This week Apple pumped out Safari 4 beta. After a long search and evaluation period, Safari became my main browser a while ago. I like the simple, clean UI; I don’t need most plugins for browsing; and Firefox suffices for my web dev needs.
But while Google Chrome moved tabs up to a spot on the window just under the title bar, Safari puts the tabs in the title bar. Weird? Yes, definitely. Good? I’m not yet sold.
If you step back and look at the window, it kinda makes sense. Outside of those window controls on the left side (right side for Windows) of the whole thing. There are tradeoffs though; a lot of the little conveniences in working with tabs have been taken away just because this new title bar/tab hybrid has to do two things at once. So double-clicking the middle of a tab minimizes the whole window (like a title bar) and dragging a tab around drags the whole window (like a title bar). But grabbing the little upside-down resize handle (gah) lets you manipulate the tab (like a strange version of tabs).
I had initially turned off the new tabs on top because the old implementation was really solid, and was something I was used to. But I decided to turn them back on and try to live with them. My gut feeling is that putting things in the title bar is a weird practice… for now.
Posted in Technology