4 weeks with Safari 4 Beta

Four weeks have passed since Apple released Safari 4 Beta, and I have been using it since. There are things I like about this new browser, and even after this short time I think I couldn’t live without some of the features. On the other hand, a few things are irritating and could be fixed. I’ve been using the previous version of Safari, so the transition was not painful. But even for Apple, who is very picky about user interfaces, Safari 4 is revolutionary.

The bad stuff

Let’s start with the cons. Yes, I like the new toolbar and tabs, but they are often irritation to use too. First, it wouldn’t hurt if they swapped the tiny reload/stop button with the huge plus for adding a bookmark. I use command+D anyway, I’d rather have a big stop.

Regarding the tabs, I don’t care about the tiny New Tab button, as similarly, I use command+T. But I do hate that the tabs actually move the whole browser window. I constantly keep on moving my Safari around a bit, while switching the tabs, and frankly, it’s highly irritating. Also, why rearranging a tab makes it active?!

I had given the new tabs a longer thought, and I’m not sure how the problem should be solved. One way would be to shift the tabs bar down, like in Chrome. But that would throw the additional space to the garbage. Another option I think might work, would be to move the window only by clicking on the active tab, while inactive tabs could be rearranged and activated without influencing the window position.

Final thought about exceeding the number of tabs visible in the tabs bar. In the previous version, there was a tiny arrow button, displaying a dropdown with additional tabs. Now, there’s a triple-dot icon next to the New Tab button, doing just the same. I’m not sure why Apple doesn’t want to implement it’s genius two-finger horizontal scrolling here (like Firefox tab scrolling). It would fit perfectly.

The good stuff

The best feature of the new browser is definitely the Top Sites. It’s how the bookmarks should be long time ago. Recognizing a site by its thumbnail is way faster than reading the text link, and the ability to pin the important ones and leave the rest for automatic suggestion makes it the best rapid-browsing gateway there is. I’m still using the Bookmarks Bar, but less often. I virtually stopped using the actual Show all bookmarks button. I didn’t use it much before either.

The next best feature is History Search. Not only it’s fast as hell, but the visualization, just like I said before, makes it perfect for content recognition. Before, I had to actually remember where I was browsing to come back to a specific thing, because lots of websites are so smart to entitle different pages with the same name. Now, it’s just a matter of typing a keyword.

Another really useful tool is the Quick Search with suggestions. I got this functionality with Inquisitor before, but now it’s even better — real-time suggestions directly from Google, recent searches, and integrated current document search. I don’t need anything more.

The whole Develop menu is awesome. I don’t know why anybody wants to download Firefox, and stuff it with all these plugins, when you have Safari with all the necessary tools integrated straight away. The new web inspector rocks. Several small glitches were fixed, and the new split-screen view with element highlighting is great for debugging. I really like the website profiling tool, and the JS debugger looks very promising.

Finally, as I said, I like what they did with the top user interface, both the browsing toolbar and the tabs in the window titlebar. It was a controversial move, especially the tabs, but it gives substantially more browsing space. And I’m always in need of that.

Conclusions

I really am happy with the past 4 weeks of the new Safari browser. I don’t even remember if it crashed, everything works smoothly and quickly. I consider it the browser of my choice. While I have Firefox and Opera installed, as well as running Chrome and IE through VirtualBox, I really can’t understand why anybody would like to use anything else than Safari, on a Mac. Don’t get me wrong, but I really think that quality of use should be put before the quantity of features. Thus, plugin-packed Firefox doesn’t make me drool, and feature-packed Opera feels too non-native and clumsy.

While on a Mac, I think and work a bit in the way Apple design it, because then the quality is at its best. Why don’t you try it to, maybe you’ll like it? Be sure to follow me on Twitter, to be up to date with the upcoming workspace improvements for Leopard and Mac I’m planning to describe.