Safari whinge
Poor Apple. They really can’t win; when they released the Beta version of Safari 4, everyone seemed to be moaning about the Tabs on Top feature (a la Google Chrome). Various websites carried Terminal hacks to get the tabs back to their rightful position. Now that the final release of Safari 4 has the tabs in the more usual place, everyone wants them back at the top.
Personally, I hated them at the top. It seemed counter-intuitive and was a pain when you wanted to click on a tab and ended up moving the whole window. I’m glad to see the back of the feature.
Another feature that I’d be happy to see the back of, but which appears to be here to stay, is the re-positioned reload / stop button. Up until now, its been a proper button by itself, nestled nicely with the homepage button but in Safari 4, Apple have moved it to the end of the URL bar and made it a wishy-washy little icon which often gets swamped by the RSS indicator.
This seems to be one of those design changes that are made just for the sake of it. In practice, it actually makes the browser worse to use. It’s surprisingly difficult to re-educate your mouse hand to go to the right of the screen rather than the left. And even worse is the fact that the Terminal hack that worked in the Beta, and re-enabled the reload / stop button in the customise toolbar window, no longer works. So until Apple come to their senses and re-instate the button, we’re left with the only marginally better option of Cmd-R instead.
And while I’m on the subject of things that bug people about Safari, the big one for me is the Bookmarks Toolbar. Specifically, the behaviour when you go from one folder to another. In Firefox, when you have one folder expanded and you mouse over another it too is expanded. In Safari, you have to click again to get the new one to expand. Again, it’s a small thing but when it comes to browsers, it’s the small things that make all the difference and this one is one that annoys the heck out of me. So much so that periodically I have to relegate Safari to tertiary browser and use Firefox again.
So, what do you think? What’s good – or bad – about Safari 4? What features have they got wrong? Where do the other browsers beat it? Drop a comment and let me know.
Wolfs Helpers
