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Safari Beta Updated
LenE writes "Safari has been updated to Beta 6, and is available via Software Update. New in this version is XML support, more speed, and many bug fixes. The download is 2.4 MB and doesn't require a restart." From the notes: "The Safari Update 2-12-03 improves the compatibility with popular web sites based on Safari user feedback, further improves the performance of loading web pages and Flash content, adds support for XML, increases standards conformance and delivers improved application stability. The update also enables access to web sites that offer self-signed security certificates."
As noted by Bill Bumgartner, file size of the package has gone from 7.2MB to 6.9MB.
I haven't seen file size increase with upgrades. The Safari developers should be proud.
Actually, I think these storys are auto posted based on when the software update window pops up on his mac. Invariably when I'm at work and see the software update window pop up there's a corresponding slashdot story 20 minutes later.
As in, the lack of them.
I am now using Chimeron, which CRASHES on me, closing ALL MY WINDOWS, about once every thirty hours of surfing.
I use it because I can open new tabs in it, and bookmark groups of tabs.
There is NO other reason.
I severely dislike chimeron because:
1. It's painfully slow with many windows open.
2. It's a memory hog.
3. As I mentioned, it CRASHES from time to time, losing my contexts, which sometimes include a great deal of surfing, which I then must painfully reconstruct using the history.
But I need tabs. I cannot work without tabs.
You don't need to allow all users to use tabs. Just hide them, as chimeron (navigator) does until you open them explicitly. Heck, you could have an 'advanced' preferences option "present option of opening new tab upon command-clicking (right clicking) link".
But I CANNOT use Safari while it doesn't have tabs.
It has features I love. It's small and robust. But it doesn't have a feature that I cannot surf efficiently without.
If you saw my tab-group bookmarks, you'd understand.
The HIG, as I recall, doesn't mention tabs as evil. While Apple may not deploy tabs on the system level, we can look to Excel for tabbed worksheets as a long standing example, and to Airport Admin for a more recent usage. For a more public example, you only need to visit Apple.com
Safari will have tabs...sooner or later, and Cupertino will not slide into the Pacific as a result.
It isn't spelled out directly there, but from previous times I worked on MacOS apps the guideline summaries have pretty much said "One document, one window". It is consistent with their original desktop theme - each window was a document and sort of appeared as a sheet of paper.
And before someone else points them out, iTunes is more like an appliance - i.e. your CD player. iPhoto is an electronic photo album. iDVD and iMovie are film editors. Essentially the distinction is they don't work with single documents. Safari, however, deals with would could be called active newspapers or magazines. If you want to read a different article, it's in a different magazine, and either replaces your current document or is another document altogether.
I'm not trying to over-defend their choices. I just wanted to point out they are fairly consistent. Sometimes the distinctions are vague (e.g. what would Mail be?), but in the case of Safari I thinking they are going to stick with the document line of thought, and in this case it makes sense to me.
R: That voice. Where have I heard that voice before? B: In about 365 other episodes. But I don't know who it is either.
http://home.quicknet.nl/mw/prive/dennis.scp/s/safa ri
The idea is NOT to add tabs inside a window. But to place a new window at the exact same place as your previous window and let any obscured windows pop up a tab.
So instead of indenting that new window to the lower right to reveal a clickable border as used today, I say let the windows behind the current window pop up a tab to show their name and icon. The windows stay independent and the screen has less clutter than with today's jumpy stacking system. Power-users can cycle the windows in a tab-like fashion using the [option] key.
Just to note this is not a User-Interface update, it is more focused to fixing bugs in and extending the Webcore rendering engine used at Safari's heart. This is a beta browser, so it should be feature complete, and there should only be bug-fixes between here and a 1.0 final release. Wait for 1.1 if you want tabs ;-)
Answering your question, tabs allow multiple webpages to be viewed in a single window - a little like how Safari's preferences box works - click on an icon to get a different 'page' of options, but all in the same window.
Mozilla does do tabbed browsing, Command-T opens tabs instead of windows.
In my opinion (and we all have strong opinions- this is Slashdot after all!) I found tabs useful only because there was a 5 pause when switching between windows (not tabs) in Mozilla. But Safari's so damn fast I'm quite happy Command-~ -ing between 10 or so windows, without any noticeable pause - and that's on a 600MHz iBook.
#define ROSE any_other_name
You can now drag & drop text from browser windows. (It previously only allowed dragging links and images.) Unfortunately it uses the silly Cocoa-style delay before allowing you to drag text. (When will Apple finally fix text dragging in Cocoa?!)
It also now supports embedding HTML with the <OBJECT> tag, although it will stop drawing the embedded content if you use the Back/Forward buttons. Also, if you click in the <OBJECT> and scroll it with the keyboard, then clicking on links outside of the <OBJECT> sometimes doesn't work unless you first click outside of the <OBJECT> area and scroll the main page with they keyboard. (weird, but it happens .. check out the W3 CSS1 test suite pages)
-- Tim Buchheim
As any long time mac user knows, command-option-w closes allthe windows in almost ANY mac app made in the past 12 years.
yet safari does not do this.
Know what I like about atheists? I've yet to meet one that believes God is on their side.
On my Mac I opened Chimera and filled up the window with as many tabs as it would allow (16 in a single window). All windows displayed the Slashdot mainpage. My Slashdot prefs are set to show all stories from all sections.
I checked the system usage in the Process Viewer app:
I then closed all the windows and did the same thing, this time opening 16 SEPARATE windows. Again with Slashdot's mainpage loaded in each.
Process Viewer showed:
So, according to this unscientific off-the-cuff test, you cut your RAM requirements in half by using tabs. YMMV.
I noticed this the other day when I opened over 50 different images in different windows. My Mac almost ground to a halt. I then opened the same images in tabs (in only a few windows
So, to all those who think tabbed browsing is purely a matter of personal preference, I suggest that there is at least a reasonable performance based argument for it.
(the productivity arguments are even more compelling IMHO, but I won't get into those)
But as far as I can tell any criticism that can be aimed at tabs can also be aimed at Safari's bookmark bar. Across the top of the brower there are a bunch of horizontal text buttons that let me select different documents to view in the same window. Or in other words, tabs.
The big differences are that the bookmark bar doesn't have the "tab look", it doesn't keep the page in memory, and to add one from a link you have to option-click, select "add bookmark" then click "OK". So they are basically a slow and inconvenient tab system. Although they are persistent across browser sessions, which is kinda cool.
Yes, I understand that they can't really be used efficiently that way, but that's not the point. The point is that as a UI concept Safari's current bookmark bar and the proposed (and much maligned) tabs are cousins anyways. So anyone spouting that tabs are an inconceivably bad UI design is just reacting to surface characteristics and religion
Cheers