Chimera Developer Considers Dropping It

The Infamous Grimace writes "Chimera's developer is seriously considering dropping it, since 'Safari has already won.' This would be unfortunate, indeed. I still use Chimera at times, although it's true that Safari has become my browser of choice." I cannot use Safari regularly, it lacks too many features and has too many bugs. Of course, how long will this remain so? But even if Safari adds tabs and fixes bugs, will they add all the features I need from Chimera/Mozilla, like remembering form passwords, site navigation bar, more fine control of security and privacy? I guess there is always Mozilla if Safari doesn't fit the bill ... but Chimera is so much faster and Mac-like. Update: 01/22 19:54 GMT by P : The web site has been updated: "Chimera's not going [away], regardless of whatever I post on this blog."

Comments

unlikely demise

[ubiquitin]

Dave Hyatt's weblog, the Confessions of a Mozillian, indicates that there is a sizeable team working on Chimera, so I wouldn't expect everyone to just walk out the door all at once. Sure, development on it may become less of a priority, but that doesn't mean the fat lady has sung. Also, the overwhelming response to the safari announcement was for tabbed browsing. It is quite possible that Apple simply won't cave in to the demand for tabbed browsing in which case you can have my chimera when you pry it from my cold dead hands.

Re:unlikely demise

[Rip!ey]

...there is a sizeable team working on Chimera...

Even if there was only one person working on the codebase, it is open source. No one person/corporation/entity can effectively 'kill the code'. The code is free to live.

Re:unlikely demise

[Twirlip of the Mists]

Dave Hyatt's weblog, the Confessions of a Mozillian

If it tells you anything, he changed the name of his weblog to Surfin' Safari about a week ago.

Re:unlikely demise

[markzdk2002]

I agree with you. While I like Safari, its still has a long way to go. Also follow that link to seriously thinking of dropping, no where does it say that the browser will be dropped.

Re:unlikely demise

[usr122122121]

Even if there was only one person working on the codebase, it is open source. No one person/corporation/entity can effectively 'kill the code'. The code is free to live.

I'd mod you up if I had points [HINT HINT]... but since I don't, I'll just voice my agreement.

Even if all hell broke loose in the Chimera team and they abandoned the project in a fit of rage, Chimera would most likely just end up on sourceforge.net.

Re:unlikely demise

[DeeKay]

He changed it right after MacWorld (for obvious reasons), not a week ago. Plus he quit the Chimera-Project quite some time ago, so that doesn't tell anyone anything!

Safari musing

[Matthias Wiesmann]

As for work on Chimera, I understand the feeling of the Chimera team. I agree that Safari is missing many features, it is overall more finished that Chimera. For instance Chimera does not support services well and on my machine it tended to crash a lot.

While some feature will certainly make it to Safari, others will not. It would be nice if Apple would open-source the whole Safari, but I doubt this. Instead, what would be smart from Apple would be to have the browser support plugins, not only for displaying content, but also for controling network operations and maybe some aspect of the GUI. This way people could customise Safari.

As for tabs (the topic of probably 95% of the posts on this post), I don't think is such a good solution. While they are usefull, I feel they are not complete, mostly because the relationship between tabs is unclear: are they at the same level? On the same site?

Most of the time I used tabs, it was to explore some hierarchy and load in parallel multiple branches (say multiple links). What I really would like is something that displays this tree structure, with some options like "pre-load branch" and "attach link as branch". This structure could also use the relationships defined by the link tags. In fact this thing would simply expand the notion of hierarchical history (and in fact include future links). If done well, Safari could use the same panel interface for the hierachy as mail.

Re:Safari musing

[octover]

I admit that I am not your average 'web surfer', I'm a web developer. I love tabs. Why? Because at any given moment I have three to four different pages loaded. Tabs make it very easy for me to switch back and forth without have to go up to a menu to see what is even open. It keeps my screen cleaner which is nice. The other great thing about tabs is that my mom can use Mozilla and never even see them. What is it with the whole tabs are too complex crap? Tabs aren't a default thing on any browser I've come across.

Oh and the relationship between tabs is that they are both 'documents' the browser has/is rendering. That is it. There is no other relationship than that, and I hope that no one gets it in their head to make it more than that (I'm thinking JavaScript and dom stuff).

Re:Safari musing

[Twirlip of the Mists]

My opinion on tabs is well known. I'm not picking a fight here; just offering a counterpoint. I'm well aware that lots of people disagree with me, so don't bother posting just to say that you're one of 'em. Constructive criticism, on the other hand, is welcome.

Because at any given moment I have three to four different pages loaded.

You accidentally point out the biggest flaw of tabs here: they're self-limiting. Depending on window size, you can only fit between four and eight tabs across the window before they have to be truncated. If you can't read the titles, the advantage of tabs evaporates.

With multiple windows, on the other hand, you can have as many pages loaded at once as you want. Multiple windows are not self-limiting.

Tabs make it very easy for me to switch back and forth without have to go up to a menu to see what is even open.

While the usability advantages of a menu over a row of tabs have been discussed thoroughly, it's hard to beat the ease of use of command-` for cycling through an application's open windows. Tabs are useful for up to 4-8 open pages; they are not useful for more than that. Similarly, command-` is useful for about the same number of open windows.

It keeps my screen cleaner which is nice.

On the other hand, it prevents you from looking at two pages side-by-side without jumping through hoops. (Choose the tab, control-click, choose "open page in new window.) Multiple windows can be used in a clean-desktop way (command-M for minimize), but let you arrange your pages however you want.

Oh and the relationship between tabs is that they are both 'documents' the browser has/is rendering. That is it.

That's not really good enough, in my opinion. For example, if tabs were implemented in some way that dealt with #1 problem (truncation), you really ought to be able to drag a tab from one window to another. That's a complicated thing; you have to implement your NSView subclasses as application instances instead of directly associating each NSView subclass with an NSWindow subclass. The current implementation, in which a tab is tied not to an NSView but to an NSWindow forever, kinda sucks. It would make more sense on a large scale for "tabs" (that name is becoming less and less appropriate) to be global network session objects, and for any window to be able to display the output from any "tab." But that poses huge usability problems; how does one instantiate a new "tab?" Should the application manage it for you, creating an autorelease pool of tabs automatically every time you open a new site (by clicking a bookmark or typing a URL or clicking a link that takes you to a new site)? Trying to implement "tabs" right opens more questions than it closes.

But basically my opinion can be summed up in what I've been saying all along: "tabs are a bad solution to a problem that we don't have."

Re:Safari musing

[SlamMan]

Well, then have a a couple windows with multiple tabs each. Never did see why people around here see it as a one or the other thing.

Re:Safari musing

[Twirlip of the Mists]

Well, then have a a couple windows with multiple tabs each. Never did see why people around here see it as a one or the other thing.

I have two open windows. I want one of the windows to be a "tab" contained inside another window. How do I get it there?

(Select URL, copy, New Tab, click address box, paste, enter.)

I have one open window with two "tabs," and I want to see them side-by-side. How do I do that?

(Click other tab, control-click, "Move tab to new window")

These operations are not intuitive, and they're not convenient. People see a tabbed interface as being one way or another-- either all "tabs" or all windows-- is because moving back and forth is such a royal pain in the ass. Could we make it easier? Sure. But to do so would require rethinking the whole architecture of the browser, and-- here's the important part-- we don't need to do that.

Tabs are a bad solution to a problem that we don't have.

Re:Safari musing

[Mirkon]

"You accidentally point out the biggest flaw of tabs here: they're self-limiting. Depending on window size, you can only fit between four and eight tabs across the window before they have to be truncated. If you can't read the titles, the advantage of tabs evaporates."

I wouldn't say that.

I regularly have dozens of tabs up at once. They're remarkably good for checking multiple posts on a message board simultaneously. Back in the days of Netscape 4, more than four windows at a time was a pain...

Seeing the titles of the tabs, frankly, is irrelevant to me.

Re:Safari musing

[Twirlip of the Mists]

Back in the days of Netscape 4, more than four windows at a time was a pain...

Right. These are not the days of Netscape 4. Opening new Safari windows is not a time-consuming operation. Switching between them is not a time-consuming operation. As I've said, like, a billion times now, tabs are a bad solution to a problem that we don't have.

Re:Safari musing

[dumbArtMajor]

Wow, I couldn't disagree with you more, my friend.

Depending on window size, you can only fit between four and eight tabs across the window before they have to be truncated. If you can't read the titles, the advantage of tabs evaporates.

If I understand correctly, you assume that people have absolutely no short-term memory to figure out what pages they've visited. If they understand the tab concept and they're using it, they're also well aware of which pages they've visited, and in roughly what order they opened new tabs. You're telling me this tab I'm reading Slashdot in loses all benefit because the title of the tab only reads "Chimera Developer Consid..." instead of "Chimera Developer Considers Dropping It"?? That's ludicrous.

On the other hand, it prevents you from looking at two pages side-by-side without jumping through hoops.

What hoops? I open another window without opening a new tab, and put them next to each other. Am I missing something?

I'm not saying they're perfect (I don't like Chimera's use of History as a tab-based object, it seems to work better in Mozilla) but they do add tons more options for the power-user without getting in the way of lesser users.

Re:Safari musing

[Twirlip of the Mists]

If they understand the tab concept and they're using it, they're also well aware of which pages they've visited, and in roughly what order they opened new tabs.

Then what's the point of representing different views as tabs? The point of tabs is to show you all the window titles at once. If you don't need to see the titles, then you're better off using windows.

As an experiment, I have opened a Chimera window to my normal browsing width, and created one tab for each window that I current have open. (I'm working on a project, so I've got some documentation windows open, and some random web sites that I've been reading when I take breaks.)

My tabs look like this:

App...
NST...
NST...
NST...
NSP...
NSS...
NSS...
App...
Slas...
Goo...
Surf...

Quick! Which one of those tabs refers to the NSTextField documentation page, which one refers to the NSTableView page, and which one refers to NSToolbarItem?

This is not a contrived example. This is fairly typical for me. Tabs, in a word, suck.

What hoops? I open another window without opening a new tab, and put them next to each other. Am I missing something?

Yes. You're missing the whole point of this discussion. You're arguing that you can do things with tabs. That's fine and good, but it's not the point. The point is that Safari is everyman's browser. If you want to use Obscure Browser #77, which lets you sort all the links on a page in descending order of number of syllables or what-the-hell-ever, you're free to do that. Safari should not include those sorts of features, however. Tabs bring nothing to the party, and require lots of compromises. They should, therefore, not be included in Safari.

Are we on the same page now?

Re:Safari musing

[drsmithy]

If you can't read the titles, the advantage of tabs evaporates.

No it doesn't, because of things like locality and muscle memory. I *know* that in my monitoring window, the 5th tab from the left is alway the Big Brother firewalls page. The third tab is always the fileservers page. The 7th tab is always WebDNS. Etc.
The primary functional advantages of tabs are a) speed of access, b) organisation and c) a reduction in window clutter. And, as I've stated before, since OS X's task-switching paradigms still all suck, (c) is in IMHO one of the most important. Tabs facilitate these advantages by being always accessible, fixed in position and contained within a single window.

Multiple windows are not self-limiting.

Yes they are, because they fill the screen with wasted space and are difficult to navigate between in large numbers. On my 1600x1200 screen - already an above average resolution - any more than about 5 - 6 active windows becomes difficult to manage simply due to being obscured (and having no quick & easy way to switch between individual windows). 5 or 6 open windows is _nothing_ for a power user.
Discrete windows also lose out because they cannot be collected together into organisational groups under OS X. A bunch of browser windows are always in a simple stack and cannot be ordered or collected together _at all_ (and remain useful), even by kludgish methods like opening them in a specific order (like you can in Windows). Unless you have truly massive amounts of screen real estate (multiple monitors at 1920x1280+ resolution).
Even when I had a Powerbook and ran a spanned desktop at 1152x768 (or whatever it was the PB ran at) + 1600x1200, I still didn't have anywhere near enough desktop real estate to keep just my active terminal windows all accessible, let alone those plus all the other junk that's running.

Tabs are "self-limiting" in that the titles printed in them can become obscured - however, that is only self-limiting if you always need to read the title of a window/tab before you switch to it - something that is not always necessary with a tab because its location is fixed.
Multiple windows are "self-limiting" because after a certain number they become time-consuming and frustrating to task switch between.

[...] it's hard to beat the ease of use of command-` for cycling through an application's open windows.

No, it isn't (at least for browsers), and tabs do so easily. The problem with your solution is the "cycling" part - to get to a specific browser window I have to step through all the others that come before it in the stack. With any more than about a half-dozen pages constantly being referred to, this becomes unworkable and frustrating.

Tabs are useful for up to 4-8 open pages; they are not useful for more than that. Similarly, command-` is useful for about the same number of open windows.

You seem to be stuck in the mindset of a single window full of tabs vs lots of windows. This is a waste of an excellent resource. Think in terms of multiple windows full of tabs, with each window carrying a certain type of page. Suddenly you have 3 or 4 windows x a half dozen tabs each. With tabs you can often skip directly to the window you want. Windows' taskbar has the same advantage. (Its keyboard controls for task-switching are also much more usable. IMHO - most "window-oriented" and less "application-oriented").

On the other hand, it prevents you from looking at two pages side-by-side without jumping through hoops.

Which for some people (like me) is an operation performed so rarely as to make the "hoops" not even an annoyance, let alone a frustration.

But basically my opinion can be summed up in what I've been saying all along: "tabs are a bad solution to a problem that we don't have."

Tabs are a good work-in-progress solution to the problem of managing and efficiently accessing a large number of active web pages. In all honesty, if you truly find multiple discrete browser windows not only more usable, but workable at all under OS X, then I can only assume you rarely have a significant number of active windows open at any time.
There some features it would be nice to see in tabbed browsers - the ability to drag & drop tabs between windows and within the same window (to reorder them), for example. But, on the whole, they are a good solution to a problem faced by many users. This may not be the problem faced by *you*, but I would suggest you are in the minority in that. Thus far, the only real criticisms I can see you have made of tabs is that:
1. they make comparing two already-open webpages side-by-side a somewhat fiddly affair - not a scenario I would call common and one that could be easily addressed simply by allowing an easy way to migrate tabs between windows.
2. they are limited to about 4 - 6 at once due to the size of the window. Yet you also say your preferred method is similarly limited.

Managing large numbers of windows is one of only a few glaring faults that exist in the OS X UI, IMHO (the others being file management and keyboard accessibility). It is something Windows handles *much* better, I think. I've been using OS X since the public beta, and it's always appeared to me to be a UI only really meant to handle a small number of concurrent applications and windows.

Re:Safari musing

[pmsyyz]

Depending on window size, you can only fit between four and eight tabs across the window before they have to be truncated. If you can't read the titles, the advantage of tabs evaporates.

Page/site/fav icons.

Re:Safari musing

[dumbArtMajor]

Ok, I can see we're never going to agree (which is fine), but I'll make one last comment set:

Quick! Which one of those tabs refers to the NSTextField documentation page, which one refers to the NSTableView page, and which one refers to NSToolbarItem?

I wouldn't know (beyond saying "One of the 3 NST pages, obviously"), but I'd assume you do since you're the one who made the tabs.

The point of tabs is to show you all the window titles at once.

Truthfully, I think of tabs as "hints" to the different sites you're visiting, not a means to read page titles. So I don't agree on your point.

You're missing the whole point of this discussion. You're arguing that you can do things with tabs. That's fine and good, but it's not the point.

Sure it is! The point of the discussion as I see it is that you don't think tabs serve any useful function. I'm saying they don't hinder YOU if YOU don't use them. No one MAKES you use them, but they've quickly become a nice little convenience (and one that's in high demand) for people who do. They HELP me when I'm surfing 5 different websites and want to control clutter. IMHO, it's more of a compromise NOT to include them, and others agree. I won't use Safari until they're included.

PS- My girlfriend is the antithesis of a "power user," and she'd rather use the tabs on Chimera or Mozilla than Safari or IE's non-tab GUI.

Re:Safari musing

[Twirlip of the Mists]

The primary functional advantages of tabs are a) speed of access, b) organisation and c) a reduction in window clutter. And, as I've stated before, since OS X's task-switching paradigms still all suck, (c) is in IMHO one of the most important.[windows] fill the screen with wasted space

I do not know what the hell you are talking about here. How do you waste screen space with multiple windows? If you want to use all of your screen for a single window, go for it. Windows are resizeable. If, on the other hand, you only need to see something small, make the window small and put it in the corner or something where you can see it behind your main window. Wasted space? What?

[windows are] difficult to navigate between in large numbers

First, the OS provides you with no fewer than four different ways of dealing with windows. One, the Window menu. (Menus have been proven time and again in useability studies to be easier to use than in-window widgets, both for the disabled and for mundanes.) Two, the dock menu. Works the same as the window menu, but it's accessed by control-clicking the application icon in the dock. Three, minimizing windows to the dock. This also addresses the oft-cited clutter issue. Four, the command-` and command-shift-` shortcuts for cycling and toggling. Very handy, those.

And finally, as demonstrated elsewhere tabs are completely unacceptable in large numbers. Depending on window size, the tab labels start to get truncated at four to six open tabs, and by the time you get to 10 or 12, chances are fair that they're completely obscured. And because applications like Mozilla have no tab-based equivalent of the Window menu or the dock menu, you're stuck clicking to find or cycling through tabs. Terrible.

Discrete windows also lose out because they cannot be collected together into organisational groups under OS X.

You can stack your windows however you like. Here's a quick taste test. Open a Chimera window with four tabs. Now move two of the tabs to another window. We're trying to stay organized, right? So put two of the tabs in one window and two in the other. Oops. Can't do it without opening a new window with two tabs and cutting-and-pasting some URL's. With windows, on the other hand, I can make a pile in a corner of my screen or whatever, stacking and restacking to suit my purposes.

I still didn't have anywhere near enough desktop real estate to keep just my active terminal windows all accessible

I don't know what to say except, "maybe you were doing something wrong."

Multiple windows are "self-limiting" because after a certain number they become time-consuming and frustrating to task switch between.

That's simply bogus. Sorry, but it's true. As I said, the OS gives you no fewer than four ways of getting from one window to another, and that doesn't count the simple expedient of point-and-click. All of these methods scale to a practically unlimited number of windows; the Window menu and dock menu, for example, can show you any number of window titles without truncating their names. (Well, you have to truncate past about 80-100 characters, but that's only because screens are only so wide.) I don't know why you have a problem dealing with open windows, but it's not the fault of the OS or the application.

The problem with your solution is the "cycling" part

If you don't want to use the shortcuts, then done. As I said, the OS provides you with no fewer than four separate ways to get from one window to another, not counting pointing-and-clicking.

Think in terms of multiple windows full of tabs, with each window carrying a certain type of page.

Doesn't work that way. Pages are opened by clicking links. When you click a link with Mozilla, your only choices are to open it in the current window, replacing the page you're currently looking at; to open it in another window; or to open it in another tab in the current window. You can't open a link in another tab in another window. So what you call a powerful organizational feature is really nothing more than the illusion thereof.

Tabs are a good work-in-progress solution to the problem of managing and efficiently accessing a large number of active web pages.

Exactly. Like I said, tabs are a bad solution-- "work-in-progress" doesn't begin to cover the ramifications of a UI design that hasn't even been throught out yet, much less implemented completely-- to a problem that we don't even have.

In all honesty, if you truly find multiple discrete browser windows not only more usable, but workable at all under OS X, then I can only assume you rarely have a significant number of active windows open at any time.

Ah, I see. "Your opinion differs from mine, so you must not be as sophisticated as I am." Very mature.

But, on the whole, they are a good solution to a problem faced by many users.

From my experience, which is not complete by any means but I think does provide some representative samples-- people who find tabs to be an enabling solution are handicapped by the fact that they don't know how to use the features that the OS already provides.

Thus far, the only real criticisms I can see you have made of tabs is that...

Your assessment of my criticisms is, unfortunately, not accurate. If you'd like to know what I'm saying about tabs, please go back and read my posts again.

Managing large numbers of windows is one of only a few glaring faults that exist in the OS X UI.... It is something Windows handles *much* better, I think.

How? How does Windows handle it much better? Because I'm fairly confident that you're going to say, "Windows lets you do X," and I'm going to say, "You can do the same thing, or something completely equivalent, under OS X by doing thus-and-so." Let's see if I'm right.

Re:Safari musing

[Twirlip of the Mists]

I wouldn't know (beyond saying "One of the 3 NST pages, obviously"), but I'd assume you do since you're the one who made the tabs.

If they were windows instead of tabs, I could go to the Window menu or the dock menu to find out. But since they're tabs, I have to either click on them one at a time, or cycle through them using a keyboard shortcut. This is a major shortcoming of the tabbed interface.

The point of the discussion as I see it is that you don't think tabs serve any useful function.

Then let me be more clear about what I'm saying. Tabs serve no useful function that is not better served by the various and several existing features of the window server. The fact that they let you do the same thing in a different way is fine and good, but since they solve no problems, the degree to which they cause usability problems means that they have no place, in their current state, in an application like Safari.

I'm saying they don't hinder YOU if YOU don't use them.

Opportunity costs, my friend. For every minute that an Apple programmer spends working on tabs, that's one minute not spent fixing bugs in the model or view classes, or the renderer. If tabs were a good thing-- that is, if they brought something new or improved to the table-- then I'd be all for them. But since they do not, and since implementing them would take valuable time away from more important work, I oppose their inclusion wholeheartedly.

I won't use Safari until they're included.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but that's not a very big deal. Apple isn't writing Safari for a few thousand former-Mozilla users. Apple is writing Safari for over 5 million former IE users. If you don't like it, don't use it! Nobody will take offense at your decision.

My girlfriend is the antithesis of a "power user," and she'd rather...

Yeah, I have a girlfriend too, and she loves Safari. I showed her tabs once, in Chimera, and her response was, "Why would I go to all that trouble when I can just open a new window?" So I guess our anecdotal evidence cancels out.

Re:Safari musing

[Anonymous Coward]

My dear twitlip,

In Mozilla 1.2.1, I can have truncated, non-viewable page names splashed across a dozen or so tabs, and it is NOT a problem to discern which tab is which.

Simply pause the mouse pointer over the truncated tab for a very brief moment, and the FULL name of the truncated tab/webpage appears just below the tab, inside of a yellow box.

I use tabs ALL the time -- full screen browser windows, two or three deep, representing 25-35 web pages opened simultaneously -- I am sorry that you are unwilling/able to realize the significant benefit that the tabs function brings to the browsing experience -- perhaps if you tried moving your bedtime up an hour or two -- just a friendly suggestion.

Re:Safari musing

[Twirlip of the Mists]

Simply pause the mouse pointer over the truncated tab for a very brief moment, and the FULL name of the truncated tab/webpage appears just below the tab, inside of a yellow box.

For crying out loud, have you lost all sense of reason? How in the name of hell is this better than the systemwide Window menu, or the dock menu, both of which show complete names without truncation, both of which all Cocoa applications get for free, with complete universal access support, both of which work in a consistent manner across all Cocoa (and even Carbon, I believe) applications?

This just stands as even more proof that people who are rabid about tabs-- as this poster appears to be-- just don't know how to use a Mac. If you're on Windows, where there is no systemwide Window menu and (in pre-XP days) the task bar rapidly becomes crowded by multiple windows, then tabs make sense. But this is Mac OS X. The OS does helpful things for you like providing menus to manage your windows. Use them!

Re:Safari musing

[SoupIsGoodFood_42]

These are not the days of Netscape 4. Opening new Safari windows is not a time-consuming operation. Switching between them is not a time-consuming operation. As I've said, like, a billion times now, tabs are a bad solution to a problem that we don't have.

You obviously don't own a 600Mhz iBook.

Re:Safari musing

[SoupIsGoodFood_42]

If they understand the tab concept and they're using it, they're also well aware of which pages they've visited, and in roughly what order they opened new tabs. Then what's the point of representing different views as tabs? The point of tabs is to show you all the window titles at once. If you don't need to see the titles, then you're better off using windows

The point in tabs is not to show you all the titles at once, it to show you all the sites you have open at once. Titles are not always nessesary, Infact, I don't even read the most of the time. I go by were they are.

App...
NST...
NST...
NST...
NSP...
NSS...
NSS...
App...
Slas...
Goo...
Surf..

Quick! Which one of those tabs refers to the NSTextField documentation page, which one refers to the NSTableView page, and which one refers to NSToolbarItem?

My bet is on the 2nd to 4th ones. Of course. I would have a more accurate guess if I had knowen when that window was opened. In other words, you example doesn't work because we didn't know what you did. We don't have you short-term memory to examine.

This is not a contrived example. This is fairly typical for me. Tabs, in a word, suck.

Ah, yet another shining example of your ignorance. Maybe tabs suck for YOU, but they obviously don't suck for everyone. So just give it a rest ay?

Re:Safari musing

[Twirlip of the Mists]

You obviously don't own a 600Mhz iBook.

No, I own a 400 MHz iMac, and a 300 MHz iBook. Blueberry. What of it?

Re:Safari musing

[drsmithy]

How do you waste screen space with multiple windows?

By having a toolbar, address bar, window widgets, status bar, plus maybe more in every window and by requiring all those windows to be suitable stacked for quick access if needed (the latter is more of a clutter issue than space, but IMHO the two go hand in hand).

If you want to use all of your screen for a single window, go for it.

Actually that touches on another one of my gripes with OS X - there's no quick & each way to make a window take up the entire screen.

First, the OS provides you with no fewer than four different ways of dealing with windows.

That doesn't mean any of them are _good_.

One, the Window menu.

So I have to move the mouse from where it is to the top of the screen, navigate to the Window menu, then read each entry and select the right one ? Sorry, too slow.

Two, the dock menu. Works the same as the window menu, but it's accessed by control-clicking the application icon in the dock.

Not to mention requiring another larger mouse displacement to get to and (this is the killer) having a built-in delay before displaying the menu. Sorry, too slow.

Three, minimizing windows to the dock.

Sorry, minimized windows in the Dock move around, thus meaning I have to actually look for any window before restoring it to make it useful. This requires mousing over each window to get a title, which is too slow (not to mention annoying). This is before we even get to the screen real estate problem with having a dozen minimised browser windows, along with probably two dozen _other_ windows from other apps.

Four, the command-` and command-shift-` shortcuts for cycling and toggling. Very handy, those.

Which require stepping through every window in the stack to get to the one you want, not to mention requiring ahving to examien each window to make sure you get the right one (since the order does not remain consistent). Stepping through a dozen browser windows every time I want to look at a different web page ? You have to be kidding.
The keyboard shortcuts aren't too bad, but break horribly when you want to move between applications, because cmd+tabbing to another applicationg brings *all* of that applications windows to the front, obscuring everything else. Very annoying, that (but in line with OS X's interface paradigms).

And finally, as demonstrated elsewhere tabs are completely unacceptable in large numbers. [...]

Maybe for the way *you* use them, but not when you've got a dozen monitoring web pages sitting in tabs that remain in a fixed order. I don't *need* to read the title of the page, because its function is associated with its location (you know, the same principle Apple espouses with its single standardised menu bar). To say tabs as demonstrated elsewhere tabs are completely unacceptable" is patently false when I, and others, use them in such a way every hour of every day.

And because applications like Mozilla have no tab-based equivalent of the Window menu [...]

Nor do you need it, if you keep your tabs organised by window as I do.

Here's a quick taste test. [...]

I stay organised by having one window for each type of browsing I do. Thus, tabs only get opened in the window they need to and don't need to be moved between windows. For my usage patterns your "test" is completely unrealistic and pointless - it's not something I do (or want to) rarely, let alone often.

With windows, on the other hand, I can make a pile in a corner of my screen or whatever, stacking and restacking to suit my purposes.

But you can't move between them quickly & easily if you have other browser windows open and as soon as you do their fixed order is lost. This is even assuming the screen real estate can be wasted (which it can't in the case of our monitoring pages that need a large chunk of a 1600x1200 screen to be useful).

I don't know what to say except, "maybe you were doing something wrong."

You mean, like trying to do my job ? I have around a dozen terminal windows at a _minimum_ open at any given time. They all need to be fairly quickly and easily accessible and, ideally, partly visible at all times.

That's simply bogus. Sorry, but it's true. As I said, the OS gives you no fewer than four ways of getting from one window to another, and that doesn't count the simple expedient of point-and-click.

If you can keep ~40 (at current count) windows visible, hence "clickable" and usable on the screen at once, I salute you. And, as mentioned, just because the OS gives me several different methods doesn't mean any of them are any good for what I want to do.

All of these methods scale to a practically unlimited number of windows [...]

What definition of "scale" are you using here ? The already slow methods of the Window menu and Dock menu remain slow. Minimising much more than about 20 windows to the Dock is unworkable and the keyboard shortcuts are simply broken if you want to move to a specific window of a specific app in a single operation.

Just because something is *possible* doesn't mean it is *optimal*. It's *possible* to have a large number of apps and windows open on OS X, but it is difficult and frustrating to manage them all.

I don't know why you have a problem dealing with open windows, but it's not the fault of the OS or the application.

I'm having a problem because the tools in the GUI to do this are inadequate. And it is a problem of the GUI, because I don't have the same problem in the Windows and KDE GUIs.

If you don't want to use the shortcuts, then done.

I do, it's just that they are poorly implemented.

So what you call a powerful organizational feature is really nothing more than the illusion thereof.

It's all in how you use it. I've explain how I use windows and tabs within to organise my browser windows in a hierachical fashion. I'm sorry if you don't understand, but trying to claim a flat, unordered and dynamic collection of windows is is any way *more* organised is just plain wrong.

[...] to a problem that we don't even have.

To a problem you don't have. I do, and tabs are, thus far, the best available solution on my preferred platform.

Ah, I see. "Your opinion differs from mine, so you must not be as sophisticated as I am." Very mature.

I fail to see how the "your opinion is different to mine, so you're wrong" attitude you have is any different. Not to mention your "I don't understand what you are doing, how or why, so you're wrong" attitude.
As I said, in complete honesty, the only conclusion I can draw from your comments is that you aren't dealing with large numbers of open windows simultaneously, because I simply cannot understand how you could be doing so and _not_ find the current methods limiting and frustrating.

[...] people who find tabs to be an enabling solution are handicapped by the fact that they don't know how to use the features that the OS already provides.

You've yet to inform me of any features in OS X I don't know about, haven't known of for some time and have already tried.

Your assessment of my criticisms is, unfortunately, not accurate. If you'd like to know what I'm saying about tabs, please go back and read my posts again.

Well, thus far I've read what boils down to "there is no problem", "it's a bad idea", "it's fiddly to view two web pages in tabs side by side". To which I answer "there is a problem", "there is no better idea yet" and "so what".

You seem fixated on not being able to read the title of a page and being able to manipulate multiple open pages so that they can be viewed simultaneously. I can understand why this would be useful and when, but I cannot understand your attitude that it is necessary _alL_ the time and that anyone who thinks otherwise is a fool.

How does Windows handle it much better?

Several ways:
It's faster.
It groups similar windows.
It allows me to move quickly to *any* window by either mouse or keyboard.
It allows me to order the tabs in the taskbar (only kludgily, but that's better than not at all)
The placement of things in the taskbar is almost completely static (resizing it can subtly change the position of tabs, but it's far from the wholesale it-could-be-anywhere of minimised stuff in the Dock).
It allows me to completely maximise windows.

The only method that even comes close is an Application's Dock menu, but that suffers from being annoyingly slow, even more so on slow machines and having to read the verious items on the menu to choose the one that's wanted.

Re:Safari musing

[Twirlip of the Mists]

Titles are not always nessesary, Infact, I don't even read the most of the time. I go by were they are.

The spatial organization argument is bogus, and it's incompatible with another major pro-tabs argument: logical organization. Windows can be put anywhere on the screen you like, so it's easy to remember that this was over here and that was over there. That's one of the main benefits of moveable windows in a UI.

If the big deal about tabs is that they always show up in the order that you opened them, then that invalidates the "tabs are good for logical organization" argument. Tabs that always show up in the order that you opened them are not good for logical organization; you can't stack them or arrange them in any way. In fact, you can't interact with them at all except to open and close, reveal and hide them.

My bet is on the 2nd to 4th ones. Of course. I would have a more accurate guess if I had knowen when that window was opened.

This is the crux of my point. If you want to keep track, in your head, of which window is which, then by all means keep using tabs. Myself, I don't like having to do that. I have a computer that's supposed to do that for me. That's why I use the Window menu. It shows me which window is which, when I need to know. Unlike tabs, which are incapable of showing me what I need to know when I have more than a few (i.e., 6-8, depending on window size and title lengths) windows open.

Maybe tabs suck for YOU, but they obviously don't suck for everyone.

I'm sorry, but you've got it backwards. Tabs suck for some very objective reasons, outlined here and elsewhere. The fact that you, and a few others, have adopted them as a workaround for OS's with inadequate window management features, and have learned to live with their critical limitations, does not mean that tabs don't suck.

On an OS like Windows or Solaris, not having tabs may suck worse than having them. But on an OS like OS X, where the OS provides you with all the window juggling services you require, tabs are at best redundant and at worst a huge waste of time and resources on the part of the developers.

If you're so enamoured with tabs, find one thing-- just one thing!-- that you can do with them that you can't do better without them. Just one!

Re:Safari musing

[Twirlip of the Mists]

Nor do you need [an equivalent of the Window menu for tabs], if you keep your tabs organised by window as I do.

Somehow you've managed to spin a massive omission from the UI into an advantage. I salute your moxie. Didn't work, of course, but damn fine try.

And, as mentioned, just because the OS gives me several different methods doesn't mean any of them are any good for what I want to do.

It doesn't mean anybody else wants to do what you want to do, either.

Your argument-- with all the gross factual inaccuracies strained out-- basically boils down to this: "A car sucks because it can only leave the ground for brief periods of time, you can't drop bombs from it, and you can't get to and from an aircraft carrier with it." Gee whiz, Sparky, have you ever considered the possibility that you might be happier with a plane?

I'm having a problem because the tools in the GUI to do this are inadequate. And it is a problem of the GUI, because I don't have the same problem in the Windows and KDE GUIs.

Then I ask you, with all sincerity, respect, and politeness, to shut the fuck up and go use Windows or KDE. If the tool doesn't work for you, use another one. You are decidedly in the minority, to the tune of about 4,999,999 to one, plus or minus a margin of sampling error.

I'm sorry if you don't understand, but trying to claim a flat, unordered and dynamic collection of windows is is any way *more* organised is just plain wrong.

What does the top of your desk look like? Does it have papers and other sundries on it arranged in stacks? Or does it consist merely of a series of open bins that you can put things in? I would wager that your desktop is flat, just like everybody else's. And you get by by putting things in stacks, just like everybody else does. And yet, somehow, you are able to get through your day. Amazing, huh?

I do, and tabs are, thus far, the best available solution on my preferred platform.

As I said before, it sounds like a Mac is the wrong tool for you. Multiple tabbed monitoring windows that never change? Forty-plus terminal windows? I don't know what the hell you're doing, friend, but it's not typical desktop computer use.

I fail to see how the "your opinion is different to mine, so you're wrong" attitude you have is any different.

My attitude is, "Your opinion is different from virtually everybody's, so you're wrong."

Now we get to the good stuff. The point was raised that Windows does a better job of managing open windows than the Mac does. The question was posted: how? The responses:

It's faster.

Demonstrably false. Move on.

It groups similar windows.

So does your Mac. See the application icon in the dock, and the "hide" and "hide others" functions.

It allows me to move quickly to *any* window by either mouse or keyboard.

Haven't you been reading? So. Does. Your. Mac. In five different ways, any one of which you can use on any occasion, depending on your situation, your mood, or the tides.

It allows me to order the tabs in the taskbar (only kludgily, but that's better than not at all)

I don't have any idea what that means. Sorry. Last time I used Windows, those little thingies-- what are they, anyway; icons? menus?-- appear in the task bar in the order that they were opened, and cannot be rearranged. This may be different in XP; I never noticed one way or the other. In any case, the Mac lets you drag icons around the dock to your heart's content, and leaves them where they were put until you move them again.

The placement of things in the taskbar is almost completely static

Apart from sounding like a contradiction of your previous point, this is substantively the same on a Mac. The placement of things on the dock is completely static until you move them, that is; they do not reorder themselves.

It allows me to completely maximise windows.

You win. Because the Mac doesn't let you do this, it must suck. I apologize for ever doubting you.

In conclusion: please stop interjecting your opinions, which thus far have been based solely on some highly specialized and absurdly atypical situations, into a discussion of the interface of a general-purpose application. Your opinions simply don't count, because the vast majority of users don't exist in an environment even remotely similar to yours. You are at the far end of the bell curve. You are outside the standard deviation. Your data point will be weighted completely out of existence. So the only possible outcome will be for those of us who listen to say, "Whatever, dude, go back to Windows if it makes you happier," and for you to go away frustrated and disenfranchised.

But what the hell, it's a free country, gripe all you want.

Re:Safari musing

[Anonymous Coward]

Your analysis is clear and points in the right direction for a solution, but I don't believe you're taking it far enough.

Tabs are bad. Using native window management is better than using tabs since browser windows have no special needs which separate them from other types of windows. We agree on this.

Now, take this one step further: why do people want tabs? My proposition: people want tabs because OS X window management is broken.

You cannot, in OS X, select a window by choosing its name or iconic representation from a list. You can only select a window by finding it in the background, either by dragging your current window away, or by minimizing your current window; or by using cmd-` to cycle through the application's available windows (both of which are blaringly inefficient since they are not immediate selection actions, but rather choice trees - you cannot say "this one" but you must say "not this one, not this one, ..."). There is no iconic or textual representation of non-minimized windows (tangent: the iconic representation of minimized windows is pretty useless since most windows look alike - observe an OS X user with lots of windows attempting to restore a minimized window: the user will hover over the icons of minimized windows until they find the one with the correct title; this would not be a problem if the window title were displayed along with the icon).

I also object to cmd-` because it is not intuitive and it is not documented where it needs to be documented. You'll only find out about cmd-` by talking to another human or by reading something online (or by experimentation or mistake, but that's unlikely). You cannot simply browse through the available menu items to find one that has the cmd-` shortcut, so none of the Mac users that I know knew about cmd-` until I showed it to them out of frustration with their slow window management.

Apple did improve their window management in OS X 10.2 in two ways: minimized windows showed an application-specific "iconlet" which speeds up selection, and cmd-tab cycles between the top two most recently-used items instead of behaving like a circular list all the time (although they did not make the move to a complete stack for cmd-tab, which they cannot do since they visually tied the cmd-tab action to the order of icons in the dock).

OS X still has massive usage problems, however: for one, minimized windows are treated differently from non-minimized windows. It is not natural to remember whether or not a window is minimized, so users either (a) never minimize windows, or (b) first look for minmized windows on-screen (by moving things out of the way or by minimizing current windows) and only revert to checking the dock after ascertaining the window is not on-screen (as with any usability claim, verify by observing other users - you will not be able to verify by observing your own behaviour since you are now consciously thinking about it). This is both unintuitive and inefficient; the only reasoning I see behind this is so that the dock does not become too cluttered (which would actually point to the base mistake, which is using the dock to represent application shortcuts in addition to serving window management purposes).

Earlier I mentioned that you cannot choose a window by selecting its name from a list. There is an exception, however: you can choose a window by selecting its name from a list if the window is in the current application (Window menu). I'm not certain why Apple created this artificial division between "application" and "window" in OS X, because it leads to inefficiency. Users certainly will not bring the application to the foreground by clicking on the applications dock icon (or using cmd-tab) and then select the correct window by using the Window menu (or cmd-`) - it's much faster to find the needed window in the background and simply click on it. That is, however, a terribly inefficient with lots of windows. The barrier is also artificial, especially when you're working with stuff like Apple's Developer Studio, which comprises multiple related applications, and multiple completely different types of windows within one application.

Anyway, I'm always immensely frustrated by the window management whenever I try to use a Mac. MS Windows is not much better (consider the debacle with Office 2000 using MDI but also using taskbar buttons for MDI windows - it's almost as if MS admitted that MDI failed miserably). In my preferred environment (X11 with a window manager I wrote), I never work with non-maximized windows, I can select windows immediately from an always-accessible hot-corner menu (with no pointless delays on the menu), or a global alt-tab list (using a proper stack which naturally brings MRU applications to within fewer keystrokes (think about that if you haven't realized it already)), and I can organize windows into workspaces at the touch of a key combo. Makes OS X feel like early 1980s tech with modern visuals. I don't blame these users for demanding tabs for their browsers - pretty soon, they'll start demanding tabs from their other heavily-used applications as well.

Re:Safari musing

[drsmithy]

Somehow you've managed to spin a massive omission from the UI into an advantage.

I didn't say it was an advantage, I said it wasn't relevant to my application.

It doesn't mean anybody else wants to do what you want to do, either.

The popularity of tabs, and the similar reasonings behind liking them, would suggest otherwise.

Your argument [...]

If you believe any of my statements are factually incorrect, then please demonstrate why. If not, STFU and stop trying to pretend they are because you have a differing opinion or a lack of understanding.
You seem to be implying, amongst all the pointless attempts at belittlement and name calling, that I have the wrong tool for the job, yet all I am after is a good GUI sitting on top of a good, Unix-based OS that doesn't require much futzing around with to work. In short, I want OS X.

Then I ask you, with all sincerity, respect, and politeness, to shut the fuck up and go use Windows or KDE.

I'd rather use OS X. It's nicer overall apart from these few annoyances I have.

You are decidedly in the minority, to the tune of about 4,999,999 to one, plus or minus a margin of sampling error.

I daresay there are quite a few people using OS X for similar tasks to me and have similar complaints.
I would also be interested to see the results of the survey you did of all those people to be able to speak so authoritively on their behalf.

I don't know what the hell you're doing, friend, but it's not typical desktop computer use.

Unix Sysadmin. Which, if I'm not mistaken, is a textbook example of one of the types of user Apple is aiming OS X at.

My attitude is, "Your opinion is different from virtually everybody's, so you're wrong."

Since when was "virtually everybody" you ?

[It's faster] Demonstrably false. Move on.

Please demonstrate it as being false. Having a veritable multitude of PCs from Dual Pentium 1s to Quad Xeons available to me, along with quite a swathe of Macs going from a Beige G3/266 all the way up to a Dual 1GHz Xserve I can quite confidently say that OS X's GUI is *much* slower than Windows', even running on hardware that is probably four times faster in raw performance. To make the statement you have is either flat-out lying or complete ignorance.

So does your Mac.

Alas, my Mac requires more work to get at those groupings, which is why I have it listed as a Windows advantage.

Haven't you been reading? [...]

Haven't *you* been reading ? Not. Quickly. It. Doesn't. And, I might add, only two of those methods allow me to go *directly* to an arbitrary window. The others require switching to the application first, with its inherent disadvantages in spewing windows all over the screen.

I don't have any idea what that means. [...]

Well, I'm afraid I can't make it any clearer. I can fix the order of tabs in the taskbar by starting applications and opening windows in that order, and have them remain in that order.
While OS X lets you drag stuff around the Dock (which is nice, and sorely lacking from the Windows taskbar) is doesn't allow any way of pinning an icon in a certain spot. This is most noticeable with minimised windows, where the position of a minimised window at any given time may not be the position it was minimised to, depending on what else has been happening.

Apart from sounding like a contradiction of your previous point, this is substantively the same on a Mac. The placement of things on the dock is completely static until you move them, that is; they do not reorder themselves.

Yes, they do. Apart from the whole centred aspect of the Dock moving things about depending on what is loaded and what isn't, the position of minimised windows *changes* often. If I minimise 3 windows, then restore the middle one and then re-minimise it, it's position in the Dock has changed. This is a bad thing.

You win. Because the Mac doesn't let you do this, it must suck. I apologize for ever doubting you.

*sigh*. You are the epitomy of a Mac Wanker. No opinion other than yours is right, everyone who thinks differently (ah, the irony) is wrong and the only true way is the way you believe things should be done. No-one else, no matter how sound their reasoning or different their needs, could possibly have a better method or different requirements than you, and you're not afraid to tell them so.
I've offered many reasons, along with my needs, why I think some ways of doing things are better than others. Your replies, when distilled from direct or implied insults, effectively are "Why would you want to do that ?" and dismissive of any complaints.
You seem completely unable to understand that there are people who have different workloads and jobs than you do and seem unable to understand that what works for you doing your job might not work for them doing a completely different job. It is somewhat unfortunate - albeit not completely unsurprising - that you appear to be a software developer, or at the very least someone who develops software as a hobby. I just hope you never try to write software outside of your direct experience, because your mind is closed and your habits are set.

You are one of the reasons people like me don't like to be thought of as "Mac users". You have simply refusing to engage anything I've said with any meaningful dialog, choosing instead to insist your way is the only correct way and that everyone else is wrong - despite only having a handful of people in the entire discussion agreeing with you.

In conclusion: please stop interjecting your opinions, [...]

C|N>K. That's pretty funny, given that all you've done thus far is interjected your opinions with little more than "you're wrong and I'm right" to back it up.
If you think the number of people who want to run lots of stuff simultaneously on OS X is small, and going to get smaller, then you are welcome to that belief. However, with Apple aiming OS X squarely at Unix users and Windows users, I propose that you are incorrect.

Re:Safari musing

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're so enamoured with tabs, find one thing-- just one thing!-- that you can do with them that you can't do better without them. Just one!

OK: I can open seven bookmarked webpages AT ONCE with one click on a bookmark created with the "Bookmark all tabs" feature of Chimera. There are certain sites that I visit every day, and being able to open them all at once with ONE CLICK, and to have the others loading as I'm reading the first one, is a real boon that I simply wouldn't want to give up.

Re:Safari musing

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's a quick taste test. Open a Chimera window with four tabs. Now move two of the tabs to another window. We're trying to stay organized, right? So put two of the tabs in one window and two in the other. Oops. Can't do it without opening a new window with two tabs and cutting-and-pasting some URL's.

That's simply not true. I do this all the time, in order to group pages that I want to bookmark as a group. You can click on the page title IN THE TAB and drag it to the tab area of another window (either to another tab OR alongside the other tabs), and voila! If you drag it to a tab, it replaces the page; if you drag it alongside the other tabs, it creates a new one. Simple and elegant.

That's not to say it's perfect. For instance, I'd like to be able to create browser windows and apply my own titles--i.e., "The Evil Empire" for a window that would contain tabs with today's stories about the latest outrages from Redmond, or "Admin" for a window that would contain tabs with my Webmin pages for the severa computers I administer. Then, I could control-click on a tab and choose "Move tab to [Window Name]." That's the direction in which I hope tabbed interfaces will evolve, and it is consistent with Apple's idea that everything is an object contained by other objects and containing objects itself.

Re:Safari musing

[Twirlip of the Mists]

You cannot, in OS X, select a window by choosing its name or iconic representation from a list.

That is completely untrue. You can get from one window to another in the same application in five different ways: the Window menu (select by name), the dock menu (functionally similar to the Window menu; select by name), minimizing and unminimizing (select by thumbnail), command-` and command-shift-`, and simple point and click.

I also object to cmd-` because it is not intuitive

None of this stuff is intuitive. Intuition stops with the nipple. In all fairness, though, command-` was started by Microsoft in their Office and IE products; OS X just codified it. So while I think it's fair to say that it's kind of a hidden feature, it's also fair to say that it has lots of precedent behind it.

for one, minimized windows are treated differently from non-minimized windows.

I'm not seeing what you mean here. Can you elaborate?

I'm not certain why Apple created this artificial division between "application" and "window" in OS X, because it leads to inefficiency.

Apple didn't create it in OS X. It goes all the way back to the original Mac OS, and the rationale behind the systemwide menu bar. The running application takes over the menu bar. When MultiFinder was introduced and multitasking became a feature, "running" was changed to "foremost," where it stays today. In fact, OS X brings something brand new to the Mac: window interleaving. In the classic Mac OS, it was not possible to bring only a single window from a background application to the foreground; either all application windows had to be on top, or none could be. WindowServer does things differently, by letting you bring (say) a single Terminal window to the front, leaving all others in the background.

Users certainly will not bring the application to the foreground by clicking on the applications dock icon (or using cmd-tab) and then select the correct window by using the Window menu (or cmd-`) - it's much faster to find the needed window in the background and simply click on it. That is, however, a terribly inefficient with lots of windows.

Wait, wait. You're saying that you have one way of getting to the right window that isn't optimal when there are few windows, and another that isn't optimal when you have many windows. I think perhaps you might be standing on your head. Flip-flop your objections and you will find that they become strengths.

The barrier is also artificial, especially when you're working with stuff like Apple's Developer Studio

Um. Apple's what now? I'm not familiar with a product called "Developer Studio."

In my preferred environment (X11 with a window manager I wrote), I never work with non-maximized windows, I can select windows immediately from an always-accessible hot-corner menu (with no pointless delays on the menu), or a global alt-tab list (using a proper stack which naturally brings MRU applications to within fewer keystrokes (think about that if you haven't realized it already)), and I can organize windows into workspaces at the touch of a key combo.

Boy, oh boy. Should you ever not be using OS X.

Or, perhaps more accurately, should you ever be running X11 on OS X instead of WindowServer.

Makes OS X feel like early 1980s tech with modern visuals.

Sorry, but from your description it sounds like your preferred environment is early 80's technology, with or without modern visuals. Like the other guy, I'm happy that it works for you, but it's not a Mac, and you shouldn't be surprised by this fact.

I will try to make this point as broadly applicable as possible, so that persons like yourself can read it and know where I'm coming from. If you are an unusual user-- meaning you use your computer in a way that's signficantly different from the way the average user uses it-- then you will not be happy with OS X. OS X was designed, from the ground up, to be the most powerful operating system under the hood, but the simplest on top. The number of basic Finder and OS-level features actually dropped, significantly, between OS 9 and OS X. Desk accessories: gone. Control panels: gone. System extensions: gone. Spring-loaded folders: gone, returned by popular demand. Window-shade: gone. Appearance Manager: gone. Apple Menu: gone. Chooser: gone. Balloon help: gone. Control strip: gone. Desktop printing: gone. Do people miss some of them? Sure. I'm sure there are three, maybe four people out there who miss the hell out of window-shading, or the control strip, or desktop printers. Does that mean Apple should weigh OS X down with all of those features? Absolutely not.

I guess what I'm saying is this: if you genuinely want to use a Mac, then let's talk about your ideas. But if you really wish you were using Linux, or Windows, or whatever, then please just use them and be happy. Use the tools that you find most appropriate for the job, okay?

Okay.

Re:Safari musing

[Anonymous Coward]

"Tabs bring nothing to the party, and require lots of compromises. They should, therefore, not be included in Safari."

You are being pointedly opinionated throughout this thread and yet you won't consider anyone else's opinion without resorting to insult and condescension. And above you suggest that tabs wouldn't make Safari a more popular choice for many people when they may have 4+ browser choices sitting in their dock. You are ignoring the obvious evidence - many many people like and prefer tabbed browsing. The absence of tabs in Safari adds nothing to the party, and is requiring compromise by the many Safari users who would rather have them.

It should also be said that you are a being somewhat of a dictatorial prick, who cares if people are given the choice to use tabs in Safari? besides you, I mean?

Heil Twerlip!

Re:Safari musing

[Twirlip of the Mists]

The popularity of tabs, and the similar reasonings behind liking them, would suggest otherwise.

Are there tabs in IE? No? Well, then I think "popular" is an absurd overstatement of the facts. Tabs are very popular among people who are far, far away from Apple's target audience.

If you believe any of my statements are factually incorrect, then please demonstrate why.

I already have. The horse is dead, put down the bat. Each of your criticisms of one of the five (!) methods of switching between open windows applies to that method and that method only. You seem to be missing the fact that you can use any of those methods at any time. The fact that none of them is perfect amounts to a hill of beans.

And your favorite-- too slow!-- is demonstrably false. So why argue about it any more?

(I always did love that one. "Tabs are faster, because switching windows is more computationally expensive!" Back in the bad old days before Quartz Extreme, that wasn't really true, but it was closer to true than it is now. [In those days, redraw versus restack was pretty much a wash.] Now that every Mac sold stores a buffer of every window in the graphics card and uses the GPU to do the buffer-swapping, it's completely untrue. The CPU cost of switching windows is very, very close to zero.)

Unix Sysadmin. Which, if I'm not mistaken, is a textbook example of one of the types of user Apple is aiming OS X at.

You're mistaken. Apple is aiming OS X at, first, users of OS 9. There's something like 20 million of 'em out there. Next, Apple is aiming OS X at people who have never owned a computer before, and who want to do relatively new tasks like surf the web, listen to music, manage their photographs, and make movies. Next, Apple is aiming OS X at Windows users who are fed up with how hard it is to do the aforementioned tasks with Windows.

Hardcore UNIX users are way, way down the list. Somewhere after professional audio and film/video production (Shake, Final Cut Pro/Express, Logic) and bioscience (BLAST).

I can quite confidently say that OS X's GUI is *much* slower than Windows'

Well, if you say so, then it must be true. Look, I'm not here to teach remedial benchmarking. If you think it's faster, then it's faster. Maybe it's even true in your environment. If you're wrong, then you're wrong. If you're right, then it just doesn't matter, because nobody but nobody uses Macs because they're the fastest. There are, as you may have guessed, other reasons.

I can fix the order of tabs in the taskbar by starting applications and opening windows in that order, and have them remain in that order.

In other words, you are unable to reorder the little widgets in the task bar. I do so love the way you flip things like this on their heads. Instead of "you can't move it," it becomes, "you can fix the order." If I didn't know better, I'd say you're an apologist.

While OS X lets you drag stuff around the Dock (which is nice, and sorely lacking from the Windows taskbar) is doesn't allow any way of pinning an icon in a certain spot.

Okay, I see what you mean now. When you minimize a window, its thumbnail appears at the right side of the dock, next to the trash. When you unminimize it, it disappears from the dock. When you minimize it again, it appears at the right side of the dock. Not very complicated, but I see your point: unminimize a window, then minimize it again, and its thumbnail is now at the right side of the dock instead of in the middle where it originally was. But, in all fairness, I'm not entirely sure how else it could be done, practically speaking.

You are the epitomy of a Mac Wanker.

Fuck you, too.

I've offered many reasons, along with my needs, why I think some ways of doing things are better than others. Your replies, when distilled from direct or implied insults, effectively are "Why would you want to do that ?"

At first, yes, that was my response. Because you were asking for things that are not typical, not even within the range of typical. Then you explained that you work this way, and my response was, in paraphrase, "Fine. Use Windows or UNIX, then. Because a Mac is not for you."

What's the problem?

You are one of the reasons people like me don't like to be thought of as "Mac users".

That's really okay. We Mac users really don't like people such as yourself-- who do nothing but complain about how the Mac isn't like Windows/UNIX/their Toyota/whatever, constantly trying to squeeze the Mac's lima-bean-shaped peg into a round hole-- being thought of as Mac users, either. We're a pretty happy bunch, as a rule, and the degree of discord that your posts would bring to our party just isn't welcome.

It is a free world. Use whatever computer you like. If Windows would better fit your needs and you pick a Mac, expect no sympathy at all from us.

Sorry, but there it is.

Re:Safari musing

[Twirlip of the Mists]

I can open seven bookmarked webpages AT ONCE with one click on a bookmark created with the "Bookmark all tabs" feature of Chimera.

You can do exactly the same thing with webloc files, FYI. Select seven of them, then command-O. Poof! Seven nice new windows, each one with a different page in it.

That's pretty close to being a good answer. Because I had to go outside the browser to do it, let's call it a draw, okay?

Re:Safari musing

[Twirlip of the Mists]

You can click on the page title IN THE TAB and drag it to the tab area of another window (either to another tab OR alongside the other tabs), and voila!

Okay, I stand corrected. That's a good point, and I didn't know about it before. I will no longer complain that you can't drag tabs from one window to another. I will instead concentrate on complaining about all the other stuff I've mentioned, including the fact that you can't reorder tabs in the same window. In fact, if you drag a tab from one window to the same window, as if to move it to another place in the tab bar, Chimera simply creates a new tab and begins downloading the page you dragged. Weird, weird.

Re:Safari musing

[Twirlip of the Mists]

You are being pointedly opinionated throughout this thread and yet you won't consider anyone else's opinion without resorting to insult and condescension.

That's because, with a few notable exceptions, I have yet to hear a contrary opinion that is worth listening to. You've got your guys who wish they were using Windows, your guys who absolutely have to have umty-bump-teen different windows open at the same time, your guys who think OS X sucks because the buttons are round, your guys who think WebCore should have been built on Gecko instead of KHTML, your guys who keep asking when OS X for IA-32 is coming out, and so on. People who are absolutely missing the point.

The point is this: Safari is designed to be a web browser for the 20 million Mac users who are still using OS 9. Are tabs an important feature for those people? No, because those people are running IE 5, and like it. IE for OS 9 is a hell of a browser; fast, standards-compliant, and stable as can be. IE for OS X is hammered shit, slow and buggy. Apple wants people who are migrating from OS 9 to OS X to have the best possible experience, particularly when it comes to surfing the web, and Microsoft just isn't coming through for them.

Life is about trade-offs. Most people who use Safari (or who will use it after it's released, rather) will never use tabs. Of those who do, many will undoubtedly choose another browser for other reasons-- image filtering, the mail client, Gecko, whatever. So you're left with a tiny (in relative terms) group of people who would both want tabbed Safari and use tabbed Safari.

During the time they spend implementing tabs in Safari, Apple could have been fixing bugs, or working on a feature that most people will use, as opposed to a feature that very few people will use.

And yet, we still get a regular influx of "if Safari don't have them tabby thangs, I ain't usin' it, nosiree" bug reports. Some people just aren't getting it, it seems.

You are ignoring the obvious evidence - many many people like and prefer tabbed browsing.

Many as a proportion of Slashdot users? Yes. Many as a proportion of the 20 million Mac OS 9 users that Apple hopes to get migrated over to OS X in the next year? Not exactly.

It should also be said that you are a being somewhat of a dictatorial prick, who cares if people are given the choice to use tabs in Safari?

We all do. See above, re: opportunity costs. This may be a difficult concept for you to grasp at first, particularly if you have ever been on the Mozilla team. It seems like a startling number of Mozilla developers are unclear on the concept of opportunity cost, which explains why it got to 1.0 four years late and weighing in at a whopping 17 MB.

Re:Safari musing

[drsmithy]

Are there tabs in IE? No? Well, then I think "popular" is an absurd overstatement of the facts.

Of people who know about them, they are more liked than disliked. That makes them popular from where I'm standing.

Your line of reasoning is rather amusing, not to mention strange. Presumably you wouldn't call any Mac software at all popular, since at most it would only be used by 5% of the computing population ?

I already have. The horse is dead, put down the bat.

No you haven't. Not once. The closest you've come is saying "you're wrong" with no supporting evidence, or even an argument.

Each of your criticisms of one of the five (!) methods of switching between open windows applies to that method and that method only.

And...? This somehow makes them, and your complete lack of response to them, invalid ? How an earth can you call a response of 'well, the problems with the methods of switching windows only apply to each of those methods' meaningful when the criticism was 'it's a pain changing between windows on OS X because of problems in the methods'.

You seem to be missing the fact that you can use any of those methods at any time. The fact that none of them is perfect amounts to a hill of beans.

I'm not missing that fact at all, sorry to break it to you.
My criticisms still stand. Your complete inability to address those criticisms, and the issues they raise, also still stand.

And your favorite-- too slow!-- is demonstrably false. So why argue about it any more?

Because you haven't demonstrated it, nor even suggested as to why it is demonstratably false.

I always did love that one. "Tabs are faster, because switching windows is more computationally expensive!" [...]

That's not what I said. I said tabs are faster. There are a number of reasons why they are faster to use, none of which have anything to do with computational difficulty. I'd be surprised if, programmatically speaking, a tab is much more expensive to create than a new window.

The CPU cost of switching windows is very, very close to zero.

Nevertheless it is slow - much slower than Windows on comparable, even significantly less powerful hardware.
Even a dual 1GHz Xserve becomes sluggish to interact with in the GUI at trivial loads.
Not that tabs are any faster, when the switch actually occurs - it's just they're quicker to get to.

Having said that, I don't know where you get this silly idea I think switchings is slower because it is more computationally expensive. I never said that (or even implied it).

You're mistaken. [...]

Ah, I must have been imagining all those ads obviously aimed at Unix users.

Well, if you say so, then it must be true. [...]

I'm quite happy to run any benchmark you wish to devise and describe to compare the performance between switching windows on OS X vs Windows. However, given the sluggishness of OS X's GUI is a fairly commonly-accepted fact, I'm surprised you'd even bother trying to say it was faster.
Btw, I don't expect Macs to be the fastest and really, it's not a huge issue as nothing I do requires a great deal of performance. I do, however, expect a machine with as much raw power as a Dual G4 _not_ to get a sluggish GUI under a trivial load. Speed does not really bother me. Unresponsiveness does, and OS X is unresponsive. Presumably some of this is builtin and deliberate, like the short pauses before menus appear - but other things like window resizing are so atrociously slow as to detract from the entire user experience.

In other words, you are unable to reorder the little widgets in the task bar.

That's what I said. Twice.

I do so love the way you flip things like this on their heads. Instead of "you can't move it," it becomes, "you can fix the order." If I didn't know better, I'd say you're an apologist.

What's to flip on its head ? I quite clearly stated that the order of the tabs in the taskbar does not change and I consider that an advantage - much like I consider it an advantage that the order of tabs does not change in Chimera. You might like having to hunt around for the window you want every time you want it, but I like things to stay put so I can take advantage of simply remembering where it was on the screen and click there. It's faster. The same principle behind the Apple Menu and standard Application/File/Edit/etc menus.

But, in all fairness, I'm not entirely sure how else it could be done, practically speaking.

It can't in the way the Dock is currently implemented. It is an inherently broken feature of how the Dock deals with minimised windows.

Fuck you, too.

Perhaps if you were a little less snooty, a little more open-minded, somewhat more prepared to accept that not everyone has the same needs you do and a little more humble I'd have been less inclined to describe you the way I did.
However, the more posts of yours I read the more I agree with my initial assessment. You're a smarmy little know-it-all who refuses to accept they don't and would rather belittle and insult people with differing viewpoints than try to discuss them.

Because you were asking for things that are not typical, not even within the range of typical.

I'd call wanting to use several applications and windows concurrently to be fairly typical behaviour. It might not be for Mac users, as they're used to a GUI not geared towards efficiently dealing with lots of windows, but it is to the rest of the world.

What's the problem?

The problem is that instead of reacting in a reasonable and polite manner, you chose not to. As I've noticed in the past, this is a typical Mac Zealot reaction to any suggestion that their way is not the best way.

We Mac users really don't like people such as yourself [...]

Yes, I know. You are very intolerant to anyone critical of Apple or anything Apple has ever done.

It is a free world. Use whatever computer you like. If Windows would better fit your needs and you pick a Mac, expect no sympathy at all from us.

Except Windows wouldn't and doesn't, which is why I moved to OS X. Fortunately while the Mac community and its attitudes leave a lot to be desired, the OS itself is solid, reliable and apart from a few minor niggles, nice to use.

Re:Safari musing

[mcwetboy]

I own a 600 MHz iBook, and I find opening new Safari windows to be very quick. Quicker than opening new windows -- or new tabs -- in Mozilla or Chimera. I'll take fast windows over slow tabs any day. Make the tabs comparably fast, and we'll talk.

Re:Safari musing

[Mirkon]

My complaint is/was not the opening of tabs/windows, but rather, keeping track of them.

WIth two dozen tabs open, I can see what's finished loading and check each one in turn. With windows piled on top of other windows, I have to either cycle through them one at a time or venture random guesses.

I'm not slamming Safari. Actually, I've never used it. I'm just saying that tabs are, in fact, God's gift to web browsers.

Re:Safari musing

[Anonymous Coward]

That's pretty close to being a good answer. Because I had to go outside the browser to do it, let's call it a draw, okay?

Sorry--because you had to go outside of the browser AND select seven SEPARATE items (compared to my one), I'll call it a win--for me.

Re:Safari musing

[Anonymous Coward]

for one, minimized windows are treated differently from non-minimized windows.

I'm not seeing what you mean here. Can you elaborate?

Non-minimized windows do not appear in the dock; only minimized windows appear in the dock. This is unintuitive because when you look for a window, you first have to figure out whether or not it was minimized: you look on-screen, and, failing to find it immediately, you look in the dock, and failing to find it there, you start shuffling windows around, or attempt to recall which application the window belongs to.

Um. Apple's what now? I'm not familiar with a product called "Developer Studio."

Well, I guess you saw right through my attempt to sound like a real Mac user :) I meant the complex bundle of gui applications you have to download in order to get gcc + make and friends.

I guess what I'm saying is this: if you genuinely want to use a Mac, then let's talk about your ideas. But if you really wish you were using Linux, or Windows, or whatever, then please just use them and be happy. Use the tools that you find most appropriate for the job, okay?

You are right, and you get it. Unfortunately, the Mac-heads I usually come in contact with don't get it and can't understand why I could possibly prefer a regular X11 Unix workstation to a Macintosh. My rants are simply an explanation of why I don't like using MacOS X (and this was only about window management - don't even get me started on attempting to do Unix things with MacOS X - really, the most annoying thing is that OS X all but requires HFS (since most things (like file sharing) don't work on UFS) and HFS makes managing OS X machines all but impossible using standard unix tools; if Apple made file forks appear as funny-looking files in HFS as they do in UFS, I might consider allowing OS X machines back into my server room, as I could manage them like any other *nix box and others would appreciate the little gui management stuff).

Anyway, back to the matter at hand - I appreciate that Apple is doing some cool things, but I'm really sick of trying to explain why my next laptop is going to be some cheapo PC running FreeBSD and not a titanium Mac. I know my window management is better for me, since I wrote it and I can make it do anything I want. Might not be better for you or my mother, but I didn't write it for anyone except myself. You can at least appreciate that, but other Mac-heads seem to think that anything Apple produces is automatically better for everybody and that writing X11 software is pointless, since Apple's technology is all-so-great and we can all just give up our unix machines and get Macs.

(Regarding the quip about 80's software: have you ever run Apple's "Workgroup Manager" or related programs? Amazing how slow and unstable they are - my guess is because they (Regarding the quip about 80's software: have you ever run Apple's "Workgroup Manager" or related programs? Amazing how slow and unstable they are - my guess is because they go through loopback for every operation in order to implement client/server display (per-program, not VNC-like), whereas this comes for free with X11. Is this relevant? Anecdote: I recently had to write a program that did some fairly simple database stuff, but some more complex gui stuff that isn't feasible with a browser (real-time list/menu/table manipulation with data from a database (and obviously we can't send all records over the wire)). Anyway, it had to run on Windows and MacOS. VNC/Remote Desktop/etc are not options since we need to run 15 to 30 separate instances of the program simultaneously. First option: write a Windows and Mac version of the program and have them talk to the database over the network. This is only feasible (given time constraints) in Java or wxPython (or perhaps with C++/QT, but we'd have to get licenses for QT). This would involve client/server code since I could not give anyone direct access to the database ports (for security considerations; this means writing client code that encodes some operations and operands, and server code that decodes it, does appropriate database manipulation, and sends back encoded results - using custom parsers, XML was really overkill for this simple stuff). Second option: write an X11 application (using any language or toolkit) and have it display remotely using X11 (the cygwin/XFree86 rootless stuff is just now becoming stable and those above are now taking X11 on MacOS seriously since Apple is putting time into it). Version one of the system used option one (Java clients, C server backend); version two of the system uses option two (QT/X11, and some desktop shortcuts that ssh into chrooted sandbox account on server to launch program). Version one was a PITA and took immense amounts of time; version two was simple, immediate, direct and far more responsive. Now, what was that quip about 1980s technology? :)

Anyway, yeah, I got a chip on my shoulder. Some of those suggestions about window management may be useful for others, as I have put some thought into this.

Re:Safari musing

[FortranDragon]

Maybe for the way *you* use them, but not when you've got a dozen monitoring web pages sitting in tabs that remain in a fixed order. I don't *need* to read the title of the page, because its function is associated with its location (you know, the same principle Apple espouses with its single standardised menu bar). To say tabs as demonstrated elsewhere tabs are completely unacceptable" is patently false when I, and others, use them in such a way every hour of every day.

Obviously for you, tabs are essential. The main question is really: are you a normal user of tabs? That is, do people generally open a fixed set/fixed order of tabs most of the time or do they have open a random set of tabs (say, using the tabs to load stuff in the background while they continue to read their current page)?

My thought is that it is the latter, not the former, but I could be wrong. I'd be interested to see what other people say about their usage.

Personally, I'm glad to see both browsers. I want choices and having Safari and Chimera gives me the best of both worlds. That's cool. :)

Re:Safari musing

[Twirlip of the Mists]

Sorry--because you had to go outside of the browser AND select seven SEPARATE items (compared to my one), I'll call it a win--for me.

Absolutely not. You open the bookmarks manager thingy, select something, and hit a key. I click a Finder window, select something (marquee or cmd-A) and hit a key. It's a draw, and you know it.

Re:Safari musing

[dumbArtMajor]

Sorry, I had to add one more thing as I follow this intriguing discussion.

Hardcore UNIX users are way, way down the list. Somewhere after professional audio and film/video production (Shake, Final Cut Pro/Express, Logic) and bioscience (BLAST).

I'm not sure where you obtained your marketing figures, but you're wrong. Actually, I'll let Apple's website refute your argument for me (from this link's FIRST PARAGRAPH):

And whether you're a Mac user who's upgrading, a Windows user who's looking at switching to the Mac or a UNIX user who loves the idea of using key applications like Microsoft Office on top of a state-of-the art BSD UNIX implementation, this is the OS for you.

That's along with links to Darwin and professional-grade developer tools further down on the main page. I'd say Apple considers all three equally important (as they should).

And *what* gave you the idea that Mac doesn't want the audio and film/video audience?? How can you even mention Final Cut Pro/Express and then claim they don't want that audience? Do you ever read the Pro Page, where they regularly do spotlights on artists in the fields you just dismissed as unimportant?

As a longtime Mac user, I have to agree with drsmithy, you are one of those people that give Apple users a bad name, because you CANNOT digress from what you see as "The Apple Way," whether or not that actually *is* The Apple Way. OSX is very much a work-in-progress, and they've never claimed it was a finished product (or there would be no reason for updates).

And this reinforces the original argument, that just because YOU haven't discovered something, doesn't make it useless. You're so caught up in trying to show off your complete comprehension of shortcuts and hidden features (which we already know) that you're missing the key point: None of those features addresses a basic user need, which tabs has (thus far) done the best job of fulfilling.

Re:Safari musing

[Twirlip of the Mists]

Non-minimized windows do not appear in the dock; only minimized windows appear in the dock. This is unintuitive because when you look for a window, you first have to figure out whether or not it was minimized:

Sorry, I'm not going to buy that one. See, while I don't agree that this point is counterintuitive at all-- what do you expect, that every window should be listed in the dock??-- compared to how WindowServer handles minimized windows, tabs are even less intuitive. See, the line between a tab and a window cannot be crossed, despite the fact that they are, functionally, exactly the same things. Tabs can't show up in the Window menu. Tabs can't show up in the dock menu. You can't cycle through tabs with command-` and command-shift-`.

So basically what tabs do is that make the user learn an entirely new semantic for dealing with windows. Unnecessarily, as I've pointed out time and again now.

I meant the complex bundle of gui applications you have to download in order to get gcc + make and friends.

One download, one install, and it's bundled with new systems by default. The CD (or CD image, if you're downloading) is called Developer Tools.

There is only the one application that you need for creating software: Project Builder. Well, two if you count Interface Builder, but that's not really necessary. Project Builder provides the front end to jam and gcc (C++, Objective-C, and Java) and gdb. The rest of what's included on Developer Tools is documentation, example code, and a set of secondary tools like a memory leak tracer and profiling tools and such.

My rants are simply an explanation of why I don't like using MacOS X

I appreciate your openness about this, but since this is a Mac thread, and a Safari thread in particular, I hope you can understand why I'm going to be pretty dismissive. If you want to talk about this stuff in the abstract sometime, email me or something. But if we're talking about features that should be included in Apple's bundled web browser for Mac OS X, going off on tangents about why OS X isn't as good as X11 isn't very productive.

if Apple made file forks appear as funny-looking files in HFS as they do in UFS, I might consider allowing OS X machines back into my server room

Forks are completely deprecated. I don't believe I have a single resource fork on any of my machines, except in files like Word documents. Word, being a really poorly Carbonated application, sticks a resource fork on all of its documents, for no reason that I can grasp. You can strip it off with no trouble at all, which means it must not be doing anything important.

You will find forks in Classic applications, of course, but seriously... who uses those any more?

You can at least appreciate that, but other Mac-heads seem to think that anything Apple produces is automatically better for everybody and that writing X11 software is pointless

Both of those things is true. It's just a matter of educating the nonbelievers. ;-)

Seriously, pull out the tutorial and do a little Cocoa programming. In a day, you'll be completely and utterly unable to look at any C++ or (especially) X11 source code without getting the shakes. I spent about a year slogging through ViewKit, and after my first day of messing around with Cocoa I was pissed that I'd wasted a year of my life.

Re:Safari musing

[Anonymous Coward]

You open the bookmarks manager thingy, select something, and hit a key. I click a Finder window, select something (marquee or cmd-A) and hit a key. It's a draw, and you know it.

Nope. You take three steps, I take one--I click a link in my bookmarks toolbar. AND I don't have to switch apps to do it. PLUS, if I set Safari as my default browser, I can still click my link in Chimera and have the seven locations open up INSIDE CHIMERA. Try to do that with your webloc files, and they'll trigger your default browser. Game, set, match.

Re:Safari musing

[Twirlip of the Mists]

Okay, you win. Chimera can do one thing that you can't do with Safari. (Of course, we could fix this by adding a multiple-select-and-open feature to the bookmarks manager; tabbed browsing is not necessary to implement this functionality.) Good for you. Now, would you mind having a quick look at the real issues to see what you can do about those?

Re:Safari musing

[Twirlip of the Mists]

I'd say Apple considers all three equally important (as they should).

Dude, that's marketing material. What do you expect, that it's going to say, "Whether you're a Mac user who's upgrading or a Windows user who's looking at switching to the Mac this is the OS for you. If you're a UNIX user, yeah, we'd like you to buy Macs too, but we're not going to bend over backwards for it or anything. We've got bigger fish to fry right now."

Apple's actual business plan and product strategies differ somewhat from what the marketing glossies say. I know this will come as a shock to you, but there it is.

How can you even mention Final Cut Pro/Express and then claim they don't want that audience?

1. Apple has acquired Final Cut Pro, Shake, Logic, Chalice, and Rayz from other companies in order to ensure that those products, and products like them, continue to be available for the Mac. Does Apple want media users? Yes, definitely. Is Apple taking the time to write entire applications from scratch-- like Safari, from example-- to capture that market? No. They're doing it the quick-and-dirty way.

2. Final Cut Express is part of the consumer product line, and it's positioned as a part of the iLife strategy. The other iLife products-- iPhoto, iDVD, iMovie, and, yes, Safari-- were all written from scratch to capture Apple's target market: home users. Apple invested heavily in those products. Apple slimmed down Final Cut Pro to make Final Cut Express because home and "prosumer" (ugh) users wanted it, and because Apple could do it more or less for free. Again, is Apple bending over backwards to capture the media market? No. They're working on it, through acquisitions and partnerships, but it's not their biggest focus. Apple's core focus for 2003 is iLife, and getting the 20 million OS 9 users up to OS X, or at least as many of them as they can.

And this reinforces the original argument, that just because YOU haven't discovered something, doesn't make it useless.

Blah, blah. That horse is dead. Whether or not you agree with me on the technical issues, the larger issues still stand.

None of those features addresses a basic user need, which tabs has (thus far) done the best job of fulfilling.

Basic user need? No. If tabbed browsing addressed a basic user need, Netscape would have taken the Windows browser market by storm. And yet, the vast majority of users still use IE, despite the fact that it lacks tabbed browsing.

You're seeing the market through a fish-eye lens. Look at it from a more appropriate perspective and you'll see that tabbed browsing just doesn't matter. It's not good enough to woo people to using Netscape, so it's not an important feature for Safari. And here is where those 6 points in my other post start to come into play.

Re:Safari musing

[Twirlip of the Mists]

I'm not slamming Safari. Actually, I've never used it.

Boy, we sure are getting some quality input today. "I've never driven a car, but I'd say that the horse is God's gift to transportation." Thanks, thanks a lot. Really appreciate the fact that you took the time to post that. Means a lot. Thanks.

Re:Safari musing

[nullard]

I use both windows and tabs. I like the ability to load related links in the background while reading an article. For instance, this is my Slashdot window. It has tabs for each of the stories I want to read. As I read the front page, I middle clicked on every interesting link. Now I can visit them one at a time, knowing that the last ones will continue to load in the background as I read the first ones. I can also switch to another window containing, say, soem programming references. Then I can switch back to the slashdot window. See, tabs can be used to group pages by subject. Yes tabs could be better, but I'd rather have them than not. It's good to look at the tab bar and see that I have four more stories to read. This is not possible using only multiple windows. Tabs help me get my work done faster. I like them.

I've been an Apple customer since the mid 80's. My first computer was a mac plus. I still have System 4.1 boot disks with Crystal Quest on them. I pre-ordered the original 450 MHz G4. Don't tell me that I don't have the right to requests features in an Apple browser. Apple supplies us both with technology. We both have the right to request new features in Apple products. Just because you don't like tabs doesn't mean that they are not useful to other people. I have no use for left handed mice, but you don't see me calling for their destruction.

Re:Safari musing

[akrabat]

If you're on Windows, where there is no systemwide Window menu and (in pre-XP days) the task bar rapidly becomes crowded by multiple windows, then tabs make sense.

In post-XP days, it still does :) I'd love to use a Mac, but my choice of OS is based on the applications I want to run (which are only available for Windows atm).

Re:Safari musing

[Mirkon]

As I remember, the discussion topic was originally about Chimera, and my particular comment was about tabbed browsing.

Frankly, if you think that your mention of Safari immediately negates everything I've said, you can go have a seizure.

Re:Safari musing

[Anonymous Coward]

If they were windows instead of tabs, I could go to the Window menu or the dock menu to find out. But since they're tabs, I have to either click on them one at a time, or cycle through them using a keyboard shortcut. This is a major shortcoming of the tabbed interface.

Uhhh, or you could just hold the mouse over it for a second and view the tooltip. Or you could switch to it instantly by clicking on it and view the menu. Or on a high resolution big screen the tabs could contain an icon representing what the page looks like, etc.

Tabs serve no useful function that is not better served by the various and several existing features of the window server. The fact that they let you do the same thing in a different way is fine and good, but since they solve no problems

Clearly they are beneficial, or you wouldn't have so many people in love with them! Tabs offer speed improvements for the average surfer. They let you focus on the current document while 'collecting' links to view later. They let you bookmark a group of pages that go together (pages in a project you're working on, for example).

For you to say 'they solve no problems' is ridiculous.

Opportunity costs, my friend. For every minute that an Apple programmer spends working on tabs, that's one minute not spent fixing bugs in the model or view classes, or the renderer.

Give me a fucking break!

Yeah, I have a girlfriend too, and she loves Safari. I showed her tabs once, in Chimera, and her response was, "Why would I go to all that trouble when I can just open a new window?"

I can think of a dozen explanations for your girlfriend, but really, what's the point of arguing with you? If you like browsing in the stone age, be my guest. I know people that will only click on items in a menu, never a shortcut key or icon in a toolbar. If you want to take the slower, more painful route, that's fine. Have fun!

Re:Safari musing

[Anonymous Coward]

Boy, we sure are getting some quality input today. "I've never driven a car, but I'd say that the horse is God's gift to transportation." Thanks, thanks a lot. Really appreciate the fact that you took the time to post that. Means a lot. Thanks.

He doesn't need to use Safari. The comparison is between a browser that has tabs (Mozilla/Opera) and one that doesn't (all the others). I bet he has enough experience.

Re:Safari musing

[Anonymous Coward]

In that case you should have opened 2 windows
one window with all the documentation tabs
and the other with the random websites tabs

It is clear you haven't realized yet how to use tabs properly

Re:Safari musing

[SoupIsGoodFood_42]

Well, now that I've had a chance to compare them at the same time, they're pretty much even. Except for the fact that it takes me a few seconds to move the window up so that the bottom isn't covered behind the screen. Don't have to do that with tabs. Tabs win for me.

Re:Safari musing

[SoupIsGoodFood_42]

The spatial organization argument is bogus, and it's incompatible with another major pro-tabs argument: logical organization. Windows can be put anywhere on the screen you like, so it's easy to remember that this was over here and that was over there. That's one of the main benefits of moveable windows in a UI.

But as mentioned before, moving windows around is a pain. Tabs order themselves in a predictable manor.

This is the crux of my point. If you want to keep track, in your head, of which window is which, then by all means keep using tabs. Myself, I don't like having to do that.

I'm talking about spatial orientation and memory muscle here. You don't have to actively remember where the tabs are/what order they are in, you brain does this automaticly. Yes, windows have the same advantages, like you said at the top, but like I said in my reply to that, windows are a pain because they don't order themselves clearly, it's very easy for a window to be hidden. Tabs may get truckated, but they are never hidden behind other tabs.

On an OS like Windows or Solaris, not having tabs may suck worse than having them. But on an OS like OS X, where the OS provides you with all the window juggling services you require, tabs are at best redundant and at worst a huge waste of time and resources on the part of the developers.

To the contrary my dear. In Windows, Tabs just keep the task-bar less cluttered. In OS X, there is no task-bar, and all the other alternatives aren't as fast or as easy as the task-bar. If it takes more than one mouse-move and a click, then it's too slow for me to be used as a system to switch between windows.

If you're so enamoured with tabs, find one thing-- just one thing!-- that you can do with them that you can't do better without them. Just one!

Switch between sites I'm browsing very quicky. And that's the most important one for me.

I'll admit that tabs are a GUI hack. They are providing a solution to a problem that Mac OS has had. Hopefully Apple will be adressing the issue, then we can banish tabs from things like Chimera, but until then, I suspect they will become quite popular (and by judging from posts on various web-sites, they already are).

Re:Safari musing

[Anonymous Coward]

thanks for the comparison. If we were comparing travelling on rocky foot trails over mountains. Your car can't tab. It can't do CSS, and its javascript has a flat tire, a cracked distributor cap, and it on runs on 2 cylinders. But hey, for the gas mileage! At least it doesn't eat hay.

Re:Safari musing

[Anonymous Coward]

These operations are not intuitive, and they're not convenient.

Typing isn't intuitive, either. But I don't hear you bitching about keyboards.

Re:Safari musing

[Anonymous Coward]

Twirlip, I like my tabs. You don't like yours. The difference between us is that I accept perfectly well that you don't like tabs, whereas you, for some reason, cannot accept that others do like tabs. I know you find it fun and academic and pedantic to theorize about why tabs violate Fitt's Law up the wazoo and how they represent an inferior browsing experience, but I find your reasoning to live in theory and die in practice.

That's MY opinion. I will browse in the fashion that I find best fits my application, and you will do the same. There. Yay. We're both happy, we both get our tasks done, and we may use different browsers. Wowee! Imagine!

Hold up, hold up. Before you set out to defend your presumably ruffled feathers with a long, windy, condescending, opinionated, bullheaded post, I first invite you to wade in a pond of shit, because I don't care.

Nooooooo!

[MacAndrew]

Of course, I find something I love and *Apple* of all companies threatens to kill it, indirectly.

I've been using Chimera Navigator for months, forgetting altogether IE (the real villain IMHO). I suppose the sole question for the Chimera team on whether to continue is whether *their* shadowy objectives are being met. The results in the time frame of the effort so far has been impressive -- no, stunning -- much more than a build-a-brower this weekend kind of thing. It really is Mac software.

The single best thing I can say about Chimera -- and there are many nice things, more so now that I've gotten around to poking around with 3rd party mods like SpeedChimera and "PDF Plugin" -- is that I've mostly forgotten about it. That is, it works like the Finder or some other utility that you take for granted and don't give much thought. That's what I've wanted, not the fickle and feature-encrusted IE, just something simple and clean and fast. Safari will learn (has learned?) a few things from Chimera, which tells you something about the latter's value and why it would be a shame to lose the lead-by-example prominence of Chimera.

Re:Nooooooo!

[usr122122121]

Of course, I find something I love and *Apple* of all companies threatens to kill it, indirectly.

Plain and simple: Apple does not have the power to kill off the Chimera project. Apple can create another similar product, but it is up to the end user to decide.

Plus, I think everyone is missing the mark a bit: both browsers are free. These organizations/companies aren't going to be shut-out financially... they weren't getting the users' money for these browsers in the first place!

If the developers choose to shut down the Chimera project, it would be a shame, but it would be their decision. To blame that decision on Apple is ridiculous.

Re:Nooooooo!

[Oculus Habent]

Indeed, it is not Apple's fault if Chimera loses developers. Chimera isa great browser, I use both it and Safari, and while i keep IE around to check the HTML I write, I haven't used it for over a month now.

Chimera was my only browser until Safari came out. And while I now primarily use Safari, Chimera is still in my Dock, right next to Safari. Several pages I visit do not load properly (or at all) in Safari, and I have sent bug reports in. Chimera continues to run reliably and without fail for me.

Twirlip of the Mists makes good points about how tabs, while convenient, are also making a mess of the function of the browser. I love Tabs, I swear by them when I'm in Chimera, but Twirlip's points about making tabs draggable are a consideration. I tend to keep a two windows with 2-5 tabs up when using Chimera, and the last thing I want is Excel-style contextual-menus for working with tabs.

I hope Chimera does stick around, and that someday Safari will have tabs. But Apple is the champion of Drag-n-Drop, having brought it to us in System 7 Pro (some programs installed it in System 7.1, though) and faithfully carried it with them. Tabs, as they are today, have their static place in preferences and programs, but such dynamic tabs may be hard for Apple to stomach.

Re:Nooooooo!

[MacAndrew]

You misunderstand -- Apple could "kill" Chimera by giving the latter's developers the impression that there's no need to contune because their browser is not different enough or that the remaining market share is too slight. There are other forms of competition than profit. Internet Explorer is free -- you don't think Microsoft intends to use it as a tool to dominate the market?

If the developers choose to shut down the Chimera project, it would be a shame, but it would be their decision. To blame that decision on Apple is ridiculous.

If the developers decide to shut down Chimera because of the Safari release, where the the hell would you assign the "blame" but Apple? It's not much of a blame -- the product is replaced and users come out in roughly the same place -- but you still see it would be a "shame." Apple is increasingly absorbing the types of applications with wide enough audiences to attract good developers, and here would be undermining an open source developer to boot. I don't think an all-Apple software world is a good thing. Although I think Apple is doing a great job, and I am benefitting from their products, it would be very foolish not to consider the impact of their expansion on the development community as a whole, which for the Mac is small to begin with.

Re:Nooooooo!

[mrpuffypants]

well, Apple's browser is not free, technically (to Apple, that is). Apple has to invest development time and pay those people to make the software, whereas Chimera is totally free and open sourced....i.e. the development time is donated.

Safari vary well could die, but only if Apple died with it.

However, I seem to remember Apple hiring the oroginal Chimera guy a while back and that's what got all the rumours started about the Apple browser. The big thing is whenever IE stops shipping with the macs, or at least leaves the dock on boot-up.

Re:Nooooooo!

[IamTheRealMike]

Plain and simple: Apple does not have the power to kill off the Chimera project. Apple can create another similar product, but it is up to the end user to decide.

So Microsoft didn't have the power to kill off Netscape?

I don't know for sure, so flame me if I'm wrong, but I doubt in future MacOS will come with Safari and Chimera both installed by default, both given equal prominance. Only those that know about it will use it and Chimera will end up to Safari what Mozilla is to IE on Windows.

Re:Nooooooo!

[DeeKay]

Omniweb is the *only* OSX-browser to get Drag & Drop right! Yes, it beats Safari by a large margin!
I've tried them all, Safari, Chimera, IE and Omniweb, and OW is by far the best integrated with the nicest features, there's so much stuff that Chimera got from Omniweb you wouldn't believe it: Shortcuts, Linebreak/Tab/Space-Filtering in the URL bar, opening of a new browser window when there's none or all are minimized, a largely enhanced contextual menue that almost matches OWs Menues now (only in the latest nightly builds!) and much more!
But Drag & Drop is really bad with Chimera, i can't drag URLs or Text into Editfields, if i drag an Image (read: just a rectangle of the image's size!) onto the desktop it makes a TEXT clipping of it! Why?
This is why i still prefer OW as my primary browser, even though it may be the slowest and (besides iCab) most incompatible (hint: Setting the Browser-ID-String from "Omniweb" to "Netscape 6" helps with alot of lamely programmed Browsercheck-Javascripts!) and you bet i'm looking forward to OW5 featuring Apples WebCore..

Somebody's mad at Apple

[bill_mcgonigle]

It's obvious it will only ever be a marginal product on a even more marginal platform.

So, not only does Chimera suck, Mac OS X sucks harder. Am I translating that right?

I was very excited at first by Chimera, but by 0.3 I'd uninstalled it and stopped participating in the mailing lists. I thought Chimera was going to be the OS-X native (look & feel, native text widgets, services, full-on ATSUI, etc.) version of Mozilla, but instead it became the dumbed-down version of Mozilla with a nice OS X GUI but drastically reduced functionality (at last glance there was still no button to close a tab).

Now it seems this direction was chosen in order to lure Apple to use it as the default browser on OS X. Since they decided not to, what purpose does Chimera serve? For a dumb browser, we have Safari.

If I may suggest, there is a market for a non-dumb browser on OS X. OmniWeb still has a decent following but it can't compete with Mozilla for standards. Re-tasking Chimera to be the OS X -native version of Mozilla might be a good direction for the project - quite a bit of the hard work has been done already.

Re:Somebody's mad at Apple

[mgs1000]

I have the latest Chimera and it has a "close tab" button.

Unfortunately, it goes on the "navigation toolbar" instead of the tab itself.

...Just my $.02

Re:Somebody's mad at Apple

[jtdubs]

Good to see you spent so much time experimenting with Chimera. You seem to know it inside and out.

By the way, you can close a tab by pressing Apple+W (like you would normally close a window). Genius.

Justin Dubs

Re:Somebody's mad at Apple

[bill_mcgonigle]

By the way, you can close a tab by pressing Apple+W (like you would normally close a window).

Only if the tab has the current focus, and only if you're using the keyboard for browsing. Mozilla, and Netscape before it pioneered mouse-only browsing. You'll notice that Mozilla has a GUI widget for closing a tab, and it's not because the Mozilla folks are far less intelligent than you are.

Genius.

Ummm, yeah, well, I won't play your name-calling game, but suffice it to say not everybody uses a computer the same way you do, and you shouldn't assume as much.

Re:Somebody's mad at Apple

[moof1138]

One person's featureful browser is another's bloatware. Note how often people bitch about Mozilla as 'bloated.' Software design is all about tradeoffs, no feature is completely free, and Chimera has the best set of tradeoffs for me (except for putting the bookmarks in a sidebar - I hate that). You might not see some features you want and call Chimera 'dumb,' but there is a fair chance that the gains of adding the feature vs. the bloat added by it were weighed. Also Chimera has a lot of features with no UI in prefs.js.

It is funny that the example you chose (the close button) is one of the reasons I like Chimera over Moz. The space where tabs go is already space limited and I was really annoyed when the close button showed up in Mozilla. When a lot of tabs are open that limited space is precious - adding a UI widget for an action where you already could either hit Cmd-W, or use a contextual menu did not seem like a good trade to me, and I am happy to see Chimera agrees more with my sensibilities. And it is clear that there are still a lot of feature yet to be implemented in Chimera, and features to implement, since it is only a .6 release.

Finally it is really funny to see someone call a browser 'dumb' when that person cast their opinions in concrete at version number .3.

Re:Somebody's mad at Apple

[bill_mcgonigle]

You might not see some features you want and call Chimera 'dumb,' but there is a fair chance that the gains of adding the feature vs. the bloat added by it were weighed

OK s/dumb/minimalistic/, if the semantics work better (or dumbed-down, 'lite', simple, limited, whatever works). The problem I had is that it was decided that the OS X savvy version of Mozilla was to be minimalistic. If you want Aqua behavior, you have to give up the other features. If you want the other features, you have to live with a clunky UI which doesn't conform to the Aqua HIG. There's no choice for the user. Even the Finder has a 'Simple Finder Mode', but the user has the choice whether they want the 'bloated' Finder or the Simple Finder.

Also Chimera has a lot of features with no UI in prefs.js.

Yet many users on the lists and in Bugzilla are asking for the 'secret' lines to add to get the functionality they require. Who does that help? Why not expose the preferences so the users can decide if they want to use certain features or not? Because it's minimalistic, and the developers will decide what the users need.

Finally it is really funny to see someone call a browser 'dumb' when that person cast their opinions in concrete at version number .3.

That's about the time it was decided to go minimalistic. I've never criticized the implementation, the quality of work, or the effort put in by the team - on the contrary the product performs quite well - it's the project direction that was troubling and that hasn't changed.

Re:Somebody's mad at Apple

[Redline]

Mozilla, and Netscape before it pioneered mouse-only browsing.

Then try right-clicking or ctrl+clicking the offending tab in chimera and selecting "close tab" from the context menu. This works the same as mozilla or konqueror.

You'll notice that Mozilla has a GUI widget for closing a tab

The versions of mozilla I have seen don't have a close button on each tab, but a single close button to the right of the tabs. And it will only close the currently focused tab, much like the Apple+W hotkey suggestion above.

Don't take my Chimera!

[ahknight]

Please, please don't take my Chimera! Here's why:

Mozilla is bloated. It's slower than Chimera and includes a whole lot of things that are just not needed in a web browser.

Safari can't render well. For the time being, it's not a good solution for people who need standards-compliance or good CSS support. Chimera is.

Tabs, and Aqua-ness aside, it's really the best solution. Even after Safari came out I'm still clinging to Chimera. It still has it's uses and is still the best solution for the Mac right now. It's WAY too early to claim obsolescence.

Re:Don't take my Chimera!

[slyborg]

I don't understand the bitching about Mozilla being "bloated". Most people are sporting 80GB+ drive capacities now, so disk space isn't the issue. It loads slower, but how many times do you launch the browser? On my machines, I run browser sessions for days. And the additional features of Mozilla amount to a few tiny icons near the bottom of the screen. I just ignore them.

I just don't understand this mass delusion that Chimera is "faster" than Mozilla, either. How can it be faster to render when it uses the exact same engine?? I've used both, and I see no perceptible difference in speed. There certainly is a difference in stability, Moz 1.2 has been golden for me.

Chimera is more Aquafied...ok, I run Pinstripe on Moz, done.

I agree Chimera is superior to Safari, at least in its current incarnation, but from my standpoint both could dry up and blow away and be no loss. If you want alternatives with different approaches and unique technology, as pointed out by someone, there is still Opera, there is still iCab. Apple's imprimatur in this area doesn't count for much, for those of us who remember CyberDog....

Re:Don't take my Chimera!

[cubal]

Amen!

Chimera is still my primary browser -- I tried safari, but I really can't handle no tabs, and it munts up local relative URLs (which is a killer for web development)

Mozilla is bloat, and kinda ugly after aqua.

IE is IE... need I say more?

So I say, keep it coming Chimera, please!! :)

Re:Don't take my Chimera!

[ahknight]

Bloat is not just size, it's feel.

There's two dozen preference catagories, there's menus out the wazoo, there's dialogs for this and that and the window is cluttered (every edge has a button on it, somewhere).

It's bloated not in size but in features. Every feature takes up a menu item, preference, or window widget. "If you don't want to use this part, don't" isn't a good answer when I have to stare at the infernal button all day.

So, rather than complain, I switched to Chimera, which does not have the problem.

Re:Don't take my Chimera!

[c13v3rm0nk3y]

I just don't understand this mass delusion that Chimera is "faster" than Mozilla, either.

There have been a few comparisions of native browers for OS X. Almost all of them break down "speed" into a variety of metrics. In most I've seen, important numbers like startup time and page load time, Chimera beats both Mozilla and IE. There are a lot of cars that share the same engine. We wouldn't expect them to perform the same would we?

Chimera, and Safari, are for people who want a web browser. They don't need, or want, a mail client or a chat client. Mozilla comes with an HTML editor, for cryinoutloud!

"Bloated" can mean many things.

Re:Don't take my Chimera!

[vrykolaka]

"Safari can't render well. For the time being, it's not a good solution for people who need standards-compliance or good CSS support. Chimera is."

You mean it doesn't parse well. Actually, Chimera is better at parsing (small-caps, indents...) and Safari is better at rendering.
The way I see it, parsing is a KHTML/Gecko problem while rendering is a /Apple problem. And we all know how good is Apple for appearance...

The best would had been Safari with a Gecko engine..for now. I hope KHTML will improve its parsing capability.

As picture is worth a thousand word, I made a webpage (http://vrykolaka.chez.tiscali.fr/render_pars.html ).

Any correction welcome.

Re:Don't take my Chimera!

[Anonymous Coward]

Try running Mozilla on a "slow" G3 < 500Mhz G3 system.

It's practically unusable. Chimera, IE, and Safari don't have that problem.

Re:Don't take my Chimera!

[Anonymous Coward]

I just don't understand this mass delusion that Chimera is "faster" than Mozilla, either. How can it be faster to render when it uses the exact same engine?? I've used both, and I see no perceptible difference in speed. There certainly is a difference in stability, Moz 1.2 has been golden for me.

Uh, rendering speed isn't the only relevant "speed". Mozilla is butt-slow for things like switching between tabs, compared to Chimera.

Chimera

[catwh0re]

I'm still finding chimera useful. Safari isn't going to get tabs or bugs flattened soon enough for chimera to just disappear. Phoenix is out there too, less recognised, but I don't see them dropping a port either.

Really if anything is going to happen chimera should turn into a plug in pack to the standard mozilla distro for osx.

Re:Chimera

[thumperward]

Phoenix is out there too, less recognised, but I don't see them dropping a port either.

That's because said port never officially existed in the first place. The last OS X port of Phoenix I saw is about three months old now. Seeing as 110% of all OS X users seem to have switched default browsers overnight upon seeing brushed metal, I don't imagine the OS X port of Phoenix is going to be well-attended.

- Chris

Safari, shmafari - think about webcore.

[cryptochrome]

I don't think Safari should be the Chimera developers main concern as competition. What they should be worrying about is what's IN Safari - specifically, webcore. Because it's going to make it MUCH easier for people to create browsers with novel interface features for the mac. Including tabbed browsing, even if safari itself doesn't.

My advice to the chimera developers - either focus on bringing the unique features of the mozilla platform like XUL apps that are not so easily replicated, or quit and spend your time someplace else.

(And IMHO, the value of tabbed browsing is not so much organizing pages but preventing clutter. The main problem with the desktop metaphor is it doesn't take many open windows before it's practically unusable.)

Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

What kind of an argument is *that*? I mean, so far Mac OS came bundled with the 90%+ browser from Microsoft. How was that easier to beat than a (relative) newcomer browser?

Of course, if one actually reads the article ...

"I'm torn about what to do with Chimera. It's obvious it will only ever be a marginal product on a even more marginal platform. AOL and Netscape have no interest in supporting it. Who aspires to be number two in an already over-commoditized space? Working my ass off for 3% just isn't any fun any more. Safari has already won, the rest is just to see by how much."

This is not about evil Apple killing off independent developers, but about someone who just lost interest in his pet project, IMO ...

"Perhaps what is more disappointing is that my fifteen minutes of fame are just about up and I've really got nothing to show for it."

I know exactly how you feel *sigh*

b.

What about Mozilla?

[Calvin1331]

After using mozilla, I tried to use Chimera, but I just couldn't because mozilla offers so many more features. I understand that it is a little slower, but it seems that over all its a better experence

Re:Death to Open Source

[presearch]

What the hell are you talking about?

Banner blocking...

[Nipsy356]

I doubt a corporate browser will ever have the banner blocking beauty of Moz based ones. I like my web like I like my [Replay]TV, commercial free... Between the almost zero chance of banner blocking, and the lack of tabs, I'm sticking with something from the Moz family for now.

Re:Death to Open Source

[Anonymous Coward]

snoogles.

Why? Chimera is better.

[teamhasnoi]

I tried Safari. The speed that everyone talks about wasn't even close to Chimera. What's that about? (I figured the cache made a difference, but after surfing on and off with it for a day or two, Chimera was still FAR faster. YMMV) And where are the tabs? Bleh. It might eventually find a space on my mac's HD, but Chimera wins in my book hands down.

Another nice thing about Chimera...It functions very similarly to Phoenix on my PC at home. No feature rot.

I'll stay with Chimera, thanks.

Re:Why? Chimera is better.

[iso]

What build of Chimera are you using? From my experience, the "released" build of Chimera is slightly slower than Safari, but any monthly from the last few months is considerably faster than Safari. There's no doubt that the latest nightly build of Chimera is far superior to Safari in every way. I really hope the developers don't drop is, as Chimera is on a roll!

- j

Re:Why? Chimera is better.

[teamhasnoi]

I'm just using the last point release .6 / 2002110415. I running on a 733 w/ a gig of ram.

Re:The less browsers, the better!

[PierceLabs]

Wow... your point needed to be made so strongly that you posted anonymously.

no cocoa == no use

[buzban]

personally, and since using chimera, if the browser is not cocoa i won't use it anymore.
safari is great for little stuff, and i'm looking forward to seeing how it develops. i applaud apple's effort.
for now, i've found that a ton of sites i use regularly just don't work in safari, and the whole lack-of-tabs issue is too much for me to get over. so for any serious browsing, i'll stay with chimera for now.
i hope both continue to develope

Re:no cocoa == no use

[foo12]

Safari is cocoa ---- and your point was...?

Re:no cocoa == no use

[buzban]

and your point was...?
...underdeveloped. ;)
sorry. meant to make the comparison to mozilla, IE, and others, that, even though functional, just don't cut it relative to these two cocoa browsers.
i'll stop posting with pizza in the other hand. nothing ever makes sense that way...

Re:no cocoa == no use

[Anonymous Coward]

Chimera is only partially cocoa. Where it really matters for me (text boxes in web pages), Chimera still uses the crappy Mozilla text boxes which are only half as functional as cocoa text boxes, since they ignore the cocoa re-bindings, and don't use plugins.

Re:Big Buttons

[Twirlip of the Mists]

Here's an idea for u devolpers - Try making a theme editor for Safari that ISN'T JUST CHANGING THE COLOR!!!!!!!

Ugh. Here's an idea for you developers: give up on themes. If you want to work on something, make it something that contributes more to the world or to your own personal enrichment than simply making my screen uglier.

Wait a second

[ethank]

People are saying "don't take Chimera!" because Safari doesn't render well and lacks tabs....

OK.

Safari is in beta release 1. Chimera in the .6 release (post). By the time Chimera is indeed "dropped" Safari should be upwards of beta 3 or 2 or possibly even release. The developers of Safari maintain their own weblog (http://www.mozillazine.org/weblogs/hyatt/) and from what you read there, its indicative that CSS compliance is of the highest priority.

I'll go with the best browser that provides the best user-experience. For me, I use Safari right now because its bookmark management rocks, its history view rocks and its fast as hell. I used Chimera from the time I bought my Mac (September) to when Safari was released. Sure, Safari has some CSS problems, and Chimera is still always running for that very reason, but it boils down to the typical mac idiom: what lets me do my work faster.

Ethan

Re:Wait a second

[Anonymous Coward]

Umm what about the nasty UI safari has? Do you really want to have to look at that while you surf the internet? Do you also realize that gecko-current, not part of chimera right now runs as fast if not faster than safari? Or that with a quick mod to your user.js file you could get Chimera to the same speed as Safari? By far Chimera is the better browser.

Chimera wins.... for the moment

[mamahuhu]

Yeah - Chimera wins.... but only for the moment - Safari is almost there and it is a beta release. The biggy is obviously.... duh.... tabs - especially for slashdot, google news and new scientist..... but also the rendering.... if the next releases don't measure up then Chimera wins for sure - the speed is fine, the rendering fine and the tabs.... did I meantion the tabs..... how could anyone desing a modern browser without them ..... come on.... why spawn a window for every page.... duh

Rock on and hany out at Puy de Dome you might see a UFO or something....

But it might be the beer....

Re:Chimera wins.... for the moment

[The Bum]

I really like the tabs, but I think the most understated feature of Chimera is the Keychain integration for passwords. I have found only one site thus far for which Chimera didn't offer to save the password in the Keychain. The alternatives to this is to either remember every single password you have registered or to manually look up the passwords (in the Keychain app or elsewhere) and then type or cut-and-paste them into the web forms. As soon as Safari gets these two features (tabs and Keychain integration), I will probably switch, but not until then.

GNUstep?

[Dimwit]

You know, the GNUstep Project would love to have Chimera working on their platform.

(For those who don't know: GNUstep is a free implementation of the OpenStep specification, of which MacOS X is a direct descendant. There's a very high level of source code-level compatibility between the two platforms.)

Is there any reason why Chimera could not be ported to GNUstep?

Re:GNUstep?

[thumperward]

Don't change my language because of your inferiority complex.

It isn't your language. It's our language. USian English isn't a real language at all.

re: your point though, surely the objective would be binary compatibility, therefore eliminating the need for an actual port entirely?

- Chris

Re:GNUstep?

[rgigger]

uh... no

GNUStep - usually runs on linux usually on intel hardware

Cocoa - always runs on Apple (PPC) hardware.

It would be cool to have an emulation layer that would run all of the cool apple apps but that wouldn't make any sense for porting Chimera. It would make much more sense and be A LOT easier to just try to get it compiling under the GNU step libraries.

Re:GNUstep?

[Twirlip of the Mists]

Is there any reason why Chimera could not be ported to GNUstep?

Sorry to give the obvious answer, but it depends on whether Chimera has any Carbon code in it. If Chimera is entirely Cocoa-fied, then a port should be pretty easy, modulo some AppKit features like the toolbar that I don't believe have counterparts in GNUstep.

Re:GNUstep?

[DeeKay]

I think Quartz and generally the Carbon-Part of Chimera (Chimera is called like that due to it's "two-fold" nature: Carbon-body & Quartz-head!) and all the other Apple-specific stuff could pose a problem..

Re:GNUstep?

[Anonymous Coward]

It isn't your language. It's our language. USian English isn't a real language at all.

Actually, since Britain is a third world shit hole, "USian English" is the language. ThirdWorldShitHolian English, however, isn't a real language.

Funny...

[Cinematique]

Chimera looks more Apple-like than Safari! WTF? Am I the only one who thinks Safari is great, but looks like a puddle of puke?

Actually, Safari would be great if it looked like Chimera, but kept (and improved) its webcore stuff.

At the end of the day however, the lack of tabs in Safari, plus the hideous UI, are what helps keep Chimera out of my trash can.

Re:Funny...

[anaesthetica]

I couldn't agree more. Using the brushed metal for every single one of their 'flagship' applications doesn't strike me as a good aesthetic move. Brushed metal is fine for smaller windows (iTunes, iChat) but it looks terrible on big windows that take up most of the screen.

They should make Safari simply Aqua, not Brushed Metal, and make the navigation buttons bigger. I'll probably end up using Safari, if and when they fix all the CSS2 bugs and add tabs though, despite the UI, because i'm a big sucker for Apple crap.

I really think it will be a bad move for Chimera to stop developing at this stage in the game. If this clown wants to stop, i hope all the other developers don't follow his lead and instead keep making Chimera the browser to beat.

Re:Funny...

[Anonymous Coward]

Puddle of puke no... it looks more like the inside of a septic tank..

Re:Funny...

[usr122122121]

Ah, the irony of Apple not following their own Human Interface Guidelines, then hearing about from their users :-)

Aren't they supposed to set a good example or something?

Re:Funny...

[anarkhos]

They never have.

In fact many of the revised guidelines are adopted from 3rd party conventions.

Re:Funny...

[anarkhos]

Big buttons? No thanks. That's one of the reasons I hated Chimera, it was impossible to only have a url field.

If you want a new front-end for webcore you're free to do so. That's what Omni plans to do.

Why I use Chimera, not Safari

[Tor]

Chimera is a Free(tm) browser, and so will not be subject to a vendor's (Apple's) agenda. In practice, this means that features like popup blocking, selective cookie acceptance/rejection won't go away (the way they have in IE) whenever the vendor no longer blesses such "anti-commercial" features. It also means better code scrutiny, and ultimately, better security.

Re:Why I use Chimera, not Safari

[scotsalmon]

Yep. I gotta throw my voice in here in favor of Chimera for a lot of reasons, but this is a big one.

Of course, it's not going to matter once commercial web sites figure out to put their content in the popup and the advertising on the "main" (non-popup) page...=(

Please don't stop!

[Anonymous Coward]

I LOVE chimera. Tabs rock, it's fast, its stable.

And I love the interface, it's clean and unbusy. Shortcuts are reasonable and I don't get "surprised" by behavior like i do with explorer or opera or even omniweb.

The big reason to keep working on chimera though is that when chimera is in good enough shape it can be the basis for a wide variety of great open source projects and university research projects. With all the information available on the web a clean module for doing web browser functions will be invaluable to lots of people.

Another good reason, is that mozilla is the "2nd standard" web browser. Usually web designers code to ie and then mozilla, how many are going to code to safari too? This is a big problem with opera and omniweb, sometimes they just don't work on site X. Chimera is much much better for not getting scrambled websites.

And folks were questioning tabs. Hearesy!

The big reason tabs rock? It gets rid of waiting for the network. You're reading along and then just command click on what you are interested in. You mess around on the page a little bit and then switch over. It turns a click-wait-read-click-wait-read experience into click-click-read-read.

Another reason, they remind you of what you were interested in. So i can scan down slashdot and command click the 5 or so stories that interest me. Then I get to the bottom and i don't have can just look at each of the stories in turn instead of going back to the main page each time.

By the way, on the "fifteen minutes of fame" business, don't worry about it. You've got street cred now, that's worth tons here in Silicon Valley. You can get a nice job as the resident guru at a startup or write books or do consulting. You're in geek heaven man, don't sweat it.

Re:Death to Open Source

[MachineShedFred]

Whoa. Someone's choice for President didn't get elected. Now getting back to the topic, who said anything about the DMCA? Is there a lawsuit between Apple and the Mozilla project? Has someone invoked the DMCA here? How did EVERY tech-news site miss that, but your uninformed knee-jerk reacting self catch it?

Pushing Down Developers

[agentkhaki]

Recently, it came to my attention that MacAmp Lite X is no longer under developement either. Why?

"iTunes just got to be far too big, far too free, and far too bundled with the OS"

Granted, MacAmp Lite X wasn't freeware, like Chimera is, and it wasn't open source, like Chimera is, but it still begs the same question:

As Apple moves from a company that was all about selling their own hardware and an OS to run on it, to a company that is all about moving into every aspect of our lives - giving us not only hardward and a (very healthy) OS to run on it, but also software to take care of most features required by an 'average' user, as well as digital lifestyle devices like the iPod (and rumored things like PDA's, video iPod's, etc.,) - are they becoming more like Microsoft? Are they discouraging the independant developer? Will they continue on this path to such an extent that those people who have begun to raise Apple's market share - and who have begun to actually pay attention to the operating system as something actually worth using - away?

In short, will Apple invading all of the different types of software areas discourage developers to the point that it is no better than Microsoft, if only in terms of their attempted monopoly over all aspects of our computing experience?

Re:Pushing Down Developers

[Graymalkin]

You answered your own question. MacAmp Lite X's developers just gave up because they didn't think enough people were going to use it and buy it from them. That isn't Apple stifling innovation, it is a developer trying to sell a product in a competitive market and not having the wherewithal to keep up development in the face of real competition.

Apparently in some cases like MacAmp Lite X, Apple producing a competitive product will discourage developers. Whether that is their intention or not isn't something anyone but Apple can really answer. In other cases Apple's competition has spurned companies to work even harder. Avid is a pretty good example of this, their DV Xpress package is a direct competitor to FCP. With FCP's meteoric rise to popularity and OSX being a capable OS they decided that they didn't want the Mac-only FCP dominating DV XPress' market. Thus they released DV Xpress 3.5 on both Windows XP and OSX. Now video editing on OSX is at a great point because you've got DV Xpress and FCP competing for the same userbase, it is in the best interest to both companies to produce the mostest badass versions of their software they can to increase sales.

This point is what it comes down to, when you have competition you can either throw in the towel or try harder. Had MacAmp's developers made MacAmp Lite into a real powerhouse of a media player that picked up where iTunes failed they would have kept a decent sized user base. So to answer your question, no I don't think Apple is stifling innovation on anyone's part like Microsoft. It's up to people their programs compete with to make a better product. iTunes may be free but it isn't the end all be all of MP3 players. There's still room for an iTunes killer.

Re:Pushing Down Developers

[thatguywhoiam]

In short, will Apple invading all of the different types of software areas discourage developers to the point that it is no better than Microsoft, if only in terms of their attempted monopoly over all aspects of our computing experience?

In short, no. I'll tell you why.

There are three major differences between Apple's bundling of the iApps and Microsoft's value-add (uh, Plus?) software.

1. Apple's apps don't suck. Flame if you will. iTunes in particular, you'd be hard-pressed to find someone who didn't think it's really the be-all of music interfaces. iCal has a huge following already, Mail kicks ass, iSync does what it says it does. iMovie practically kickstarted the real desktop moviemaking revolution, iDVD was an industry first. I have nasty things to say about iPhoto, but since the 2.0 rev is 4 days away I'll reserve judgement.

2. Apple apps are uninstallable. This point is often lost on the Windows crowd. "Apple bundles a browser too! It's anticompetitive!" Microsoft tells you that IE is literally crazy-glued to their OS, as is WMP and others. Any Apple iApp is a single icon, that is tossable, without a fuss, without that wacky Install/Remove Programs nonsense.

3. Apple only extends itself where it feels it is needed. I could probably take some crap over that statement, but it seems to be true. The browser situation was sucking until Chimera came along, and Apple hired that guy. The iApps serve as proof-of-concept OS X apps, as well as fulfilling the 'what software?' problem of a new OS. Also, Apple is happy to point users in the direction of more powerful, flexible, paid applications if asked (i.e. Audion).

Besides, I think most people would agree that there are certain activities that a computer ought to do 'out of the box' that are more complex than users would have demanded in the past. CD burning, for example. Does including CD/DVD burning capabilities in iTunes and the Finder hurt Roxio's Toast? Probably not, Toast is more powerful.

Re:Pushing Down Developers

[ealar dlanvuli]

Apple wants to have a usable computer out of the box, so long as everything is still trashable I do not have a problem with this.

The instant they require registry hacks to disable "join .Mac!" every time you start the computer is where I draw the line (see .net).

Re:Pushing Down Developers

[WaKall]

You make valid points. I just want to recall that when the rumors about Apple charging for iApps came out (just before MWSF), /.'ers were very vocal about Apple supposedly 'baiting the market' by getting people hooked on the apps and then charging for them'.

As far as I know, the iApps aren't integrated with the OS. Unless they are using un-documented APIs, you can't really claim that Apple is playing unfair. Sure, they could distribute the iApps separately, or maybe put them on another CD that you install after the fact, but we'd bitch at them for that too.

It's a no-win situation. They have to make them free, since they're are a fairly integral part of making the OS functional. Sure, you could go download replacements from here and there, but you should have decent ones on the system.

The only problem, as I see it, is that they are too good. Maybe it should be like iDVD. A free/slim-featured iApp, and a payware full-featured. It would help your position in terms of competition, but I'm happy to just get the iApps the way they are - feature-rich and free. Safari is the only one that doesn't do all that I want - only Mozilla does that.

Chimera is seriously missing some features (cookie manager is broken, for one thing - try removing a site from your block list in the GUI in 0.6). Safari is too - try managing cookies at all.

Re:Pushing Down Developers

[Anonymous Coward]

The instant they require registry hacks to disable "join .Mac!" every time you start the computer is where I draw the line (see .net).

The instant they use a registry is where I draw the line.

Re:Pushing Down Developers

[Yeroc]

Apple doesn't have a whole lot of choice except to bundle more and more functionality with their OS/machines. Why? Because Microsoft is doing it. They need to maintain some semblance of feature parity with the competition...

Re:Pushing Down Developers

[tunah]

Does including CD/DVD burning capabilities in iTunes and the Finder hurt Roxio's Toast? Probably not, Toast is more powerful.

Damn, i was agreeing with everything you said, up to the last line ;).

In all likelihood, it DOES hurt Toast. If there's no simple way other than buying a big, powerful package, you'll buy it. For a lot of people, the iTunes/Finder stuff will be enough, and they will not buy toast. Does that hurt? Sure. Is that a problem? Nope. The end goal is benefit for the *public*, not companies. MS did bad not (for example) in crushing netscape, but rather because in crushing netscape it harmed consumers.

Re:Pushing Down Developers

[Anonymous Coward]

haha so true.

Re:Pushing Down Developers

[IamTheRealMike]

1. Apple's apps don't suck.

Hate to break this to you, but I know a LOT of people that think IE is great. Mozilla has more features, but Chimera has more features than Safari. Outlook Express is a pretty good mail client, until the virus situation became untenable I used it all the time. Microsoft make some sucky apps, but many of them are quite good.

2. Apple apps are uninstallable.

So are Microsofts. Yes, you can uninstall IE. It's in Add/Remove Programs. No, that won't remove the WebBrowser control because apps need it to be there, just like Mac apps will when Apple start shipping WebCore as part of the OS. I fail to see the difference.

This is false logic anyway, you don't need to uninstall one product to use the competition. Mozilla and IE can sit side-by-side, so really how "uninstallable" an app is is basically academic.

3. Apple only extends itself where it feels it is needed. I could probably take some crap over that statement, but it seems to be true.

Yeah, you can. The quality of PowerPoint X was killing the Mac? I think not. Keynote is there because Jobs thought it was cool.

Re:Pushing Down Developers

[thatguywhoiam]

Hate to break this to you, but I know a LOT of people that think IE is great. Mozilla has more features, but Chimera has more features than Safari. Outlook Express is a pretty good mail client, until the virus situation became untenable I used it all the time. Microsoft make some sucky apps, but many of them are quite good.

Oh, I know some people 'like' IE, but I haven't met anyone - at all - who doesn't immediately detest IE when they try something different. Anything different. Just for the pop-up blocking, that alone sends people running from the MS browser.

I should qualify my statement a bit more; I meant to say that Microsoft's bundled apps tend towards suckage. Entourage/Outlook are alright, do what they say, apart from the viruses of course.

Yes, you can uninstall IE. It's in Add/Remove Programs. No, that won't remove the WebBrowser control because apps need it to be there, just like Mac apps will when Apple start shipping WebCore as part of the OS. I fail to see the difference.

Hey, that's new! There it is, just like you said. Wait, it says it'll remove the 'access from the start menu and desktop'. Mmmm-hmmm. See, this is what I mean. I am in fact complaining about the Add/Remove Programs function, really - its like it throws a curtain over the screen, there's some banging and shuffling in the back, and then the curtain is thrown aside and an excited little man assures me that everything is gone.

I just don't trust that little man, y'know?

WebCore will remain a part of Safari, and not be migrated into the guts of the OS, you're wrong about that. Which brings me to...

This is false logic anyway, you don't need to uninstall one product to use the competition. Mozilla and IE can sit side-by-side, so really how "uninstallable" an app is is basically academic.

It's not academic. This is Slashdot, we're all control freaks about our computers, and something that keeps me from that control is going to piss me off, plain and simple. Sure I can run Mozilla beside IE, but IE is gonna get called, by all those insidious other hooks in 3rd party apps, and negate my browser choice, because they can. I want the option, dammit.

Yeah, you can. The quality of PowerPoint X was killing the Mac? I think not. Keynote is there because Jobs thought it was cool.

I agree with you there. That was a surprise.

Re:Pushing Down Developers

[entrylevel]

Ha! Have you ever tried typing the following into your Terminal.app?

'defaults read NSGlobalDomain'

There's your registry!

Re:Pushing Down Developers

[IamTheRealMike]

WebCore will remain a part of Safari, and not be migrated into the guts of the OS, you're wrong about that. Which brings me to...

I've read otherwise, but who knows? It'd make sense for WebCore to be a part of the OS, the name certainly suggests that - after all, the OS provides functionality to the apps and a renderign engine isn't to be sniffed at.

Sure I can run Mozilla beside IE, but IE is gonna get called, by all those insidious other hooks in 3rd party apps, and negate my browser choice, because they can. I want the option, dammit.

Well, the use of an embedded rendering engine is in fact academic, the app will function the same regardless of what engine is used. Replacing the WebBrowser control with Gecko (which is certainly doable) doesn't actually gain you any functionality. Switching web browsers does.

Good sig by the way :)

Open Source to the Rescue

[phpsocialclub]

I do not see what the big deal is.
It is unfortunate that the developers are feeling the pressure of apples new browser, but as long as the source code the Chimera remains available it can still be developed and improved.
I use Chimera every day as my primary browser and download the daily builds every day.
Safari is nice, but there is still a place for Chimera.
New developers will step forward, I would if I had the time and/or skills, to keep this project moving forward.
Projects change hands all of the time,

Chimera will live on

I like Chimera

[Outland Traveller]

I like Chimera a lot. It's near perfect for my usage, and I prefer it over Safari. My only suggustion is to add "close tab" buttons on each of the tabs, like galeon does under Linux. I miss these immensely for the easy, one-step ability to close tabs that *aren't* currently active.

Thanks for the all the open source browser beasts :)
-OT

On the other hand...

[Anonymous Coward]

Tabs organize 5-7 windows very well with minimal mouse movement and single-clicking.

Maybe you like to browse the web 1 page at a time, but when I'm searching for something in a site it'll take me 5 times longer without tabs. It'll take 2-3 clicks or a click&drag (worse) to switch windows and then switch back, leaving a total of 6 clicks or 2 click&drags (probably would take me 5 seconds I guess.. find the menu, click, find the window title, click... repeat). With tabs, I see the title and click once and I'm there. My mouse is normally at the top of the page since most links are around there and that's where I tend to read. No moving my mouse to the absolute top or absolute bottom.

Just because you don't like them doesn't mean they're not good. I've never met someone who doesn't like tabs and most of the people I show this to are computer proficient but no where near the /. crowd.

Moving back and forth between two tabbed windows is just as easy as moving between two windows, so I don't see how you're possibly complaining about that.

Re:On the other hand...

[Twirlip of the Mists]

It'll take 2-3 clicks or a click&drag (worse) to switch windows and then switch back

Wrong. Command-`. If you have 4-5 windows open, you can rotate through all of them in about one second.

Just because you don't like them doesn't mean they're not good.

I never said that. I said, and continue to say, that what makes tabs no good is the fact that they're no good. It's not really an opinion thing; it's pretty objective. Of course, different people interpret and weigh the facts in different ways.

The bottom line is this: when viewed in terms of the big picture, tabs create more problems than they solve.

Re:On the other hand...

[Anonymous Coward]

"I never said that. I said, and continue to say, that what makes tabs no good is the fact that they're no good."

Circular Logic makes me dizzy.

Re:On the other hand...

[jericho4.0]

Gees Twirlip! You sure have all the answers! I've read at least 10 of your posts on this subject and I find myself agreeing with at least %90 of what you say. But really, what the hells wrong with tabs, anyway? People like them. I like them. The're usefull. It's kind of academic, no? The GUI should bend to us somewhere.

I'm also interested in your opinions about one button mice :-).

Re:On the other hand...

[Anonymous Coward]

I fail to see how they create any problems, at all.

Re:On the other hand...

[mcwetboy]

There's nothing inherently wrong with liking tabs. (On the other hand, there's nothing inherently wrong with not liking them.) But I think it's a mistake to assume that tabs are the only solution to navigating multiple pages at once. They are only one possible solution; they may not even be the best solution.

Here's something else to think about. Most non-geeks use IE; if Safari is targeted at these users, and these users are adopting it wholesale, then they have no experience with tabbed browsing to miss it. The tabbed browsing discussion is by definition limited to those of us who have used a browser that supports tabs. That isn't many people.

Re:On the other hand...

[Twirlip of the Mists]

None of these is sufficient, but all of them together are.

1. Complexity. Tabbed browsing/MDI would add a set of features that most people wouldn't use, but the facilities for using it would still be sitting there in menu bars and such, making the application more complex for new users to learn.

2. Inconsistency. For a third-party to release a Mac application that works in a way that is fundamentally different from the way other Mac applications is frowned upon. For Apple to do it is completely unacceptable.

3. As I've already explained at length, and won't bother reiterating here, the tabbed browsing feature in Mozilla is shamefully incomplete and underimplemented. Apple would have to go back to the drawing board to produce a tabbed browsing interface paradigm that isn't fundamentally broken, as Mozilla's is.

4. Redundancy. Adding tabbed browsing, Mozilla-style, to Safari would necessarily involve having to reproduce most of the functions of WindowServer in Safari itself. There's no justification for reimplementing WindowServer's functionality unless the new way is better, and I've already explained how tabbed browsing is most definitely not.

5. Disproportionate effort. Safari is targeted, first, at the 5 million existing Mac OS X users, followed very shortly by the 20 million Mac OS 9 users that Apple hopes will make the transition this year. Of those 25 million prospective users, I think it's fair to say that maybe 100,000 of them would use tabs. Maybe. (Consider the ratio of IE users to Netscape users. IE does not have tabs. Netscape has tabs, and is freely available to anybody who wants it. Most people, though, don't bother downloading it. The obvious conclusion is that tabbed browsing alone is not a big deal to most people.) So when you consider that maybe a fraction of one percent of all Mac users might use tabbed browsing, it just doesn't seem worth it.

6. Finally, opportunity cost. Time spent implementing tabbed browsing/MDI is time that could have been spent fixing bugs, or adding features that everybody would use. Maybe even features that none of us have ever thought of yet. Consider SnapBack. I had never even thought of such a feature before I saw Safari, and now I use it every single day. To have tabbed browsing-- which, as I've already explained, only a tiny fraction of Mac users would even use-- you implicitly have to give up something else. And based on items 1-5, I'm simply unable to support making that trade-off.

Re:On the other hand...

[Twirlip of the Mists]

In addition to what mcwetboy said-- with which I agree completely-- I summed up my thoughts on "what the hell's wrong with tabs, anyway" in this post. I really tried to lay it all right out there, not in terms of why tabbed browsing a la Mozilla sucks (I've beaten that dead horse enough) but why tabbed browsing doesn't belong in Safari. Most posters here seem to be of the opinion that any feature that anybody anywhere wants should be added. That's the kind of wooly-headed liberal thinking that leads to being eaten... uh, I mean, that leads to releasing Mozilla, four years late and weighing in 17 MB in the OS X version. (The Windows version is about 10 MB, I think, and the OS 9 version is more than 20 MB. Safari, by comparison, comes in a svelte 3 MB disk image.)

People like them. I like them. The're usefull. It's kind of academic, no?

Well, actually, no. If ours were the kind of world where it didn't cost anything, financially or in terms of programmer effort, it would be a different story-- well, we'd still have the user experience problems to deal with, but given enough money and/or time we could take care of those.

But the fundamental point remains: adding tabbed browsing to Safari does not further Apple's goal, which is to get those 20 million Mac OS 9 users up to OS X by giving them some really good incentives to do so. Tabbed browsing just isn't a really good incentive, as evidenced by Netscape/Mozilla/Whatever's complete failure to take the Windows market by storm. So even if the opportunity cost issue weren't there, even if the technical issues weren't there, even if the user experience issues weren't there, tabbed browsing would still be a feature that's best left to third-party developers, like the Chimera guys.

I'm also interested in your opinions about one button mice :-).

Oh, haw haw. ;-) Short answer: I use a three-button mouse with wheel. Would I ever want Apple to ship one, even as an option? No. The mouse that comes with the Mac needs to be equally useable for a 4 year old, a 40 year old, and a... um... 400 year old. You get the idea. And Apple's mouse fits that bill perfectly. As long as third-parties like Logitech and, yeah, Microsoft are shipping excellent multi-button mice with foot pedals and special chairs and damn near everything else, Apple needs to stay out of the mouse business.

Re:On the other hand...

[Anonymous Coward]

most people will never use tabs so using tabs would be more complex for them?

as my fellow coward said above, circular logic indeed.

Re:On the other hand...

[Anonymous Coward]

25 million mac users? That sound like Apple has roughly 25% of the computer audience. I'd say maybe 5 million people have ever used MAC OS x, 9, or 8.x

Re:On the other hand...

[Anonymous Coward]

long gone are the days when Microsoft shipped a decent mouse.

Ultimately, UI is crucial differentiator

[macmurph]

I originally posted the following comment in response to a linux journal article about Apple's Safari. I feel the comment also applies to this discussion:
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.p hp?sid=6565&m ode=thread&order=0&thold=0

In summary, there are many good rendering engines but very few great user interfaces, and in the end, UI is the crucial differentiator b/w browsers.

In response to the whole rendering engine discussion I see here... IMHO Rendering engine/render speed is not everything... Of course, IE for the Mac is dog slow (its carbon, not naitive cocoa code)...and Apple was *forced* to create an alternative or fall behind. The IE for the Mac team was disintegrated long ago to make Web TV, Ultimate TV (a cancelled MS project),etc.

But for most people, more important than rendering speed is an efficient, productive UI (because rendering speed problems have largely been solved in todays best browsers).

Because the web has become so central to computing...UI is more important than ever in browsers. Safari beta (so far) offers a very nice bookmark manager but lacks tabbed browsing (or something like it).

For now, I like Chimera for OS X because it has tabbed browsing and lightning fast rendering performance. On a dial up connection, a user can open pages in new tabs and queue the downloads. This is a very very efficient method of browsing that Safari so far, have chosen to ignore. Tabbed browsing in Chimera is faster and more efficient than IE 6 for Windows. I use a technique whereby each new chimera window contains catagorys of tabs... ebay auction tabs in one window, news tabs in another window, stock data tabs in a third window. By managing topics of tabs by window I never find myself hunting for the correct tab (In IE for windows, I would find myself hunting for the right tab along the Start bar. With too many windows open the start bar becomes cluttered and useless as an interface.)

Chimera (Gecko based) is faster than Safari in my own independent testing...particularly at downloading and rendering JPEGs. When it comes to rendering raw HTML I can't tell the difference between Chimera and Safari but toss in a few jpegs and chimera wins. I imagine this is only noticeable on dial up connections.

I expect Safari will surpass Chimera and therefore all other browsers in UI and performance at some point in the near future because apple is so damn good at what they do.

PS. I should probably add that I think Chimera is the still the best browser and Apple's Safari is not yet very usable. I would hate to see the Chimera team give up so soon. I think Chimera has a lot to offer...especially because it uses a different rendering engine (great for checking standards compliance, etc). So keep up the good work Chimera! I want to see version .7 badly!

Re:Ultimately, UI is crucial differentiator

[Textbook Error]

Of course, IE for the Mac is dog slow (its carbon, not naitive cocoa code)

You don't know what you're talking about - the performance of an application has nothing to do with it being written to Carbon or Cocoa, and there's nothing more "native" about applications written to the Cocoa framework.

E.g., just look at iCal, iPhoto, or the Jaguar Calculator: all written in Cocoa, and all embarrassingly slow.

Re:Ultimately, UI is crucial differentiator

[macmurph]

My statement needs clarification. Of course, IE for the Mac is dog slow (its carbon, not naitive cocoa code)

The term naitive is ambiguous. One may be refering to naitive to the PowerPC platform for example. Im not in this case.

When I say naitive I mean that OS X's roots are in nextstep. OS X's first API was cocoa from nextstep. To me, this makes cocoa the naitive API for the OS. Apps that are written in cocoa hence are more naitive. The next API to be added to OS X was actually the Java API, and then (after pleas from developers) came carbon.

I realize that today carbon and cocoa are closely tied. I realize that the performance of one API is not consistently better than the other. But carbon is legacy and was added to the yellow box spec as a technology to bridge legacy classic code.

Yes, I realize carbon is widely used in OS X e.g. the finder. IE is still dog slow... it has taken a performance hit from being ported to OS X. Chimera, built from the ground up for OS X (and Im sure it contains carbon code too) is the better performer.

Re:Ultimately, UI is crucial differentiator

[Textbook Error]

OS X's first API was cocoa from nextstep. To me, this makes cocoa the naitive API for the OS.

By that reasoning Mach is the only really "native" API in the system, since it was there first. Cocoa is only as "native" as any of the other frameworks in the system, not more so (it's not even particularly low-level - it's just an application framework).

But carbon is legacy and was added to the yellow box spec as a technology to bridge legacy classic code.

Heh, not quite - Carbon was added as a direct response to the flop that was Rhapsody (i.e., when the only migration path for every Mac developer bar the handful from Next was a complete rewrite). BTW, the "yellow box spec" referred specifically to what became Cocoa - Carbon was a parallel project to this, and was never part of the same spec.

Carbon isn't a "bridge" in any meaningful sense of the word, it's one of the standard system APIs. If it was for legacy code, why is so much new development (Carbon Events, HIViews, ATSUI, etc) taking place in that framework?

IE is still dog slow... it has taken a performance hit from being ported to OS X. Chimera, built from the ground up for OS X (and Im sure it contains carbon code too) is the better performer.

IE's poor performance has nothing whatsoever to do with it being written to the Carbon API - some of the slowest apps on the system are written to Cocoa (e.g., iCal), and some of the fastest are written to Carbon (e.g., games: everyone but Omnigroup uses Carbon). The point is that what makes an app slow has nothing to do with it using Cocoa or Carbon. These are just APIs to get events from the system and to display a UI - which in itself isn't really a performance bottleneck.

The whole "Cocoa is more native than Carbon" myth is exactly that, a myth. It was started by ex-Next executives as a way of disparaging the previous Mac OS APIs, and has unfortunately taken root amongst people who really should know better.

Re:Ultimately, UI is crucial differentiator

[Anonymous Coward]

Somehow I'm guessing that english isn't your "naitive" language.

Re:Ultimately, UI is crucial differentiator

[macmurph]

No I'm one of those geeks that can't spell sh*t. An oxford professor once told me that only a genius can create a new word (that catches on)...there's hope for me yet.

If you think naitive sounds dumb, you should see my "I blaim bush" thread. It took 50 people to reply before someone pointed out the typo:

http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=49192&ci d=4975601

Safari is not there yet

[MachineShedFred]

It would pain me greatly to see Chimera have an untimely meeting with Bellerophon, who has the sublet contract from the king.

While both products are currently in beta, Chimera is a much MUCH more mature beta than Safari. I use both, but I use Safari at home, and Chimera at work on my Powerbook. Why? Chimera remembers my proxy password.

It doesn't matter how many times I hit the remember password / add to keychain thing in Safari, it cannot and does not remember my credentials for the proxy, which is incredibly annoying. Chimera does this with no issue, as does OmniWeb.

Besides, on a gigahertz mac, the render speed is exactly the same between them, so I'd rather have less bugs, tabs, things working mostly, etc. etc. I'm sure that I will give Safari another try once it matures a bit more, but for right now if I have to choose, I choose Chimera.

Re:Safari is not there yet

[Feral Bueller]

One of the reasons why we don't use Chimera at work is the proxy password feature you mentioned, which is regarded as a "security" issue -- what it really comes down to is that our Networking staff doesn't want people who don't have internet access walking over to a cube with internet access and checking tubgirl.com (or whatever).

At the end of the day, all of these issues come down to a matter of context. For me, Chimera is my browser of choice on OS X not only because of tabs, but because I can save tab groups as shortcuts: I have a *news* tab, a *webmail* tab, a *mobile* tab, etc.

Very handy.

Mozilla in general in bad shape

[bogie]

First development on Phoenix comes to halt
http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=5126 6&thre shold=-1&commentsort=3&tid=154&mode=thread&cid=511 5764
, next Chimera Development may by stopping, and on top of this AOL has recently pulled devs off of Mozilla itself. WTF is going on? It look like Mozilla and its subprojects are slowly dying off. This is not good!

Well....

[Anonymous Coward]

I think what has killed Chimera as far as Pinkerton is concerned is that fact he had pretty much hit a brick wall development wise. The major issues people were complaining about were slow text box entry and the fact that font rendering was not 100% quartz native. Sadly fixing these problems would be far from trivial, and in the end I guess he devided it was not worth the effort.

Because Safari uses KHTML and because of the OS X QT port, it has 100% native quartz rendering form the get go, and access to services and other goodies.

Chimera, as the name suggests was never really anything more than a kludge, gecko would have to be substatially reworked to perform optimally on OS X, and with Safari taking all the attention, it would be a lot of work for little or no recognition.

Chimera will slowly putrify, and before long will be totally forgotten. Very sad to see it happen, but the work needed was beyond the capability of the developers involved, that's not an insult, that's just gecko.

Re:Well....

[whee]

Safari does use KHTML, but it does not use QT in the manner that you suggest. Safari does not use QT for the GUI. Because of QT's modular design, native Cocoa widgets were easily used in place of whatever KHTML previously used to render widgets on other platforms.

Re:Safari musing/Tab pontification

[thatguywhoiam]

Twirlip. My man.

Here, I thought I was all alone on the tabs thing. I was going to keep my big mouth shut (er, fingers tied?) about it but you've graciously stuck your neck out - on Slashdot no less.

The problem with Tabs, is as you said, there's not really a problem to begin with. Browser window-switching accomplishes the same thing, with unlimited constraints, and equal-or-less number of keystrokes/mouseclicks. So why do people live and die by tabs?

I think it comes down to a few weird little reasons... like, you can see how many tabs you have open at a glance. That's sorta nice. The instant-load thing, that's nice. But you know what it mostly is? (imho?)

You don't have to re-size or move your new window.

Seriously. Most browsers just don't know how to open a new window, because you can't tell it. Even clever browsers like OmniWeb that allow you to 'save' a window position are still going to cascade the windows, down-and-right, so you can grab the last toolbar. Then you have overlap after 5-6 windows and things get buried (the limit on tabs too).

Really, it comes down to people not wanting to Mess With Their Windows. I'm happy messing with my windows. It would be interesting to know the ratio of tab-browsing freaks to those who run the browser full-screen, no?

RE: Tabbed Browsing's "faults"

[binarysearch]

"If you can't read the titles, the advantage of tabs evaporates."

There are, in fact, some instances where the titles of tabs don't even have to be present in order for the tabs to function correctly. The most common instance of this type of situation would be looking at a series of images, where one opens a series of tabs, each containing one picture. The series of images can then be looked at sequentially, and when you're done, you're back at your starting location.

"it's hard to beat the ease of use of command-` for cycling through an application's open windows."

I'll tell you a secret: Goldilocks hates command-`; it's either too fast or too slow. If the Command key and the ` key are both held down together, then the windows cycle too fast for the eye to be able to discern what the content of each window is before the next one flashes in front of it. If the Command key is held down and the ` is tapped, however, it will take about a second per page to register the contents of each page. Tabs are random access; windows are serial access.

"tabs are a bad solution to a problem that we don't have."

Tabs are not a perfect solution, I'll agree. However, saying they're a solution to a problem that we don't have is rather... unthoughtful of you. Just because YOU don't have a certain problem doesn't mean others do not.

I suspect that the main problem tabs were developed against was that in most browsers, if you opened a link in a new window, the new window eclipsed the old one, forcing you to either abandon your old perusal, or fight the UI to get the right window back to the front. Now, yes, OmniWeb (and Safari) allow you to open new windows in the background, but there are still a few disadvantages to tabs here: even in Safari, opening a new window is slower and more resource intensive, as well as more distracting, than opening a new tab.

Re: Juxtaposition of windows

The central issue with this is screen space; most people are, I would think, browsing the web at a resolution very close to 1024 x 768 on a monitor that is maybe 17 or 19 inches. At these screen sizes, there really just isn't enough room to look at two web pages side by side, unless you make the browser windows unbearably small.

Screen space also crops up with multiple staggered browser windows, although since the multi-windows thing is really more personal taste than anything else, I'll not bother making any sort of argument about it.

You talk about "all tabs or all windows;" well, fine, it's all within the same browser. If you don't want to use tabs, you don't have to, but please, whatever other arguments you may make about the abstract shortcomings of tabbed browsing, please try to remember that millions of people find them a useful method of organizing their webpages.

Are you translating that right? No.

[binarysearch]

"It's obvious it will only ever be a marginal product on a even more marginal platform."
So, not only does Chimera suck, Mac OS X sucks harder. Am I translating that right?

I think what he meant by the word " marginal" was that Mac OS X has, at best, maybe 6% of the computer market. Of that six percent, probably less than 20% use Chimera as their default browser. That is to say, marginal relating to size, not quality.

(at last glance there was still no button to close a tab).

That's because there doesn't need to be. Instead, Command-W has been overloaded to close the currently open tab, and if there are no tabs open, then to close the window. Or, you could add such a button to Chimera's toolbar. Or, if you've downloaded CocoaGestures, you can use mouse gesutures to close tabs (and windows), and to cycle through tabs.

Re:Safari musing/Tab pontification

[Twirlip of the Mists]

It would be interesting to know the ratio of tab-browsing freaks to those who run the browser full-screen, no?

Now that is an interesting thought. I can honestly say that I have never opened a browser window full-screen. My screen is way too big and the wrong aspect ratio for a single browser window. It fits three or four abreast very nicely, though. So for me, tabs are a terrible idea. For somebody who runs his browser window at full-screen, on a 768x1024 screen or something, they might make more sense. Maybe.

I think we're starting to talk about this in terms of the window manager rather than the application, and I think that's good. It would really piss me off if Apple decided to implement functionality that belongs in the window manager in the application. That's just not the Mac way, you know?

Re: Tabbed Browsing's "faults"

[Twirlip of the Mists]

The series of images can then be looked at sequentially, and when you're done, you're back at your starting location.

Just like windows, huh? Or like using the SnapBack feature, for that matter.

Tabs are random access; windows are serial access.

Cycling through windows is not the only way of dealing with them. There's also the window menu-- all the advantages of labeled tabs without the truncation problem-- and the dock menu. You can also minimize windows to the dock directly and manage them that way. I would like to see a "minimize others" feature added to Application Kit, similar to the "hide others" feature.

Just because YOU don't have a certain problem doesn't mean others do not.

Sure, Windows has a huge window management problem: the task bar. XP improved the situation quite a bit, but it's still not perfect. And because most of your UI's for UNIX include a task bar, they share Windows's problems. But the Mac simply does not have the window management problems that tabbed browsing was implemented to solve.

even in Safari, opening a new window is slower and more resource intensive, as well as more distracting, than opening a new tab.

That's not really true at all. Opening a new window in Safari requires just barely more allocation than opening a new tab or tab-like structure would. You have to allocate and initialize the view and then render the contents in either case; opening a new window merely requires a some drawing to the screen, which on all modern Macs is offloaded entirely to the graphics hardware. So the trade-off of speed for functionality is just not necessary. We're back to that "a problem we don't have" thing again.

but please, whatever other arguments you may make about the abstract shortcomings of tabbed browsing, please try to remember that millions of people find them a useful method of organizing their webpages.

I absolutely do not believe you. I think if you took everybody who has ever even heard of tabbed browsing and put them in the Rose Bowl, you'd have room left over for a medium-sized football game. You've got to remember that there are 5 million OS X users today, and that the number is increasing very quickly. So the fraction of OS X users who would benefit from Chimera-style tabs is tiny.

Apple has the choice of not implementing MDI in Safari at all; implementing it badly, a la Mozilla; or implementing it well. Given that a bad implementation would be worse than none at all, and that a good implementation would require a great deal of effort for miniscule gains, the only reasonable course of action is to avoid implementing MDI in Safari at all. The time and effort to do so would be better spent on other things.

Those who absolutely must have MDI in their browsers are free to use Chimera, or to use WebKit (when released) to roll their own WebCore-based one.

Re:Safari musing/Tab pontification

[SoupIsGoodFood_42]

I think it comes down to a few weird little reasons... like, you can see how many tabs you have open at a glance. That's sorta nice. The instant-load thing, that's nice. But you know what it mostly is? (imho?)...

Those "little" reasons are are major reasons, they're basic GUI issues. Tabs are better than windows because all the tabs can be seen at once, and the user can see exactly what they want, and reach for it with a single click.
Cycling through each window, to see if it's the right one is a pain. If you fuck-up, you have to go though the entire cycle again! You cold always take it slowly, but that's even more of a pain.

...You don't have to re-size or move your new window

Yes, the user should not have to mess about with windows all the time, they should be using the app. When you find you self messing around with windows all the time, there is somethign wrong with the GUI. This is one of thing that I prefer on Win than Mac. All my apps open maximised, I never have to muck about with them untill I need to to some out of the ordinary.

...tab-browsing freaks to those who run the browser full-screen

What's so freaking about wanting to use all of you're screen space? Unless yoy need to view 2 windows at once, why waste space. What's freaking is people who have a 1600x1200 screen and have their windows so small that they have to scroll all the time.
Of course, if you mean full-screen as in the feature found on a few Win browsers which hides most of the GUI, then that is a bit freaky.

Yup

[Big Sean O]

If Safari's 1.0 release doesn't have better cookie management, a popup whitelist, and image blocker, then you will find some people going back to Chimera. I know I will.

I have a comfort in using open-source software that isn't quite satisfied by 'free as in beer' apps. It comes down to "if I really wanted to, I could fix it" (or with my paltry code-fu, hire someone to fix it). Scratching that personal itch is the reason anybody changes from a default browser anyway. It's probably the reason why 'the rest of us' are on the Mac in the first place.

Of course, once Apple releases a usable WebCore, I expect all sorts of browser projects to start. Hmm... Mozilla begat Phoenix and Chimera, Perhaps Safari will give birth to "Tarzan". Tarzan must be in the public domain, Disney made a movie about it...

Re:Yup

[Twirlip of the Mists]

If Safari's 1.0 release doesn't have better cookie management, a popup whitelist, and image blocker, then you will find some people going back to Chimera. I know I will.

Yes, of course, it makes much more sense to trade in a good browser (spell-checking in text fields alone is worth the price of admission) in for an also good but considerably less so browser based on features that really belong in the proxy anyway. Get thee over to the Privoxy home page and give it a download. Problems solved.

One big-ass caveat, though. The build of Privoxy that is available on their web site includes some OS X features of questionable worth. The installation package, for example, does some things that it shouldn't do, and the start scripts aren't technically compatible with Jaguar's new SystemStarter. (They don't cause a problem, they're just not technically right.) I have fixed these problems in the copy I got from CVS, but I have yet to submit my changes back to the project. So buyer beware and all that.

Re:Yup

[Big Sean O]

> spell-checking in text fields alone is worth the price of admission

Aw, I only post to Slashdot, so if I mispell anything I make Grammar-Nazi's day.

>features that really belong in the proxy anyway.

>Get thee over to the Privoxy home page and give it a download. Problems solved.

Except that I don't want a separate proxy. Why should I download, install and worry about yet another piece of software? Software which, by your own admission, has big-ass caveats.

All I want is a browser that displays HTML in a reasonably attractive manner, manage bookmarks, allow the cookies I want to allow, and block unwanted popups. Heck Twirlip, I don't even want tabs anymore!

Both browsers are very good. But there's no sense arguing about personal preferences.

Re:Yup

[Twirlip of the Mists]

Except that I don't want a separate proxy. Why should I download, install and worry about yet another piece of software?

Well, the only answer I can give to that is that Privoxy-- or a program like it-- lets you do stuff that the built-in filtering functions in a browser would probably never be capable of doing. But your life should only be as complicated as you want it to be; I use Privoxy because I really dislike web ads, and I find that it works really well. If you don't want to mess with it, then by all means use Chimera or OmniWeb. (OmniWeb has kick-ass regex image filtering built in; look under "Privacy" in the preferences.)

Heck Twirlip, I don't even want tabs anymore!

Oh, ha ha. ;-) Thanks for humoring a grumpy old man.

Two words: Auto Proxy configuration!!

[aqsalter]

(Well maybe three words ;)

Chimera just got Auto proxy configuration support so I can use it at work.... Trust me Apple will never release a browser that supports auto proxy configuration because it is not a standard its an MS implementation in the lack of a standard (I'm not knocking MS on this as big organisations needed auto proxy config)

Chimera and Mozilla do support it.

Enough said.

Finally, I'm not even sure I really like the look of Safari as a full time browser. AND Apple don't care about the "technofiles" (ie US) they are mostly after the average joe... so I won't be surprised if Safari _NEVER_ gets tabs.

Sorry guys. Even if Chimera doesn't get developed past today I'm probably going to be using it for quite some time to come. It works right now for everything I need.

Re:Two words: Auto Proxy configuration!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Ummm...no. Auto proxy config was first devised by Netscape back around 1996 and is really more or less similar to Javascript in how they're written (I'm the guy who writes them at my university).

http://wp.netscape.com/eng/mozilla/2.0/relnotes/ de mo/proxy-live.html

It's a wonderful solution for places with firewalls, dmzes and proxy servers.

Re:Two words: Auto Proxy configuration!!

[Anonymous Coward]

I was happy to see someone mention Auto Proxy configuration! It, along with tabs, is the reason I continue to use Chimera. I need Auto Proxy Configuration to use my Mac at work. Without it I can't use the browser. I hope Apple adds support for this in their next Safari version.

Re:Safari musing/Tab pontification

[Twirlip of the Mists]

Tabs are better than windows because all the tabs can be seen at once, and the user can see exactly what they want, and reach for it with a single click.

Wrong. If you have more than a few tabs open, their names are truncated to the point where you cannot tell which is which. And unlike with windows, there is no "tab" menu to allow you to see all the names in full.

Also, usability studies have time and again demonstrated that it's easier to hit a systemwide menu bar item than an in-window item. People think that just because in-window items are closer to the point of focus that they're easier to use; this is not true. Systemwide menu bar items do not move; you don't have to "aim" to hit them. Not to mention the fact that the systemwide menu bar already has a usability infrastructure built up around it to allow things like full keyboard navigation for the disabled and such. No tab interface has that.

Cycling through each window, to see if it's the right one is a pain. If you fuck-up, you have to go though the entire cycle again!

Wrong. Command-` cycles one way through the list; command-shift-` cycles the other way.

This is one of thing that I prefer on Win than Mac. All my apps open maximised

Horrible. I don't know what kind of work you do, but when I use my computer I almost always have two or more windows arranged for use at once. For example, when I'm not goofing off as I am as I write this, I'm working on a programming project. I have my project window open over here, and my interface window open there, and two browser windows with documentation in them over here and here. I want to see all of these at once. Zooming any of them up to fill the screen would, at best, be a huge waste of screen real-estate.

IE

[hexdcml]

Erm, not to sound like the odd one out here, but I sill quite like IE for OS X. Sure, page rendering is not as fast, and sometimes the pages don't render at all - and Chimera is pretty kewl - but I like IE's functionality - especially for the Scrapbook feature and Page holder - much like the "Snapback" feature eh? Load a Google results page into the Page Holder and click away ;) I haven't yet switched to Safari yet - is still in Beta, and personally, am quite happy with my IE/Chimera combo. I think tabs are ok, I mean, its all about choice right? But, apart from the possibility that Chimera might get dropped, I don't understand what the fuss is all about.

Re:Safari musing/Tab pontification

[drsmithy]

Browser window-switching accomplishes the same thing, with unlimited constraints, and equal-or-less number of keystrokes/mouseclicks.

If you can pick a specific browser window out of a dozen as quickly as I can pick a single tab out of a dozen, my hat's off to you.
Tabs solve, very well, the problem of having a *lot* of browser windows that you want to have accessible concurrently while also having a lot of other windows open as well. Whilst I can see this not being a particularly common event from the perspective of a Mac user used to dealing with a UI that has (and remains) not optimised to working with large numbers of open windows an applications I can assure you that it is quite common in the Unix world, where tabbed browsing appears to have originated from.

Re:Safari musing/Tab pontification

[eunos94]

Twirlip, had to give you some props. After our tabs discussion in a different thread I've really been paying attention to my usage of them. You were right about a couple of things.

I think that the 'window' menu option has some distinct advantages over tabs. Mainly, the target size for the mouse. By making the 'window' menu border the top of the screen, mousing to it is more accurate than a menu floating in the middle of the open window.

Also, the command-w conflict bugs me a lot now. I tended to use the 'close tab' button, so command-w didn't bother me, but after thinking about it, it's a serious conflict.

The point of resizing windows though is an interesting one. At 1280x854, full-screen is out, tabs are the way I've found to manage all the windows without having to resize/drag each individual window when I move a new object/window to the desktop. Resizing each individual window seems overly time consuming.

While I do agree that the window cycle achieves some functionality, it seems that it is likely that a user will have to click more than once to get to the window they want. With tabs, its one click away.

Anyway, not sure how to meld these battling worlds. Like you said, it seems like a window manager problem. If there were a way to enhance the 'window' menu to provide some of the functionality of tabs, I'm be much more in favor of that.

Re:Safari musing/Tab pontification

[eunos94]

I think an interesting addition to this is the fact that while yes, tabs truncate the titles after the first four or five are opened, it is not the case that the titles become unrecognizable. I find that even with only the first three or four characters availble I can still identify each tab very quickly. I don't think in the year+ that I've been using tabs I've ever not been able to identify a tab.

Chimera's Great Contribution

[bdaehlie]

When I look at Apple's benchmarks and listen to the words straight from Steve Jobs' mouth, it becomes pretty clear that the reason Safari isn't a piece of crap is because Chimera gave Apple something to shoot for. If Safari only had to compete with IE, Apple could have released something a while ago.

I think Apple's new browser is great, but its not for me. I still use Chimera because its much more practical. There is a lot of room for improvement (build on the 1.2 branch!), and I don't think giving up is the answer. Chimera has pushed Safari to be what is is today, and now is not the time to stop upping the standards for available web browsers.

Re:Safari musing/Tab pontification

[Twirlip of the Mists]

Twirlip, had to give you some props.

Thanks for saying so. As confident as I am in my opinions, I'm glad to hear that I'm not the only person who holds them. ;-)

At 1280x854, full-screen is out, tabs are the way I've found to manage all the windows without having to resize/drag each individual window when I move a new object/window to the desktop.

I have to confess that I didn't really follow that. Can you explain how you deal with windows in a little more detail?

If there were a way to enhance the 'window' menu to provide some of the functionality of tabs, I'm be much more in favor of that.

I think I would happily throw my support behind an enhancement to the window server that lets users deal with windows in a new way. Consider Photoshop's palettes, for example. Some time ago-- version 4 or 5 or something-- Adobe came up with this neat idea of stackable palettes. Each palette occupies its own utility window, but one palette can be dragged on top of another to form a tabbed palette. I've seen people who kept each palette in its own window, and people who drag all the palettes together to form one monster uber-palette. I think I would be interested in an enhancement to the window server to let any Cocoa application manage its windows that way. The default behavior would be to keep windows separate, but dragging one window over another (possibly with a modifier key) would let you turn two windows into a single "window stack," and to cycle among them somehow. (Tabs aren't the right answer, for reasons I've already gotten into. Truncation sucks.)

But since I have no idea how window server works, I don't know if this would be a hugely impossible task, or merely a very difficult one.

Safari is not yet a contender

[fermion]

This could be a negative consequence of the MS monopoly. Developers now believe that the goal is 95% market penetration and anything less is failure. This of course is incorrect. We have a set of web standards, and what we need is a number of browsers targeting to various demographics. Even if we assume that IE and Safari will become the standards, that does not imply we need nothing else.

OTOH, there are two important issues that may hold Safari back. First, there are many sites that need IE, so Apple can't piss MS off too much. That means that it is unlikely we will see Safari as the default for a couple years. Second, Safari is fast but it is a long way from being stable. Chimera should continue to be the more mature product. Chimera is great, and besides speed, I have been unimpressed with Safari.

Safari at this point is more a marketing ploy than a product. It proves that the Mac is not the slowest browser platform on the planet. Chimera is a working product, Safari is a buggy concept package. Even if we stipulate that Safari will reach maturity, assuming massive market penetration is forgetting Cyberdog.

Re:Safari musing/Tab pontification

[SoupIsGoodFood_42]

Wrong. If you have more than a few tabs open, their names are truncated to the point where you cannot tell which is which. And unlike with windows, there is no "tab" menu to allow you to see all the names in full.

I have opened more thna a few tabs, and still been able to read them. Besides, you might not need to read the whole title. As long as it's enought ot tell it apart, and alot of the time (for me anyway) it is. Even if you can't identify them by reding the text, there is also the case of mucle memory. Quite oftern I remember which tab I need to get back to etc.
And abut the window menu, one could also add one for the tabs.

Wrong. Command-` cycles one way through the list; command-shift-` cycles the other way.

That shortcut is a pain, it's not something that I can do fast. And their is still the point that you have to do it. It's easy to make a mistake, and it requires extra effort to correct it. This is not the case with tabs, if the user does hit the wrong one, the just hit the right one, they don't have to esspecialy go back a move.

It is very clear to me that you have no backgound in usability or GUI design. These are basic pricipals were talkling about here. I don't care what you argue, I know I'm it the right here.

This is one of thing that I prefer on Win than Mac. All my apps open maximised

Horrible. I don't know what kind of work you do, but when I use my computer I almost always have two or more windows arranged for use at once. For example, when I'm not goofing off as I am as I write this, I'm working on a programming project. I have my project window open over here, and my interface window open there, and two browser windows with documentation in them over here and here

Now that is just ignorant. I truly can't understand the mentality behind you saying that way I work is horrible, it just makes no sence, you don't even know what I do, what if I just did word processing all day? For the record, I do web development. When I'm editing HTML/CSS/PHP etc. I'm not looking at anything else. I can't fit both a browser and my text editor in the screen at the some time without it being too cramped, so I might as well maxmise both and flick between them.

For browsing, I can't read 2 things at the same time. So I don't need browsers side by side. And when I do need to view my text editor and some documentation at the same time (like you do), then I will put them side by side. But when I don't need to, most of the time I want to use all of my screen (explorer windows, GetRight and ICQ being a few examples of exceptions).

Re: Tabbed Browsing's "faults"

[SoupIsGoodFood_42]

but please, whatever other arguments you may make about the abstract shortcomings of tabbed browsing, please try to remember that millions of people find them a useful method of organizing their webpages.

I absolutely do not believe you. I think if you took everybody who has ever even heard of tabbed browsing and put them in the Rose Bowl, you'd have room left over for a medium-sized football game. You've got to remember that there are 5 million OS X users today, and that the number is increasing very quickly. So the fraction of OS X users who would benefit from Chimera-style tabs is tiny.

I think he is refering to the web-sites themselves. Take a look at amazon.com or google.com or any other site that has been designed around users, most of them have tabs, because of the advantages they offer over things like menus. (menus are generally used for commands, not for navigation).

Even so, I also don't understand your logic behide; that if a lot of users have never head of tabs, than they would not benifit from them. Most people I know have never hear of linux, does that mean linux is useless?

Re:Safari musing/Tab pontification

[Twirlip of the Mists]

I have opened more thna a few tabs, and still been able to read them.

Good for you. Open some more. Can you still read them? Open some more. Sooner rather than later you're going to find that the labels on your tabs are truncated to the point of being unusable. The question of where that point is depends merely on your window width. A reasonable window width-- 700 pixels or so-- means you can get about four tabs with average-length labels without truncation. The more your add, or the narrower your window is, the more truncation you get. And it's not an absurd limit, either, like 100 tabs or something like that. It's on the order of 6-8 in a window of reasonable size.

That is, in a word, dumb.

And abut the window menu, one could also add one for the tabs.

Or one could just extract one's head from one's anus and use the feature that is already there, staring you in the bloody face, instead of clamoring for developers with better things to do to implement an inferior feature that does, at best, exactly the same thing. That's an option, too, you know.

That shortcut is a pain, it's not something that I can do fast.

Then don't use it. The OS provides you with four completely independent ways of navigating from one window to another, not counting pointing-and-clicking. If you don't like the keyboard cycle shortcut, use the Window menu, or the dock menu, or use minimized windows. Or, as I said, just point and click.

It is very clear to me that you have no backgound in usability or GUI design.

Heh. I'm curious as to how you'd reach that conclusion.

I truly can't understand the mentality behind you saying that way I work is horrible, it just makes no sence, you don't even know what I do, what if I just did word processing all day?

Then I would ask you politely to shut the fuck up about web browsers, as you do not use them. But since you do make a great deal of noise about web browsers, and tabbed interfaces in web browsers in particular, it is clear that you use multiple windows. And yet you say that you zoom every window on your computer. That is, frankly, really dumb. You're just making things harder for yourself. Use the computer in the way it was designed to be used, and you will find that your life becomes easier. Suddenly having four windows open at the same time will seem, as if by magic, to be less of a onerous burden on your weary shoulders.

I can't fit both a browser and my text editor in the screen at the some time without it being too cramped, so I might as well maxmise both and flick between them.

How do you "flick between them?" Surely not by using the (gasp!) keyboard shortcut, hmm? The very one-- well, one identical to the very one-- that you said "is a pain, it's not something that I can do fast?" And that you went on to say is, "easy to make a mistake, and it requires extra effort to correct it?" That keyboard shortcut?

I'll repeat myself just one more time: learn how to use the computer. Do not sit down at a Mac and try to use it like you would use Windows. They are not the same. The Mac is different. Learn to use a Mac. You will find that tasks you currently believe to be burdensome are, in fact, quite easy.

Re: Tabbed Browsing's "faults"

[Twirlip of the Mists]

Take a look at amazon.com or google.com or any other site that has been designed around users, most of them have tabs, because of the advantages they offer over things like menus. (menus are generally used for commands, not for navigation).

The purpose of a tabbed interface is to reduce complexity. With a tabbed interface, you can take a set of controls that are logically or functionally related and present them to the user all at once, but separately from other sets of controls to which they are not related. For example, consider the Network pref pane. On my computer, I see four tabs: TCP/IP, AppleTalk, Proxies, AirPort. (Yours will differ depending on whether you're using an AirPort interface or a wired interface or a VPN interface or what.) When I click the TCP/IP tab, I see controls related to TCP/IP settings: IP address, gateway, and so on. When I click the AppleTalk tab, I see controls related to AppleTalk.

I do not, however, have a tab called "Display" on which I see screen resolution setting controls. That tab is on a completely separate pref pane, the Displays pref pane. It would make no sense to put the Display tab on the Network pref pane.

So what's my point? That tabs are an organizational feature, not a navigational feature. When you go to Amazon's web site and see something that vaguely resembles a row of tabs across the top, what you are seeing is essentially an organizational structure. Clicking on the "Books" tab (assuming there is such a thing; I don't feel like increasing Amazon's site traffic just to make a point) shows you content and controls related to books. Clicking the "Underwear" tab shows you content and controls related to underwear.

Using tabs in a tabbed browser, though, is different. In that context, you're trying to use tabs as a document management feature. Tabs don't work well for that purpose, as discussed at great length elsewhere.

So, in summary, tabs as an organizational feature are fine, whether in a program UI or a web page or a day planner. Tabs as a document/window management feature are not fine; they don't work, and even in the limited contexts in which they do, the existing features work better.

Even so, I also don't understand your logic behide; that if a lot of users have never head of tabs, than they would not benifit from them.

I assert that most Safari users would not use tabs if they were available. Why? Because we have been writing document-based applications for the Mac for nearly 20 years, and never once has the question of an MDI-style interface, tabbed or otherwise, come up. MDI was the standard on Windows for many years, until they deprecated it around the time of Windows 95. (I don't recall precisely when Microsoft's position shifted from MDI to mixed MDI/SDI to don't-use-MDI, but it happened around that time.) During that time, did users clamor for MDI on the Mac? No. Web browsers have been around for more than a decade now; tabbed browsing only appeared recently. And where did it appear? On Mozilla, where the limitations of new window spawning are well documented, and on Windows, where the task bar makes managing several windows a challenge.

Has there ever been a native Mac document-based application-- i.e., one designed on the Mac, not designed on Windows or UNIX and ported, as in Chimera-- that had any sort of MDI interface? I don't know. But I can say with confidence that no major application had one.

The gist of my argument is that MDI, and tabbed browsing which is a specific instance of MDI, have been around for a long time. The Mac has been around for even longer. During all that time, has MDI ever been an issue? No. Will adding tabs to Safari suddenly bring out a hitherto unrecognized need on the part of Mac users to use MDI? No.

So if Apple were to take the time to implement MDI (tabbed or otherwise) correctly, a very small, albeit vocal, fraction of their users would benefit from it. Meanwhile, bugs that should have been fixed in WebCore went unfixed because the programmers were working on MDI instead. Idiotic trade-off, that.

Most people I know have never hear of linux, does that mean linux is useless?

Dear Lord, why dost thee tempt me this way? ;-)

Re:Safari musing/Tab pontification

[dipipanone]

It is very clear to me that you have no backgound in usability or GUI design. Heh. I'm curious as to how you'd reach that conclusion.

It's apparent from the nature of your arguments. Your arguments are all derived from the way you -- a relatively expert power user -- utilizes his screen real-estate with maximum efficiency.

Someone with real expertise in useability or user interface design would be working from the basis of having observed novice users and determined what seems most intuitive and most straightforward to them.

I've no doubt that there are many people who can romp through a document in Emacs far faster than someone can in say, BBEdit. That doesn't make Emacs a triumph of useability or good user interface design (at least, not in the sense the word is normally used.)

Personally, I don't use tabs myself -- even when I use Mozilla, but I still think you're dead wrong about how useable they are.

Re:Safari musing/Tab pontification

[Twirlip of the Mists]

Your arguments are all derived from the way you -- a relatively expert power user -- utilizes his screen real-estate with maximum efficiency.

Well, I don't know what else to say to that except for "nuh-uh." I won't go into details in the interest of protecting my privacy, but I have done and continue to do more UI work than you are aware.

Re:Safari musing/Tab pontification

[Anonymous Coward]

To Sum Up:

Death to all tabs!

Hell's fiery inferno for those who partake in the devil's madness that is tabbed browsing!

300mhz ibooks and 700-pixel windows are mandatory!

Those who are willing to die for the cause of Tab-eradication may join the deathsquad!

All others... prepare to suffer.

Heil Twirlip!

try mouse over

[djupedal]

...it shows the full page title when using tabs. At least in Netscape...

Re: Tabbed Browsing's "faults"

[Anonymous Coward]

tabs are an organizational feature, not a navigational feature.

when i've got five tabs going, with five different documents in them, i am using the tabs as an organizational feature. i organize the sites i am looking at into one window, with several tabs.

i cannot understand your refusal to acknowledge that tabs are actually useful to some people. you argument is basically saying "tabs are useless! they don't help people use their web browsers!" but of course that is literally impossible, because of this statement:

tabs are useful to me. they make my web browsing experience better.

with that one statement, i demolish your entire argument.

and by the way, who the fuck are you to say that 700 pixels is a reasonable window width? i'll make my window as wide as i damn well please!

Just Chill

[Anonymous Coward]

The Chimera team doesn't need to rush out and do anything. I suggest that they continue development.

Then wait.

Something's going to happen. If the Chimera team bails, they could miss an opportunity.

Just bide your time, guys, okay?

--Richard

PS: I'm not a Chimera user but I
hate to see anyone rush into a
mistake out of panic.

Re: Tabbed Browsing's "faults"

[Twirlip of the Mists]

you argument is basically saying "tabs are useless! they don't help people use their web browsers!"

God, did IQ's drop sharply while I was away? Does nobody on Slashdot read any more?

Are tabs useful? Yes, in the same sense that anything else is useful: the can be used. Are they more useful than multiple windows? No, you can do more with multiple windows if you know how to manage them with features like the dock and the Window menu. Are they as useful as multiple windows? No, because there are some basic things that you can't do with tabs-- reorder them, for example.

So, at best tabs replicate a function that is already implemented in WindowServer. And that's only at best. In practical terms, tabs replicate the functions of WindowServer badly.

Implementing tabs (or any form of MDI) takes time and effort. I am not in favor of reducing the priority of any work on Safari so that tabs can be added. Everything else is more important than tabs, because tabs, despite the fact that a few people like them, bring nothing at all to the application.

with that one statement, i demolish your entire argument.

Evidently you wouldn't recognize my entire argument if it crawled up your leg and bit you on the johnson.

and by the way, who the fuck are you to say that 700 pixels is a reasonable window width?

That's the width to which it seems that a majority of web sites are designed. Go to someplace like Amazon, or Google News, or Yahoo, or Slashdot. The window elements are arranged to fit in a window that is 700 pixels across, +/- 100. Yes, you can "make my window as wide as i damn well please." Yee-haw. You da man, Jethro.

Safari is Jaguar only

[Redline]

The thing that keeps Chimera on my powerbook is the fact that it runs on "older" OS X releases and on computers with less RAM. I'm stuck with 10.1.5 on a old G3 until I can scrape together the spare change to upgrade to 10.2. Buying OS software for my aging computer is not a priority for me right now, and since Safari won't run on my laptop, I'm sticking with Chimera as long as they keep making it.

Chimera dies. BFD

[Anonymous Coward]

Never understood the chimera hype. Looks horrible on all my macs with it's spidery little font that looks bad when increased in size. Change the font and it looks even worse). And if chimera/gecko renders so damn well how come sites (/., espn, etc.) get little verticle lines where there should be words? Sure, I can highlight the "text" to read the mystery paragraph.

Please.

And there are only 2 features of tabs I care about: grouping a set of urls to open at once and loading a page in the background so I can keep reading the foreground page.

This is all about someone who wanted to be famous and now won't. Cry me a river.

Tab are great for small screens.

[Anonymous Coward]

You should know.
Instead of being stuck on the theory that they are just not Mac like... give them a try, you might actually like them.

I find Mozilla's tabs very useful. In fact it's why I've finally swiched from IE. I'd try Safari if I could run it on my iMac 233 running OS8.6.

8.6 is dead... Long live 8.6!!

Re:Tab are great for small screens.

[Twirlip of the Mists]

Instead of being stuck on the theory that they are just not Mac like... give them a try, you might actually like them.

First, even if I loved them I would be unable to use Chimera regularly. The text rendering is just awful, and the fact that they aren't using true Cocoa NSTextField and NSTextArea widgets for HTML forms cramps my style: no inline spell-checking or services.

That said, I really, really tried to love tabs. Just couldn't do it. I constantly found myself getting annoyed at the commandeering of command-W to mean "close tab" when more than one "tab" (is it a tab when there's no tab on your tab?) is open. I wanted to close the window dammit! Not the tab! If I'd wanted to close the tab, I would have said, "close tab." Quit trying to second-guess me!

Then the other issues came into play: tab label truncation, surprisingly slow tab rendering on my older machines-- opening new windows was slower than opening new tabs, but changing to an existing window was faster than changing to an existing tab-- and so on. Finally, when I discovered that I couldn't re-order tabs, I gave it up. I started using OmniWeb full-time despite the fact that it's a lot slower on those old machines.

Now that Safari is here, my girlfriend and I (it's her iBook) can have a browser that is fast, Cocoa-savvy, and easy on the eyes. Before, I could only pick, at best, two of the three.

Re:Tab are great for small screens.

[Anonymous Coward]

Tabs, tabs, tabs... everyone's talking about tabs. Well, I might as well give my piece of mind.

Here it is:

(1) I don't see how having tabs can in any possible way be a negative feature. It's not like you can't just open new windows in Chimera, the only difference is that you don't hit command-T, which you probably wouldn't do if you were using a browser without tabs anyways.

(2) Tabs, if you use them, can be powerful organization tools.

For example:
Say I have 12 pages loaded...
-4 pages telling me why I should have sold my investments two years ago.
-2 pages telling me how much money I should have in my bank account and how much I still owe the loan-shark
-6 porn pages
It would make sense to me to have three windows open, one with six tabs, one with 2, and the other with 6. If I wasnted to differentiate between my porn site, I could easily just open a new window. Three windows are a lot easier to keep track of than 12.

(3) Tabs are simple. If you have three tabs open in one window and you want to close one tab, go to that tab and hit command-W, it's not different than closing a new window, only it just so happens that you don't have to switch between windows to find the one you want to close, you only have to click on the tab. AND, if you don't use tabs, hitting command-W WILL close the window.

Anyways, thanks for listening to me everyone... I sincerely hope to see tabs in all browsers eventually. It's like most features in most applications... if most people want it, it makes sense to include it... it you don't want to use it, then don't.

Re:Tab are great for small screens.

[Anonymous Coward]

All this talk of command-this and control-open-apple-double-or-triple-click-and-drag -that is giving St. Ignutious a headache. And people said emacs had a non-intuitive user interface!

Phoenix and Pinstripe

[esme]

IMHO, Chimera was always a dead end. Pheonix is working on some of the same problems (bloat, complicated UI) that Chimera was, but with a cross-platform approach that still uses XUL instead of native widgets. The fact that Phoenix has made such progress is a good indication that the problem wasn't XUL in the first place.

And if you're dying to have native widgets, check out Pinstripe theme. Turns out that plain-jane Mozilla has hooks to get OSX to draw the widgets. It doesn't solve all of the other Human Interface Guidelines problems -- but most of those should be solved for all platforms, anyway.

-Esme

WebCore doesn't use Qt.

[Anonymous Coward]

Safari's Mac-ness has absolutely nothing to do with the OS X Qt port, and everything to do with the wonkiness of Gecko.

Safari Functionality

[Rainer]

Safari might become a really good browser in the future, but it is definitely intended to be a "minimal configuration" browser.
Apple will never include complicated options that might break many pages.
Just look at the filter settings in iCab. (Java, Java-Script, iframe, images, cookies, ...)
If Chimera would adopt something similar it could easily become the browser of choice for power users.

Browser integration

[vrykolaka]

âoe2. Apple apps are uninstallable. This point is often lost on the Windows crowd. "Apple bundles a browser too! It's anticompetitive!" Microsoft tells you that IE is literally crazy-glued to their OS, as is WMP and others. Any Apple iApp is a single icon, that is tossable, without a fuss, without that wacky Install/Remove Programs nonsense.â

Sure I hate IE dominance but the idea of integrating web web browser and file explorer is GREAT. If you ever used its specificities (not just clicking an icon but using the address bar as a [primitive] command line), I guess you would notice an increase in "productivity", as they like to say.

What's wrong with MS and IE is not browser integration (KDE/GNOME do it also followed MS, BTW), it is closed-source browser integration.

In a certain way, Mac OS X can be compared now to Windows 95 (without Internet Explorer 4). Don't get me wrong, I'm just comparing the UI navigation :)

I'm waiting for Windows 98 ;) 10.3 ?

Real vs. pretend

[Anonymous Coward]

I can understand having one's enthusiasm doused by all the excitement concerning Safari. I hope that Chimera, UnInc. will keep work; after all this enthusiasm will pass; people will eventually stop using Safari because they want a browser that works. Sure, Apple may get it out of beta next week: unlikely. It may be a year, it may be never, other priorities may seize their attention. It's happened before. Chimera is a much more polished product, keep up the work, keep your eyes on the prize and think long term, not just MacWorld-week.

NOOOOOO!

[Anonymous Coward]

You take the Chimera away from me over my crying body!

AC

The REAL point of Safari...

[Cerebus]

...isn't the browser, it's WebCore and JavaScriptCore. The browser is a convenient testbed for both cores that has the happy side-effect of producing a useful app (and thousands of eyes to point out parse and render defects).

Personally, I think Apple as a corporation could care less whether Safari lives or dies. But either way, OS X gains WebCore and JavaScriptCore, which will prove to be indispensible frameworks in the future.

Chimera is not dead! Pinkerton says so!

[lml]

Quoting from Mike Pinkerton's weblog:

"It's all about motivations. Why did we even start Chimera in the first place? Because we wanted to make something that sucked less. Safari aside, it stands on its own as a solid product with a good UI that is pretty damn bug-free for an 0.6 release. It's easy to get sidetracked on the "woe is me, we lost again" tangent (especially if you've been at Netscape for 5+ years), but it's time to get back to why we're doing this at all: because it's fun. It's fun making a product that more than seven people use. I wish that was 7 million, but I guess we have to set our expectations appropriately. Chimera's not going anywhere, regardless of whatever I post on this blog. Will this get picked up on MacSlash? Unlikely. I guess the damage has already been done.

I'd like to correct many of the emails that commented that I was the only developer working on Chimera. I'm not by any stretch of the imagination. While our unofficial "team" is smaller than Safari's, we certainly have a lot of coverage from the open-source community."

Check it at http://mozpink .blogspot.com/2003_01_01_mozpink_archive.html#8770 4137

Calm down!

[protohiro1]

Ahhhh the sky is falling!

Settle. Don't panic. Mozilla is doing great. The browser wars are back on. Judging by my own server access logs mozilla is gaining share. Mozilla is finally as good, if not better, than IE. Opera is also excellent. We have choices again. Just because a couple side projects aren't full steam ahead doesn't mean mozilla is going to go away. It certainly won't be replaced by IE on Linux.

Re:Safari musing/Tab pontification

[eunos94]

Hmm...how to explain my window usage. I tend to have between 6-10 windows open at any given time, ranging from page source, references, current work and entertainment. I also have an iChat window open, sometimes the iChat buddy list, a clock on the desktop, maybe a couple BBEdit windows and a terminal window.

Now, if I add another element to the desktop, say an iTunes window, I find that I sometimes want to shrink the browser windows some to squeeze the iTunes display into the lower left corner. With tabs, I can drag one window and all of my windows change size together. Without tabs...that's 6-10 seperate drags and window selections.

With the widescreen resolution of the TiBook (or sometimes TiBook with a second monitor spanned), I don't run fullscreen because it would waste a huge amount of space on the side of the screen. I like to be able to just look at the screen and view applications without having to maximize it or bring it to the front (eg. iTunes naming song, aClock time, iChat buddy list) When spanning monitors, not a problem, but with one screen it starts to get cluttered and tabs have provided me with a way of grouping things together to minimize that clutter.

I do like your idea that related to palettes in Photoshop. The ability to 'stack' is essentially all I really use tabs for. Additionally, the ability to grab all of a applications windows at once and resize would be great.

Re:Safari musing/Tab pontification

[Twirlip of the Mists]

Now, if I add another element to the desktop, say an iTunes window, I find that I sometimes want to shrink the browser windows some to squeeze the iTunes display into the lower left corner.

You should consider hiding iTunes (or minimizing it, but hiding works better I think) and using the dock menu. If you want to know what you're listening to, control-click on the iTunes icon. You can also control playback from the dock menu. Very handy.

Additionally, the ability to grab all of a applications windows at once and resize would be great.

Option-click the "zoom" button. All windows in the foreground application will go to their natural size. (Admittedly, sometimes this works better than other times.)

Re:Safari musing/Tab pontification

[bnenning]

Sooner rather than later you're going to find that the labels on your tabs are truncated to the point of being unusable.

Fortunately, tabs do not preclude opening more than one window. Which is easier, managing 2 windows with 6 tabs each, or 12 separate windows? Never mind, I know what your answer is, but I disagree.

If you don't like the keyboard cycle shortcut, use the Window menu, or the dock menu, or use minimized windows.

All of these scale worse than tabs, except for the Window menu, which is inherently slower because you have to first hit the menu (granted Fitt's Law helps here), and then locate the correct item.

I'll repeat myself just one more time: learn how to use the computer. Do not sit down at a Mac and try to use it like you would use Windows.

Rather than attacking people, why don't you stop and think about why so many people prefer tabs? As mentioned above, not having to futz with moving and sizing new windows is a key advantage. Due to the nature of web browsing, it's rarely the case that I want to see two pages side by side. Instead, I'd rather consolidate lots of pages into one window so that they don't obstruct my other apps. For example, I'm typing this message into Chimera with 6 tabs open (with all titles easily distinguishable). Because I only have one Chimera window, Terminal, Mail, Fire, Project Builder, and Finder windows are visible and easily accessible. This would be much harder to achieve if I had to deal with 6 browser windows.

Maybe in theory tabs break all sorts of UI guidelines. But in practice they work quite well for many users. Rather than assuming the users are wrong, why not consider that the guidelines may not be perfect?

Re:Safari musing/Tab pontification

[eunos94]

Yeah, I tried that dock menu for iTunes for a bit, but I like just being able to glance at it without having to make any gestures to get information. I really like the 'tiny' iTunes window that uses only the three buttons and the track display. Having that in the corner of the window with information or the graphic equalizer is nice. Gotta admit, I'm a sucker for eye candy.

Re:Safari musing/Tab pontification

[c13v3rm0nk3y]

I think the reason I prefer tabbed browsers is that it gives me more choice. There are a lot of pages that just don't deserve their own window frame -- I mean, most of the pages I review in a typical day persist for a few minutes before being recycled. I tend to run a single browser window with 4-5 tabbed frames. If I need to do a side-by-side compare of content, I spawn a new window, and start building tabs on that one as well.

So I may end up with groups of related pages, using browser windows to sort pages (usually one miscellaneous group, and one development group).

Basically, having tabs available gives me more options. I already have the option of another browser window. Tabs give me the ability to manipulate content for pages that don't need a whole window to themselves.

For 90% of my browsing, I don't need to see more than one page at a time. For those times I do need to see multiple pages, I can still do so through the magic of "Open in a new Window".

For example, while browsing this thread, I ran across the link to Hyatt's weblog. Because I just want to see if it's been updated, I can cntrl-click (I'm on Windows right now) and it will load in a tab, in the background. The ~20 characters I can see of the title is good enough for me to tell what that tab is (I'm running with 6 tabs right now) and anyway, I'm just going to glance at it and then either kill the tab or reuse it for a google search or something. It's just become a natural thing for me to do now.

Meanwhile, I've got a bunch of Solaris development pages, man pages and internal bug postings open in another browser Window. Because it's lunch time, that window is minimized to the Taskbar.

I think the main issue for me is that switching tabs is no different than switching windows. It's just that, for most pages, I don't need another browser with the full complement of controls. I just need to see the content. Most content is just too short-lived to justify spawing a new window. The usual Copy-Switch-Paste activities are no easier with either scenario.

Sorry, I can't do without tabs anymore; they've become a standard way I work. As someone pointed out in this thread, you don't have to use them, but they are there if you do want them. I will not use Safari because of this. *shrug* Even if Chimera never makes it past release 0.6, that release is good enough for the majority of my work, including my usual corporate webmail and bank accounts.

Not Dead

[moof1138]

From: pinkerton@netscape.com (Mike Pinkerton)
Date: Tue Jan 21, 2003 10:46:55 AM US/Central
To: CHimera
Subject: [Chimera] Sigh
Reply-To: chimera@mozdev.org

Let me put this to bed once and for all: I'm not stopping work on chimera.

Yes, I'm frustrated and sick of being kicked around by apple. That's why I muttered that i was "torn". I never said I was stopping work or that chimera was dying. I can't speak for Simon or bryner or any of the other members of the team, but they're not stopping either.

I appreciate the support and all the emails. We're making a damn good product here, and we're doing it because we want to, win, lose, or draw.

--
Mike Pinkerton
Mac Browser Weenie
pinkerton@netscape.com http://people.netscape.com/pinkerton

_______________________________________________
Chimera mailing list
Chimera@mozdev.org
http://www.mozdev.org/ma ilman/listinfo/chimera

Do I have this straight?

[Aram Fingal]

If I understand the situation correctly, Chimera is a port of Mozilla from UNIX code base with a GUI written in Cocoa while the Mozilla that is called "Mozilla" on OS X is a Carbon port of the legacy Mac OS code for Mozilla. A Carbon Mozilla makes sense if you need to support both classic Mac OS and Mac OS X with uniform behavior as the priority.

Eventually, however, won't it be more important to use technologies like the UNIX base and Cocoa which make better use of OS X's abilities than Carbon does? Chimera may be marginal now but it's the method that makes more sense for the future.

Re:Do I have this straight?

[lordpixel]

You do have it straight, though actually, Mozilla itself will soon be dropping Classic (OS 9) support.

At that point they'll switch to a Unix back end with a Carbon front end. While a Cocoa port of the front end would be nice, its quite large, and the performance gains most likely lie in moving the back end to the Unix back end.

Chimera is not a Cocoa port of the entire Mozilla front end UI - its a completely seperate UI for "just the browser". Sort of like Phoenix, but more like Galeon or KMellon, because it doesn't use XUL.

Interestingly, one could presumably make a version of Chimera that used Apple's WebCore (the Safari rendering engine), and indeed Apple could always take the Safari UI and use Gecko (the Mozilla rendering engine) at some point in the future. I don't expect to see either happen though!

Tabs Schmabs

[Anonymous Coward]

When are we going to hear the last from you tab lamers about the lack of your precious tabs everywhere you go?

Re:Safari musing/Tab pontification

[SoupIsGoodFood_42]

Good for you. Open some more. Can you still read them? Open some more. Sooner rather than later you're going to find that the labels on your tabs are truncated to the point of being unusable. The question of where that point is depends merely on your window width. A reasonable window width-- 700 pixels or so-- means you can get about four tabs with average-length labels without truncation.

I have my window set at 1024 wide. I don't usaly have more than 6 at a time open, and although they do get trucated a wee bit if they have long title, I have always found them distinguishable, partly do to memory muscle. If I ever do have too many tabs, I'll just create a new window ;)

The OS provides you with four completely independent ways of navigating from one window to another, not counting pointing-and-clicking. If you don't like the keyboard cycle shortcut, use the Window menu, or the dock menu, or use minimized windows. Or, as I said, just point and click.

Window menu: Move, click, move, click.
Dock menu: Move, pause (I have mine hidden), move, click and hold, move, release.
Minimizing other windows means that they will be hidden, that's annoying. it could also be a lot of clicking if it's deep down.
I've already explaind my dislike for the keyboard shortcut.

Windows have 'move, click', but only if they are not covered up by other windows. The tabs are simple: Move, click.

How do you "flick between them?" Surely not by using the (gasp!) keyboard shortcut, hmm? The very one-- well, one identical to the very one-- that you said "is a pain, it's not something that I can do fast?" And that you went on to say is, "easy to make a mistake, and it requires extra effort to correct it?" That keyboard shortcut?

Sometimes I use the taskbar, other times...yes, the keyboard. But when I use that, I'm only ever switching between 2 programs, so I never find it a problem. I hardly ever need to flick between only 2 sites, else the keyboard shortcut would be perfect.

I'll repeat myself just one more time: learn how to use the computer. Do not sit down at a Mac and try to use it like you would use Windows. They are not the same. The Mac is different. Learn to use a Mac.

I have been using Macs for a while. I know how to use them, I know their flaws, and I know windows' flaws. This is not a case of me needing to learning to use my mac properly. This is simply a case of me finding certian aspects of windows easier to use in some situations that Mac. Don't kid youself into thinking that Mac OS has a perfect GUI, there is no such thing. Yes, they put more though into it that MS does, but they still have to comprimise between certain things because they have to cater to novice, and "power" users.

Re:Safari musing/Tab pontification

[Yagotta B. Kidding]

I, for one agree with you on the tabs issue. Snapback just seems a better way of handling this problem of multiple windowing, you get one window, can set any point to jump back to instantly and away you go without worrying about keeping track of what tab is what, especially when you can't reorder them and you have so many that the tab titles are comperssed to "Goo.."; "Th..."; "Form.." etc.

Snapback made sense after less than five minutes - a total boon for goole searching and gave me that dawning "ahhh.. so this is how it should be done" feeling that is all too rare in modern computer UI design (outside of the Mac world that is ;)

Even less dead:

[Erik K. Veland]

For those of you who cannot be bothered to read his blog:

Wow, ok. First I'd like to thank the 75 of you that took the time to write me an email about my last blog entry on Chimera. One of the emails went like this:

OK, Chimera will never be an app used by the masses, and possibly not even by the masses of Mac users. Still, choice is good, and choices of several apps that suck less is even better.

You know, he's exactly right. It's all about motivations. Why did we even start Chimera in the first place? Because we wanted to make something that sucked less. Safari aside, it stands on its own as a solid product with a good UI that is pretty damn bug-free for an 0.6 release. It's easy to get sidetracked on the "woe is me, we lost again" tangent (especially if you've been at Netscape for 5+ years), but it's time to get back to why we're doing this at all: because we enjoy it. It's fun making a product that more than seven people use. I wish that was 7 million, but I guess we have to set our expectations appropriately. Chimera's not going anywhere, regardless of whatever I post on this blog. Will this get picked up on MacSlash? Unlikely. I guess the damage has already been done.

I'd like to correct many of the emails that commented that I was the only developer working on Chimera. I'm not by any stretch of the imagination. While our unofficial "team" is smaller than Safari's, we certainly have a lot of coverage from the open-source community.

Certainly I recognize the irony that my musings about my fifteen minutes running out generated more email than my weekly amount of spam. Next time I get depressed, remind me to just talk to my cats.

Keep up the good work Chimera guys!!

[w128jad]

I sincerely hope the Chimera team continues their work. Considering how bulky and slow the mozilla code is, chimera has always been a breath of fresh air. Chimera offers a (99.9%) standards compliant browser built natively for Cocoa and open source!! Its performance has not been bad. Considering Apple actually built the architecture it is no wonder their browser is streamlined to use it most effectively. This shouldn't discourage the Chimera guys (although I'm sure they are not entirely broken up about an Apple supported browser appearing). Chimera still has an opportunity to mature with time, hone in on the Apple UI standards, tighten up w3c standards, and pretty much present a good open source alternative. If for good or ill the Chimera Developers drop the project, maybe they could shift over to KHTML Development. :-) Either way I think thinks are looking up for Mac users!! w2^8me out.

Because It Doesn't Work

[Anonymous Coward]

The damn thing is been in development for ages.

Chimera wins.

[Squidgee]

So sayeth Googlewebfight. Here is the link; check it out. =D

liar

[Anonymous Coward]

no comment

Re:Safari musing/Tab pontification

[chrisv]

Tabs are better than windows because [comment regarding usability].

Wrong. If you have more than a few tabs open, their names are truncated to the point where you cannot tell which tab is which.

Personally, I've never run into this problem, until I've hit the point where I've got 10-15 tabs open simultaneously. Keeping in mind that I've never used OSX, Chimera, or Safari, I can't say much in regard to those.

Even still, the names generally aren't really all that truncated. Granted, my desktop is set up in a dual-head configuration (2 17" monitors, both running at 1152x864), with a terminal window maximised on one monitor, Mozilla and/or Phoenix and/or Opera7 maximised on the other monitor, and various other items overlaying everything (IM clients, WinAmp, other such things).

And, unlike with windows, there is no tab menu...

That's because it's not necessary. I don't know the shortcut key on MacOS for this, but every browser I've seen which supports tabbed browsing on both X11 and Win32 uses Ctl-Tab and Ctl-Shift-Tab to navigate through them. And you have the tabs at the top of the browser window.

On top of that, I've never seen a convenient "Window" menu. Not even when I used MacOS on a regular basis.

.b

Also, usability studies have time and again demonstrated that it's easier to hit a systemwide menu bar than an in-window item.

And every power user I know doesn't like having to use the mouse if there isn't a reason to. That was one of my largest gripes about MacOS while I used it on a regular basis. It didn't matter what I did, I still had to use the mouse. One would think that with Ctl, Cmd, Option, and Shift, you could create enough keyboard shortcuts for everything such that it would be unnecessary to use a mouse.

Also, your systemwide menu bar, which presumably contains a list of windows for you to choose from (which is the only reason why you brought it up, isn't it?), assumes that I want to read item titles every time I want to get to something, or scan the list for the appropriate icon. Granted, it's a good idea as long as you don't have 30 windows open at once, which I quite frequently used to end up with while browsing.

Why, you might ask, would one end up with so many open windows while browsing the web and doing other things? Specifically so I don't have to fuss with the back button every time I follow a link somewhere. Every page load - whether caused by simply going "back" or following a link, still causes an HTTP request to be sent out. Which means I have to wait for the outgoing HTTP request and the 200 or 206 response to come back before the page ever renders the second time, if I've just followed my link in the browser window. Tabbed browsing makes that specific usage pattern, among others, a whole hell of a lot easier.

People think that just because in-window items are closer to the point of focus that they're easier to use; this is not true.

I haven't seen this on the thread anywhere, nor have I mentioned it myself. It's not a matter of aim or point of focus. It's a matter of the keyboard is easier for me to use because it allows me access to more functions without having to: move my hands away from the keyboard, find the mouse, move it to where I want it to go, click (and hold the mouse button!), move the mouse some more, and release the mouse button (finally!); or with the keyboard: Press Ctl-L.

Granted, active display items might be closer to the point of focus for my mouse. They are absolutely nowhere near the point of focus of my hands, which are usually in the vicinity of the keyboard. I find it a far easier way to use the computer than to be required to locate a menu bar, or other item within a window. The times I find a mouse more convenient are when I'm moving stuff around. That's about it.

... Not to mention the fact that the systemwide menu bar already has a usability infrastructure built up around it to allow things like full keyboard navigation for the disabled and such. No tab interface has that.

Hm. I could have just sworn I mentioned the shortcuts for doing so on every platform that I use on a regular basis. In any case, if the usability infrastructure is there for full keyboard navigation, why the hell was I unable to get rid of my mouse after using MacOS for 3+ years? Oh. That's because nothing could be done without the mouse.

This is one thing that I prefer on Win than Mac. All my apps open maxmised

Horrible.

My first comment to that is that you do your work the way that suits you, and I do my work the way that it suits me. I prefer maximised windows myself, as well. Granted, that also depends on what it is that I'm doing.

... I don't know what kind of work you do, but when I use my computer ... [description of computer usage here] ... Zooming any of them up to fill the screen would, at best, be a huge waste of screen real-estate.

I don't know exactly what kind of work you do. I do web development for business and personal stuff, and various bits of C-ish stuff for other personal projects. I've always found that having a maxmised window is more convenient for me. Of course, I've also always found that IDE's get in my way, GUI programming is a pain in the ass, and that I don't want to focus on everything at once.

It's purely a matter of how you work. Don't bash my [or other people's] way of doing it.

It's called the dock

[metamatic]

"Tabs are better than windows because all the tabs can be seen at once, and the user can see exactly what they want, and reach for it with a single click."

Uh, with multiple browser windows all the windows can be seen at once (in the dock), the user can see exactly what they want (an image of the page, even, in the dock), and they can reach for it with a single click on the dock.

So what exactly is the problem tabs are solving?

I wonder if all the people who love tabs are people who've turned off the dock?

Re:It's called the dock

[BinxBolling]

Uh, with multiple browser windows all the windows can be seen at once (in the dock), the user can see exactly what they want (an image of the page, even, in the dock), and they can reach for it with a single click on the dock.

Everything you say is only true if you've minimized the browser window you're looking for. If, instead, you've left it full-size and it's gotten lost under other windows, it won't be in the dock.

Re:It's called the dock

[SoupIsGoodFood_42]

Uh, with multiple browser windows all the windows can be seen at once (in the dock), the user can see exactly what they want (an image of the page, even, in the dock), and they can reach for it with a single click on the dock.

Uh, I been using OS X for a while, all major versions, and on different computers, not once have I seen windows of an application visible in the dock, except when they are minimised.

Re:Safari musing/Tab pontification

[BinxBolling]

Fortunately, tabs do not preclude opening more than one window. Which is easier, managing 2 windows with 6 tabs each, or 12 separate windows? Never mind, I know what your answer is, but I disagree.

He'd be wrong, anyways. Grouping things into categories is one of the basic ways that people deal with large sets of objects. Tabs give you a means of grouping web pages when you have many of them open. Falling back to the operating system's top-level window management means that you have one big flat pile of browser windows, far less manageable than a small handful of windows each with a small handful of tabs.

Re:Death to Open Source

[Anonymous Coward]

Google it.

And sadly, I did vote for Bush. I didn't know he was insane until after Sept 11, when I started researching him.

Seems pretty dead to me - last release was 1998 ;)

[Anonymous Coward]

It looks like the last release of the Chimera web browser was 2.0b4 on June 1st 1998.
A few plugins since then, but it looks like it's been dead since 1999. Even its name has been co-opted now.

Does no one remember? I thought it once was the default browser on FreeBSD.

Re: Tabbed Browsing's "faults"

[prizzznecious]

The problem with your argument (which will remain, no matter how much smoke you blow) is that some people like tabs and are more productive with them.

You're a Mac zealot, so you should be pretty familiar with this argument--objective performance means nothing if you're less productive.

I like tabs because I JUST LIKE THEM. I don't like having many windows open at once. It bothers me. At some point I'll frantically try to close them, and I'll accidentally command-q instead of command-w, which is clearly not a desirable end. Tabs fix this by consolidating all windows into one, dramatically reducing clutter.

Why does it even matter to you, since, as several people have pointed out, tabs aren't a default. Browsers like Chimera can do tabs if you want them to, but they can just as easily never, ever do tabs.

Re:Safari musing/Tab pontification

[blibbleblobble]

"The problem with Tabs, is as you said, there's not really a problem to begin with. Browser window-switching accomplishes the same thing, with unlimited constraints."

Well, browser windows are still limited by the size of the panel, and you still have exactly the same problems with not being able to read the titles if there are more than 8-10 windows open.

Browser windows also make it more difficult to find other applications. With 10 websites open, I can still press one key-combo, and get the email program I have open in the background. Or an FTP program. If I want to cycle through web-pages, I can press a different key combo

I've no problem with people who don't like them, but so far, everyone I know who's started to use them wouldn't even consider losing the ability.

Re:Death to Open Source

[Anonymous Coward]

Jeez, scary stuff on that site. Glad I went, thought everything was cut and dried until now.