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: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...

Safari 4 All

[Anonymous Coward]

Get your Safari Beta (with tabs!) HERE:

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

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...