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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.

2 of 275 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Oh? by drsmithy · · Score: 0, Troll
    Am I missing something?

    Yes, the ~1 second delay (which is present on every Mac I've used up to a dual 1Ghz G4, so it must be hardwired, like the slow scrolling) before the menu actually becomes accessible. Plus a few other things:
    * Having to hit a tiny, moving icon as opposed to a fairly wide tab
    * Then having to actually read what each menu item is to figure out which one you want, because the names are the only thing that differentiates them.

  2. Re:Oh? by drsmithy · · Score: 0, Troll
    On my 500 MHz G3, the delay is barely noticeable unless I am really stressing the system.

    I can see how someone might not consider it "noticable" if they are used to the general unresponsiveness of OS X's GUI. However, I just walked around here and tried it on a half dozen different machine (Beige G3/233, iMac DV/500, PowerBook 667 Rev B, G4/500, Dual 1GHz Xserve, 700MHz iBook) and they _all_ had a delay of about a second before displaying the menu (delay seems to increase with the number of items that appear in the menu). None of these machines were under any appreciable CPU load, either, and they've all got at least 512MB of RAM. I've *never* seen a Mac that didn't have the delay (and I've used a lot) and it is damn annoying if you're used to a responsive GUI like Windows (or even OS 9).

    Turn off magnification and pin the Dock.

    It's still a tiny icon. Either that or the Dock is wasting valuable screen space. It'd be hard to make the icon on the Dock anwhere near as big as the average tab without wasting heaps of screen space on the Dock.

    This has never bothered me, but perhaps it's just a personal thing.

    You're probably just not someone who would really benefit from tabs - ie don't regularly have lots of web pages open and wants to switch between them often. For the same reason, you probably aren't suffering as much from the delay in the right-click Dock menu.