Safari 4 (Beta) vs. Google Chrome

My iMac G5 was recently put out to pasture and I spent two months on a loaner PC laptop (my first Vista experience) while I got the funds together to upgrade to a new iMac. Just this week I started working with a new iMac 24-inch (soooo much monitor!) and I find that the only thing I miss from Vista is Google's Chome browser. I've tried out Safari 4 Beta and while I find that while there are quite a few nice changes from Safari 3, there are also a few things that don't feel quite polished.

The Tabs, The Tabs...

I welcome the new approach of having the Tabs above the address bar. Having the tabs below the address bar always felt like the visual metaphor of tabbed browsing was a little bit broken. The old hierarchy went: URL > Tab > Web Page whereas it really should be: Tab > URL > Web Page, like it does now. But I have a few gripes:

1. The left-most tab isn't consistent.

It's proximity to the small circular Red/Yellow/Green (Close/Minimize/Expand) buttons that are present at the top-left of every window in OSX make it look like those buttons are part of the left-most tab, when they're actually part of the browser chrome.
If they just used their left-border style (that they use on all the other tabs) on that left-most tab, I think it would solve the problem. Like this:
Incidentally, Google deciding to call their browser "Chrome" (uppercase "C") has made the logistics of discussing browser UI "chrome" (lowercase "c") kind of annoying.

2. Re-ordering the tabs is finicky.

In Chrome, as in Firefox, to change the order of the tabs that you have open you simply click anywhere on a tab and drag it to whatever position you want within the tab bar or break it out into a new window completely. This works regardless of whether the tab you clicked on is the active tab or not. If you want to move the entire browser window around, you click on the part of the browser UI chrome (lowercase "c") that's not part of a tab and then drag it somewhere. Nice and straight-forward. Safari 4 got rid of as much excess browser UI chrome (lowercase "c") as possible, especially above the tab bar. You'll notice in the screenshot of Chrome below that there's a 15 pixel tall blue bar above each tab. (This is where you click if you want to drag the entire window around.) But Safari 4 got rid of that entirely. To move the browser window around, you click on a tab and drag it, exactly like the way you're used to re-ordering the tabs. They've added a little triangle corner thingie (that's a technical UI term!) to the right hand side of each tab. If you want to re-order the tabs you have to click on the triangle corner thingie and then drag the tab where you want it. This only works on the active tab, not on the other tabs you have open. If you miss the 12px X 12px hit zone of the corner triangle thingie then you wind up dragging the whole window around instead of re-ordering the tabs. I would rather have the extra 15 pixels of browser chrome (lowercase "c") height than this behavior.

3. The lack of favicons in the tabs make it harder to tell at a glance which websites you have open.

Chrome followed Firefox's lead in this and added the favicons to each tab. Because Safari 4 has the little triangle corner thingie in the right side of each tab, they've decided to move the "X" button (that allows you to close an individual tab) to the left side of each tab, leaving no room for a favicon in the actual tab. Instead they've decided to keep the favicons in the traditional place beside the URL. The big advantage of having a favicon as part of each tab is that it give you an additional visual clue of which sites you have open in which tabs. Not having the favicons there makes it just a bit harder to jump immediately to the tab you want, especially when a client phones and you were just looking at their site five minutes ago but now you can't find it among the 15 tabs that you have open.

4. The way the tabs resize automatically when you open/close additional tabs creeps me out a bit.

Chrome (as well as FFox & IE) has a maximum width of each new tab. When you open more tabs than can fit in the tab bar, the tabs all scale down in width. But in Safari 4 there is no maximum tab width. When you open a new window, the single tab stretches across the entire width of the tab bar. This makes it just a bit harder to do something like, say... you're working in another application. You need to find something from a tab that you know you've got open in Safari. You know it's in the 3rd tab. You switch back to Safari 4 and look for that 3rd tab. In Chrome, you've got a much better chance of knowing exactly where that 3rd tab is going to be. In Safari 4, you've got to re-assess the tab bar to try and figure out where that 3rd tab is.

5. Cmd-clicking on a link in Safari 4 opens that link in a new tab at the far right end of the row of tabs.

This is the standard behavior that you'll find in Firefox 3, IE7, etc. But Chrome changed this standard... they realized that if you open up a link in a new tab, chances are that you'll want to switch to that tab relatively soon. So they made those new tabs open up just to the right of your current tab; the other open tabs get pushed to the right. When I started using Chrome I found this annoying because my newly opened tabs weren't where I expected them to be but I soon got used to it and realized that it makes much more sense. Granted, this is less of a problem if your browser window is set fairly narrow, but on my new 24-inch monitor, I like to set it fairly wide. And for navigating between tabs using keyboard shortcuts, Chrome's approach makes it much easier. You open a link in a new tab, then hit Ctrl+Tab to switch over to that next tab. In Safari, I usually have 10+ tabs open... when your link opens up in a new tab, you have to hit Ctrl+Tab multiple times to get to that new tab.

6. The Search Box, Or Lack Thereof

I'm a big fan of efficiency and thus, a big fan of keyboard shortcuts. I'm also a big fan of browsers with built-in search boxes. In Safari 4 (and Firefox), the quickest way I've found to start a new search is: - Cmd T (new tab, and if you have new tabs set to open to a blank page rather than some sort of home page, the focus is already on the address bar) - Tab (jump over to built-in search box) - type in search term - Enter (to start search) (Windows users, replace Cmd with Ctrl) 4 steps - not bad. I search for so many terms in the course of a day that I had this keyboard sequence memorized and burned into my muscle memory long ago... until Chrome came along. Chrome did away with the search box completely and instead allows you to search directly from the address bar, effectively removing one of the 4 steps. I'm surprised at how much I miss this feature now that I'm back on Safari! ----------- Anyway, kind of a rambling post and possibly not very interesting to any but the UI nerds in the crowd. I hope that by the time Safari 4 is out of Beta that Apple will have fixed these minor annoyances and it can once again regain its position in my heart as Best. Browser. Ever.