Its now day two of using Safari 4 and I must confess that it is a welcome improvement over Safari 3x. Issues have been resolved and features that required third party hacks have now have been integrated natively within the app itself. It's also good to see third party devs such as Haoli, MHO and Agile respond so swiftly in updating their code to work with the beta.
However, there is one thing that I'm still uncertain of and that is those darn tabs. I kind of understand why Apple has done what its done, but to me it just feels plain wrong and goes against what we have been taught by Apple human interface guidelines. For example, in Safari 3 I could have several tabs open and could quite easily see my tabs because they were in my 'focus area', but now, visually they are out of my focus area and require me to move my eyes away from where they should be. I know it sounds bizarre about areas of focus etc., but this is what good UI design is all about
: making software easier to use and not because it might be more practical, so this turnabout in UI design is more about style over substance in my humble opinion. Another small gripe is that when an unfocused tab is next to the window controls it suddenly gives the familiar appearance of Tiger and its non-unified toolbar:
See what I mean? That's one thing I love about Leopard's GUI and that is the unified toolbar. I'm not sure what Apple was thinking here.
I also miss the 'stop/reload' button in the toolbar. Placing it in the address bar and having a couple of mouse-over states to change it from reload-to-stop-to-progress indicator is somewhat misleading and not very practical. Fortunately this can be rectified by accessing
Safari's hidden preferences. It's also too close to the RSS icon when it's present and might cause some aggravation to users who might inadvertently click away from it. An idea might be to make the stop/reload button in the same vain as the 'add bookmark' button but placing it at the other end of the address bar?
I'm sure there are plenty of users out there who will disagree with me and want to champion the new tabs, that's great! you're welcome to your opinion
Maybe one day I'll come around to the new way of doing tabs Apple's way, but for now I'll remain in the retro tabs camp.
Overall I'm still impressed with the beta.
What are your thoughts?