Safari 4.0 changes, for better or worse?

[LERsince1991]

Not one problem here
<- Pretty impressed with the 11 million downloads in 3 days!

 

[uaaerospace]

As a tech support person for a university, I'm annoyed that our Blackboard course management system worked flawlessly with the beta, but doesn't work at all with the final release. How could so much have changed from the beta to final? Blackboard is working on an update, but still annoying.

 

[Skweeky]

Hmmm....

I've been using Safari 4 for a few days now, and overall, I quite like it, in fact I'm using more than I use firefox now. But there is one annoying thing...

I like to listen to Radio five live via the BBC iplayer in Safari, but I've noticed that it will only play back whilst that Tab has the focus, when I either switch focus to another tab or minimise Safari, the feed stops. Most annoying.

 

[iMacmatician]

i don't mind tabs on the bottom, but if they're on top, make sure you can close a good amount of tabs without having to move the mouse. since the tabs automatically resized themselves to take up the whole bar. if you wanted to close more than 1 tab that didn't include the first tab, you'd have to move your mouse every time, which got annoying. otherwise, stop bitching about like 15 pixels worth of vertical space..

Command + W.

I don't care that much, about tabs on top, or where they are now, if they could finally get the usability right.

This behaviour is just insane for heavy tab usage:

One reason why I like tabs on top…this problem isn't there.

 

[ihabime]

Command + W.

One reason why I like tabs on top…this problem isn't there.

Sure it is.

 

[kellen]

I use

COMMAND+{
COMMAND+}

to switch between tabs. Location does NOT matter.

Try control tab.

 

[mirffy]

Try control tab.

Indeed, switching between tabs via keyboard commands is not an issue. But this is no different from Safari 3. The VISUAL usability, overview, or whatever you want to call it of the hidden tabs is just terrible, in my opinion.

 

[Jugglinguy]

I really dislike the tabs being on the bottom. The top is just a waste of space now (not much, but still!). Does anyone know of a terminal command to get the tabs up top again? I know there was a terminal command in beta to get the tabs at the bottom again, so the reverse shouldn't be too much to ask for, right?

 

[suMMx]

has anyone mentioned how safari doesn't remember what tab you were in when you open a new link or something? say for example i click a jpeg link from a website and then close that newly created tab, it doesn't resort to the site that gave you that link, rather the last tab listed. I find this really annoying and wish they would solve it like firefox

 

[suMMx]

Is it me or is this maybe one scroll on your mouse extra or so?

it may seem stupid but honestly on a 15.4" screen with only 900px of vertical space, it's a very noticeable difference

 

[MacManiac76]

has anyone mentioned how safari doesn't remember what tab you were in when you open a new link or something? say for example i click a jpeg link from a website and then close that newly created tab, it doesn't resort to the site that gave you that link, rather the last tab listed. I find this really annoying and wish they would solve it like firefox

I noticed this on the first day of using the beta. I submitted it as a bug, but it apparently didn't get fixed. Glims has an option in its preferences that fixes it so I never noticed whether Apple fixed it or not. Apparently they did not.

 

[MacManiac76]

for the LIFE of me I cannot get the old progress bar back?

Maybe in Safari 5, but I doubt it. The new "loading" pseudo progress indicator is crap. It visually tells you nothing about progression of the page. The page is "loading"...well no SH*T! Like I really needed a useless icon to tell me that. What I wish they would do, copied or not, is to add a progress bar integrated into each tab, like some themes in Firefox have. Is a nice feature to have when background tabs are loading, or refreshing.

 

[jon08]

Can sb tell me how to remove the Bookmarks icon on the very left of the bookmarks bar???

 

[LERsince1991]

You can have a status bar at the bottom of the window which tells you e.g. 65/123 items loaded.

 

[timsutcliffe]

One good thing

Something which has improved for me is the use of multi-touch zoom. In the beta if I zoomed in or out accidentally, which happened from time to time, I could never get it back to how it was using the trackpad, I had to use Cmd + +/-. This has now been sorted.

In case anyone cares, I preferred the tabs on top, and would like the blue progress bar back. And it's crashed once as well. Apart from that i'm happy.

 

[LERsince1991]

Ok my safari 4 has started to crash now. 4 times in total.

Thanks for the comment about zooming; didn't know about that!

Edit: I think it's because I'm downloading Windows 7 via safari and some java based download manager that microsoft provide

 

[dukebound85]

give me my tabs on top back. it was the only reason i was using safari.

my tabs arent at the bottom of the window with 4? or am i confused?

 

[tringo]

My biggest beef is Gmail not displaying number of unread e-mails in the tab header. This is a major feature I got used to in FF.

 

[numlock]

My biggest beef is Gmail not displaying number of unread e-mails in the tab header. This is a major feature I got used to in FF.

you can activate that in the labs section in your gmail settings

 

[G-Force]

it may seem stupid but honestly on a 15.4" screen with only 900px of vertical space, it's a very noticeable difference

That must be very personal I guess, because I don't notice the difference at all during my normal surfing. And I'm on a 13 inch 1280x800 screen.

I mean, it displays maybe 100 pixels more of a webpage, if I make the window the same size. That's about one extra scroll. Call me stupid or whatever, but I don't notice that...

 

[tringo]

you can activate that in the labs section in your gmail settings

Thank you so much!

 

[hollerz]

Maybe in Safari 5, but I doubt it. The new "loading" pseudo progress indicator is crap. It visually tells you nothing about progression of the page. The page is "loading"...well no SH*T! Like I really needed a useless icon to tell me that. What I wish they would do, copied or not, is to add a progress bar integrated into each tab, like some themes in Firefox have. Is a nice feature to have when background tabs are loading, or refreshing.

Are you still on dial up? I can't see why anyone on high speed connection is bothered about this. It only takes a couple of seconds to load a page. And you get an indicator that you can see clearly out the corner of your eye.. Blue = Connecting, White = Loading. I find it a lot better! I don't even have to look up from the middle of the screen!

 

[big_malk]

Are you still on dial up? I can't see why anyone on high speed connection is bothered about this. It only takes a couple of seconds to load a page. And you get an indicator that you can see clearly out the corner of your eye.. Blue = Connecting, White = Loading. I find it a lot better! I don't even have to look up from the middle of the screen!

Sometimes things still go slow and it's just good to have a bit more feedback. Personally I've never even considered moving my eyes to be remotely troublesome and an effort to be avoided

 

[JeffreyLloyd]

It's crashing for me a lot too - even making my whole machine freeze up.
Sean

Yeah, it keeps crashing for me too. I can't keep it open because it freezes the computer and my iTunes! grrr

 

[adamfishercox]

Tabs on top only sucked because there needs to be a small area for window dragging. Chrome got this right. I wouldn't mind them back there if Apple would also realize this.