� Staring into the Abyss | Main | Stick Close to Your Desks �
January 21, 2003
Tabs
I went to read the slashdot thread that Patrick mentioned. I disagree with Patrick's point in any case; the key 'stop waiting for pages to load' feature is 'open new page in background' (a none-too-intuitive Cmd-shift-click in Safari), not tabbed browsing.
Although there was certainly a lot of noise in the thread, something slowly became clear to me. I suspect that I like tabs because I'm not hardwired to use either the Window or Dock menus. It's not Safari, it's me, still scrabbling around at the bottom of the Mac learning curve. And when they say that developing tabs would take energy away from the important stuff, they're probably right. Not to mention that Safari is intended to be a majority browser; which should leave plenty of room for niche products like an improved Chimera. But I'll be over here, teaching myself to choose a window from a menu rather than cycling through dozens.
I did like the "Welcome Safari User" logo on the Apple homepage. It made me think they care.
Update: Patrick e-mailed, to tell me that I can open pages in background, and do other things, and that there's a list of Safari shortcuts buried deep in the package at file:///Applications/Safari.app/Contents/Resources/English.lproj/Shortcuts.html. Turns out they're also in the Help; I'm already sufficiently habituated to Macs that I automatically assume:
- I can work everything I need to know out without checking Help (a good feature);
- Mac help never contains anything remotely useful to anyone beyond newbie stage (a bad feature).
Posted by Alison Scott at January 21, 2003 10:38 PM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.kittywompus.com/cgi-sys/cgiwrap/illyria/mt/mt-tb.cgi/26
Listed below are links to weblogs that reference Tabs:
� On Safari from Ask Dr Plokta
OK, I've got Safari to remember my LiveJournal login between sessions. It seems that it needs third-party cookies to be enabled -- I disabled them as is my habit in order to stop advertising sites from tracking me. And Alison posted a handy hint on ope... [Read More]
Tracked on January 23, 2003 09:34 PM
Comments
There's some problem with your link to the /. article... gots an extra http://, I think.
I used tabs in Chimera for a while, but for a long time there was some problem in the Tool Tip thingy that fired whenever I pointed at a tab and paused, and this would crash the browser. This seems to be fixed, but I almost never use Chimera anymore, and even without the crashes I was beginning to think that tabs weren't so hot.
So, I'm sold on Safari so far. Especially now that I have a status bar :-)
Posted by: Damien Warman at January 22, 2003 05:53 AM
I think I'm ready to switch to Safari as my primary browser, if only I can work out how to make it remember my LiveJournal login between sessions.
Posted by: Mike Scott at January 22, 2003 07:15 AM
You might want to look at DragThing, recommended by Simon Bisson on Ask Dr Plokta. Included in its functionality is a tabbed Dock, one tab of which can be e.g URLs. I'd expect this to be much more usable than an overfull Dock which stretches offscreen as you open more webpages.
It might have problems with using multiple browser programs (if you're not wholly switched to Safari, that is).
Posted by: Steven Cain at January 22, 2003 01:02 PM