Safari Beta Leaked, With Tabs

ollie_ob writes "Seems a bit too good to be true: Apple listening to its community and implementing the features most requested? Apparently a build (v62) of Safari has been leaked into the wild, and has tabs -- though not fully implemented yet -- and primitive support for autocomplete in forms. The Think Secret rumor site has the scoop." It is not merely a rumor, I've confirmed it. It works nicely, too, in a brief test. Then I, uh, deleted the copy I looked at.

Comments

Hooray!

[tamen]

Tabs ho!

You need to activate the debug menu. While Safari is not running, write this in the terminal:
defaults write com.apple.Safari IncludeDebugMenu 1
Start Safari (Beta .62) and choose "Tabbed Browsing" in the debug menu.
Command-T will open a new tab as will right clicking on a link and choose "Open link in new tab". Command-W will close the tab you are currently using. Command-shift-right/leftarrow wil choose the prev/next tab.
One thing though, tabs slows down the gui, not page-load-time, but it takes longer to switch between tabs than to switch between windows. Also, if you have, say, 5 tabs in one window and are looking at the last (the one most to the right) command-shift-rightarrow will not cycle you back to the first tab. Another thing is that Safari sometimes closes the whole window instead of just the tab when you press command-W.
Ive got only small complaints, Im very impressed they got it working so well already. Cant wait for the final.

Tabbing is a nice feature, but Ive kinda got used to not using tabs after shifting to Safari. well, Ive just got to get used to tabbing again ;)

Re:Hooray!

[sapporo]

Cmd-click will open a link in a new tab
Cmd-Shift-click will open a link in a new tab in the background
Cmd-Option-click will open a link in a new window
Cmd-Option-Shift-click will open a link in a new window in the background

How did I find out? When you hover over a link, Safari shows you what it would do if you clicked that link in the status bar. Very convenient.

Re:Hooray!

[sergeantmudd]

You don't need even the debug menu unless you wanna turn tabs on and off on the fly. (Which you might because clicking on a link opens a new tab, not a new window, which some might now like in all cases) In terminal just type

"defaults write com.apple.safari TabbedBrowsing 1"

Argument for tabs

[elliotj]

According to an off-the-cuff test I performed a few days ago, tabbed browsing can cut your RAM requirements in half and greatly speed up your system.

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:

Navigator %CPU 9.00 %Memory 11.20

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:

Navigator %CPU 9.20 %Memory 22.40

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 ... again Chimera limits you to 16 tabs per window), and my performance was great.

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.

Re:Argument for tabs

[moof1138]

No. This is not guesswork. A window is inherently a much more heavyweight entity than a view inside a window, and will necessarily consume more RAM. Take a look at the cocoa docs for all the components of a NSWindow. Assuming that the tabs are subclassed NSView, take a look at what is involved there. Beyond that, windows are double buffered, have border transparencies/shadows and other RAM-hogging aspects not associated with a view. In OS X, more windows inherently means more RAM. If a window with three tabs ate as much RAM as three separate windows in Safari, that would indicate extremely crappy coding, and I guarantee you I would not use the browser based on that fact.

to activate the Safari debug menu, do this:

[ubiquitin]

1. Quit Safari.
2. Open a terminal and type:
defaults write com.apple.Safari IncludeDebugMenu 1
3. Relaunch Safari.

Re:Not to nitpick but...

[tamen]

No, notyet. But as you say yourself, this is a beta, and not even a public (though it might seem like it) beta at that.
Im sure there will be bookmark-groups when it is publicly released.

Re:Everyone?

[ollie_ob]

To prevent massive Slashdotting I'm not going to link directly to the beta from here, but if you go to Dave Hyatt's weblog and have a look at the comments for the most recent story, there's apparently a working link there. Ollie

Re:Everyone?

[transient]

He speaks the truth. I just downloaded it from there.

Re:Oh?

[troc]

They are using a leaked "internal" build of Safari, not the public beta you can download from Apple.

HTH

Troc

Re:This is Great News

[entrox]

Care to back up your claims with a few facts/numbers instead of pulling things out of your back?
Here are some numbers from my machine (768MB RAM/128MB VRAM):

New Safari opened: ~9MB.
Slashdot loaded: ~13MB.
New window opened: ~16MB.
Apple page opened: ~18MB.
New window opened: ~21MB.

So what do we see? A new window takes up around 3MB. Is this "uneconomical", like you say? No, I rarely have more than 4-5 windows open so this is merely a drop in the water. Memory is cheap these days you know...

Re:Oh?

[prinzip]

Just to point out:

- Mozilla run on windows, many people use it and it have tabs

and more important:

Apple didn't create tabs idea, it came from Mozilla, then from Linux And Windoz...

Safari 4 All

[Anonymous Coward]

Get your Safari Beta (with tabs!) HERE:

http://www.domestikalien.com/imagenes/safari_v62 .d mg

Re:What about Keychain integration?

[brarrr]

i started using safari v62 w/ tabs on saturday... and it has keychain integration in its infancy - it asks for permission to decrypt the correct passwords when entering sites, but does not place them in the fields as required. so its coming, but slowly.

v62 is the first i've started using safari, and am liking it about the same as chimera for now. once there are prefs to open tabs in teh background, and a way to open up multiple sites in different tabs at the same time, i'll switch for good.

another benefit of the debug menu is being able to specify which browser you are represented as - so going to wellsfargo.com i can say i am MSIE and they let me use the site.

but there _is_ an easy way

[-ndi-]

You only really need to have tabs when there isn't an easy way to switch between windows.

Don't get me wrong, I am all for tabs, but there is an even easier way to switch between all windows of the current application in OSX, Cmd-` cycles through them. This may be common knowledge, I just thought I'd point it out for completeness...

Mirrors, md5sums, and some notes...

[phyxeld]

It's for real. I'm writing this in it now. I'm a bit paranoid, so I scoured around for multiple coppies before running anything. I've gotten it from all three of these urls:

http://www.domestikalien.com/imagenes/safari_v62.d mg
http://www.jfedor.org/misc2/safari_v62.dmg
http://www.soopah256.com/~jonathan/safari_v62.dmg

and they all had the same md5sum (eca1fe732e242786744edf5e434b2330). The disk image file itself has an apple liscense, so I think this really is an official apple beta.

Tabs are off by default, but can be enabled in the Debug menu. Once enabled, cmd-T makes a new tab, as does cmd-clicking on a link. I'm a big fan of chimera's cmd-[ and cmd-] for moving between tabs; mozilla's lack of support for those shortcuts has always bugged me. Safari v62 doesn't use those keys, but it does let you move between tabs with cmd-left or cmd-right (arrow keys). Yay safari! I wonder when we'll see the real release of this beta...