– Ponderings & code by Drew McLellan –
– Live from The Internets since 2003 –
AboutTabbed browsing is a much-loved and common feature in modern browsers. I don’t know if you’ve seen Safari’s implementation, but the tabs are particularly attractive because they hang down from the chrome rather than sticking up from the page. Kinda like a bat. Neato.
But wait … these are document tabs aren’t they? Hasn’t Apple completely blown the visual metaphor clean out of the water here? All other OS X tabs that I’ve seen stick up from the document or panel. What’s the deal?
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Drew McLellan has been hacking on the web since around 1996 following an unfortunate incident with a margarine tub. Since then he’s spread himself between both front- and back-end development projects, and now is Director and Senior Web Developer at edgeofmyseat.com in Maidenhead, UK (GEO: 51.5217, -0.7177). Prior to this, Drew was a Web Developer for Yahoo!, and before that primarily worked as a technical lead within design and branding agencies for clients such as Nissan, Goodyear Dunlop, Siemens/Bosch, Cadburys, ICI Dulux and Virgin.net. Somewhere along the way, Drew managed to get himself embroiled with Dreamweaver and was made an early Macromedia Evangelist for that product. This lead to book deals, public appearances, fame, glory, and his eventual downfall.
Picking himself up again, Drew is now a strong advocate for best practises, and stood as Group Lead for The Web Standards Project 2006-08. He has had articles published by A List Apart, Adobe, and O’Reilly Media’s XML.com, mostly due to mistaken identity. Drew is a proponent of the lower-case semantic web, and is currently expending energies in the direction of the microformats movement, with particular interests in making parsers an off-the-shelf commodity and developing simple UI conventions. He writes here at all in the head and, with a little help from his friends, at 24 ways.
Comments
I am anxious to see what Safari 1.1 brings to the table in regards to function. Yes Moz beats Safari for tab function and speed I don’t see Moz touching the bookmarks. I hear with Panther and Safari 1.1, Safari beats Moz for rendering. I just got use to Firebird too...
It would be nice if all your browsers could share the same bookmark file though, without monkeying.
Tabs in Camino always felt a little odd to me, metaphor-wise, because the address field was outside the flipped area.
Safari’s tabs get a little bit visually confusing when there are only two. I have to stare for a split-second to decide whether the lighter or darker one is currently active.
Anyway, don’t tabs in Panther abandon the file folder metaphor and simply become a cluster of candy-coated buttons embedded in the top of a field set?
Yes they do. Sort of an interesting look and feel to them, but only tabs in how they function.
The more I think about Safari 1.1 the more it burns that Apple refuses to update software like Safari for older OS’s. Their software update regime needs to be rethought before they start irritating their old gaurd of users.
Maybe Apple will release Safari 1.1 for OS 10.2.x, to keep it’s rendering quality consistent across OS versions. I’m guessing that at some point, the newest WebKit will require some system resources that weren’t present in Jaguar.
And I just figured out how to use different versions of MSIE/Win in Virtual PC.
I’m making the switch pretty soon from p.c to mac, and i’m looking for smthg other than safari. has anyone used camino?? is it as good as mozzilla. do you think i should use moz or camino?
thank you
Paul.