Safari Beta 2
After weeks of pirated developer builds circulating the net - of which I unabashedly admit to have partaken in - Apple has finally released Public Beta 2 of Safari for OS X. The browser is a massive update from the first public beta, with the addition of tabbed browsing, auto-fill forms (something I have long missed from Internet Explorer), and a host of WebCore engine bug fixes.
Tabs...well, you either love them or hate them. I personally love tabs, and couldn't imagine using a web browser that didn't offer the functionality. If you need to have multiple documents open in a web browser at the same time, containing each within a single window is far cleaner and with less screen clutter than the other option, which is to pile one full window (toolbar and all) on top of each other.
Plus, you can also do this handy shortcut - put a bunch of related bookmarks into a folder, and place the folder in your toolbar. Make sure Tabbed Browsing is turned on in the Preferences. Then, hold down the command key, and click on the folder in the toolbar. Presto! Every bookmark inside the folder is loaded into its own tab. I use this shortcut for general news, Mac sites, and any web project I'm currently developing. You can obviously click a folder, open it, and select "Open in Tabs" from the bottom, but the command-click option is much faster.
Comments
Now that tabs are here I have to say goodbye to Camino as my main browser. Safari just feels much faster. I love Apple, but this is almost scary with all the Apple apps that I use now. It's becoming very Microsoftesque.
Although I'd had to squash the brushed metal with Safari Aquafier.
Now I want to see the favicons in the bookmarks bar - or at least an option to hide or display them. It helps me visually locate sites faster.
Posted by: Jeff Hartman at April 14, 2003 1:10 PM
Safari has been my main web browser since its original release with only occassionaly jumps to Chimera/Camino for certain sites that still did not like being rendered correctly. Explorer still resides in my dock, gathering dust, and only seing the light of day when there is some testing to be done for a site design.
The one thing I miss about Chimera/Camino is the ability to undo in form fields. I use pMachine for my weblog, and there have been so many instances when this could have saved an entry from turning out badly. My writing skills fluctuate too wildly from moment to moment.
The one thing I miss about IE is the color and structural formatting when viewing a page’s code (XML and HTML). A very handy feature.
Posted by: Paul Burdick at April 14, 2003 7:01 PM
Ok, so I'm a PC fan. But I regularly check this site for entertaining blogging and neato links. I must say I've unfortunately been oppressed by the IE standard (though I do actually enjoy many things about IE). Now, I am having the craving for tabs. That's such a cool idea. I don't really want to switch browsers, but I do wish that MS would put such a thing into IE. That would be nice, especially if they didn't screw with such a simple idea (like we all know they would).
Posted by: nate at April 15, 2003 12:46 AM
I have also said goodbye to Chimera/Camino with this Safari release. It just seems faster, and Safari now has tabs and renders the CSS border "dots" properly (yes!)
Posted by: Rickey at April 15, 2003 10:18 AM
Nate:
Download the latest Mozilla for the PC. I use it on my PC and use the middle mouse button to open links in new tabs. It's wonderful. I've got a 2Ghz PC and Mozilla is faster (to load the app, load pages, and render them) than IE is.
(I am a Mac guy, I just use the PC to do cross-platform testing. Okay, and to play games.)
Posted by: Scott M. at April 15, 2003 11:57 AM
