by side without having to mess about separating a tab from it’s window.
The crippled and bug ridden implementation of MDI in Opera 7 is the reason I’m posting this with Opera 6.05.
How about a version of Safari to run on mac 8.6 – 9.1?
Mark, I wouldn’t expend any energy hoping for that.
Steve Jobs announced at WWDC 2002 that (a) all development on, or development of applications for, non MacOS X systems had ceased at Apple (except as far as needed to get Classic working), and (b) that as far as developers were concerned, it was time for them to move on to MacOS X.
Any Apple development on Safari or anything else for systems before MacOS X runs directly counter to the message they have been trying desperately to get out for the past year: “Get off MacOS, get into MacOS X!”
I hate losing screen real estate to geeky add-ons like tabs.
Ha, that is funny, “geeky add-ons”, that is like saying, “I hope I don’t have to *Double* click because that is such a waste of a click.” Ignorance is bliss eh?
Ha, that is funny, “geeky add-ons”, that is like saying, “I hope I don’t have to *Double* click because that is such a waste of a click.” Ignorance is bliss eh?
What’s wrong with not wanting to double click? I only ever single click on my computer… If you want to execute a button, you click it, not double click it. Why should icons be any different? (And before you ask: if you want to select text, you drag over it or double/tripple click it, not click it. Why should icons be any different?)
@ Dan Brown:
I hate losing screen real estate to geeky add-ons like tabs.
If you never use tabs, they’re not there. Just don’t use them, and no screen real estate is lost.
@ Felix:
What’s wrong with not wanting to double click? I only ever single click on my computer… If you want to execute a button, you click it, not double click it. Why should icons be any different? (And before you ask: if you want to select text, you drag over it or double/tripple click it, not click it. Why should icons be any different?)
Text doesn’t respond to single clicks, therefore you can double click it. Icons OTOH usually have two actions; selection and execution, therefore requiring several click methods. And I’d rather not have to execute every icon I only wish to select.
Felix:
What’s wrong with not wanting to double click? I only ever single click on my computer…
Neither do I… because I have a Logitech mouse which allows me to map a single click of the middle button to perform the same action as a double-click of the left button.
Jon:
Opera has the best tabbing system Ive used, in particular because it lets you structure them vertically.
Amen! I used to own a laptop that had a wide aspect ratio (think I ran it at something odd like 1024×600) and Opera allowing you to have it’s taskbar thingy on the right/left side was a godsend.
Stolen from Slashdot:
———-
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.
———-
but I’d still like new tabs to open in the background by default.
Haven’t dl’ed so I haven’t tested.
Iggy Drougge:
Text doesn’t respond to single clicks, therefore you can double click it.
Links do. How do you select links? Do you execute them to select them? I drag over them myself. Same deal for icons.
StephenB:
Neither do I… because I have a Logitech mouse which allows me to map a single click of the middle button to perform the same action as a double-click of the left button.
Sounds needlessly complex when you could tell your filemanager to execute on single click (which is the default on all good file managers i.e. ROX-Filer
). (Personally, I prefer using my middle button to paste or open-in-new-tab.)
Since we’re on the topic of Apple using tabbed MDIs, Apple needs to put tabs into iChat similar to how Adium implements it. Also, I wonder what keyboard shortcuts Apple will use with the tabs in Safari…CMD+Arrow(s) are reserved for history navigation, which is what Adium uses. $.02
Text doesn’t respond to single clicks, therefore you can double click it.
Links do. How do you select links? Do you execute them to select them? I drag over them myself. Same deal for icons.
First and foremost, links are just buttons which happen to look like text. Try to doubleclick them.
Besides, why would you select a link. Sounds like a novel concept given the right browser features, but since I know no browser which has got anything to offer WRT links besides opening, that is a moot point. Icons are selected for eventual manipulation, but you don’t usually manipulate links. They behave just like buttons, which you don’t select either. They’re one-action elements.
Actually, if nothing else, you can copy the text that forms the link. Same reason you select text. Also an incredibly popular reason that you would select files, I would imagine. (Or you may want to view the proporties of either a link *or* a file. Go on, try it.) Or copy the link location (to do this, I right-click and get a menu. Right-clicking on files gets me a menu to, and auto-selects them). I do plenty of things with my links.
Oh, oh! selecting multiple files is done in a different way from selecting single files when you use single-click selecting. But if single clicks execute, selecting single and multiple files is done in the same way.
My view is that double clicking is stupid, pointless and a useless complexity in the UI. But if you really want to double click all the time, that’s fine by me, so long as you don’t go off and create some law that says all icons must be double-click for execute.
Felix:
StephenB:
Neither do I… because I have a Logitech mouse which allows me to map a single click of the middle button to perform the same action as a double-click of the left button.
Sounds needlessly complex when you could tell your filemanager to execute on single click (which is the default on all good file managers i.e. ROX-Filer
). (Personally, I prefer using my middle button to paste or open-in-new-tab.)
Eh, why even bother with that when any good file manager is easily navigable by the keyboard?