Free Republic
Browse · Search
General/Chat
Topics · Post Article

Skip to comments.

Safari 4 Public Beta is a UI disaster
Mac Daily News ^ | 02/28/2009

Posted on 02/28/2009 3:41:57 PM PST by Swordmaker

Apple’s Safari 4 Public Beta is a UI disaster
Saturday, February 28, 2009 - 03:28 PM EST

"A few days ago, Apple surprised everyone by releasing the first beta of Safari 4, the company's latest version of their WebKit browser. While I generally love Safari on the Mac (my browser of choice on that side of the fence), I've never felt as comfortable with it on the Windows side of things. In any case, this latest beta has made a very bold move in the interface department, and I'm sad to say that it's not for the better," Thom Holwerda writes for OS News.

"This is where it goes wrong for Safari 4. There, the tabs are the titlebar, leading to a rather schizophrenic UI widget: it has to act as a titlebar and a tab bar, and consequently, does neither of the two very well. Since you have to be able to drag the window via this new tabtitlebar widget, Apple had to create a special and small handle for moving tabs, while making the tabs themselves the place to drag the window. This design decision is something I expect from a 6 year old who writes his first tabbed text editor - not from a company that prides itself on UI design," Holwerda writes.

"That's not all, though. Because Apple wanted the tabs to make up the titlebar, they had to ditch this well-established concept of spatial memory, making tabs change size continiously, since even if you have one tab, it needs to be wide enough to cover the entire titlebar. This makes the resize handle and tab title move around like crazy," Holwerda writes.

"To me, it seems like Apple had heard that 'Chrome has tabs on top,' but instead of just being honest and admitting that Google got it right, they set a goal for themselves to make as many arbitrary and useless changes as possible so they could still claim they were innovating. All these changes resulted in this botched and confusing tabtitlebar abomination that not only looks horribly out of place on both Mac OS X and Windows, but is also a functional disaster," Holwerda writes. "I hope Apple's Safari engineers recover from this monumental design frak-up quickly, because if this stays the way it is, I won't be using Safari on my Mac anymore."

Full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: It's highly likely that we use the Safari web browser more than, or at least as much as, any living person. 16, 18, and even more hours per day. When the very first thing we did after the first day with Safari 4 Public Beta was to fire up the Terminal to nuke the poorly-thought-out tabs, restoring them back under the Bookmarks Bar where they belong, and re-enable the blue loading bar behind the URL, then there's a problem.

Hopefully, Apple is listening: Rethink and rework the current default Tabs in Safari 4 Public Beta before the final release. They suck enough to have come out of Microsoft.

Holwerda doesn't need to junk Safari 4, he just needs to do this:

$ defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugSafari4TabBarIsOnTop -bool NO
$ defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugSafari4IncludeToolbarRedesign -bool NO
$ defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugSafari4LoadProgressStyle -bool NO

So that Safari 4 Public Beta looks and works like this:


For more info on changing and restoring Safari 4 Public Beta features, see "Safari 4 Hidden Preferences," here.


TOPICS: Computers/Internet
KEYWORDS: ilovebillgates; iwanthim; iwanthimbad; microsoftfanboys
Navigation: use the links below to view more comments.
first previous 1-2021-4041-45 last
To: Swordmaker
...They suck enough to have come out of Microsoft...

What, Apple can't make a screw up on their own ?
What a crappy UI - has Jobs written all over it. There's probably an Easter egg in there somewhere with his name on it.
41 posted on 03/01/2009 1:03:44 AM PST by ComputerGuy (not my real name)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Swordmaker

I like Google’s implementation of the top tabs a lot better. With Apple’s implementation, there is no area to click on at the top of the window that is not a tab. So if you try to raise a browser window you might accidentally raise to the top another tab that wasn’t the one you intended to look at.


42 posted on 03/01/2009 10:38:13 AM PST by mhx
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: mhx
I like Google’s implementation of the top tabs a lot better. With Apple’s implementation, there is no area to click on at the top of the window that is not a tab. So if you try to raise a browser window you might accidentally raise to the top another tab that wasn’t the one you intended to look at.

Well, in Apple's defense, the entire tab area is still available to move a window IF you click and hold... which allows you to move the window without bringing the tab under your pointer into focus. Still there is the possibility for accidentally doing so if your finger bounces... instead of holding.

43 posted on 03/01/2009 1:59:17 PM PST by Swordmaker (Remember, the proper pronunciation of IE is "AAAAIIIIIEEEEEEE!)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 42 | View Replies]

To: Swordmaker

Compared to my other browsers Safari 4 is by far the fastest.


44 posted on 03/01/2009 4:26:44 PM PST by Uncle Hal
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Swordmaker

The issue I had is that I might want to raise a window to the front without moving it. Apparently having click-through on the tabs might be a bug though, so I might wait to see if they fix it in a later beta.


45 posted on 03/02/2009 3:08:13 PM PST by mhx
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 43 | View Replies]


Navigation: use the links below to view more comments.
first previous 1-2021-4041-45 last

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.

Free Republic
Browse · Search
General/Chat
Topics · Post Article

FreeRepublic, LLC, PO BOX 9771, FRESNO, CA 93794
FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John Robinson