// Domus Neminis }

Safari 4 and the tabs on top

Well, in one word: failed! Sorry, but once in a while even Apple makes mistakes usability-wise. Those tabs you can see in Safari 4 (the picture above) are apparently very cool, but there are some serious drawbacks.

Firstly, “dragging” a tab in order to change its position in the tab-row has become far more complicated than before: you have to point the mouse in the top right corner of the tab you want to move to “grab” it and drag it. In Safari 3 you just needed to point the tab and drag.

Secondly, despite you see tabs there, that area of the window is still the title bar, and therefore it inherits all its behaviors. So, if by mistake you click twice on a tab (believe me, it could easily happen), the whole window minimize in the Dock. Moreover, the tabs are now too close to the menu bar: huge mistake. Since it is likely to switch among the tabs very often, you get unconsciously stressed by the fact that you have to pay attention to point the tabs and not the menu bar. This does not happen with the “normal” windows, because the action of pointing the regular title bar is rarer.

So, if you also feel that the new tabs in Safari 4 do not fit you, just switch back to the old ones: open the Terminal and run the following command

defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugSafari4TabBarIsOnTop -bool NO

To restore the tabs on top, use this other command:

defaults delete com.apple.Safari DebugSafari4TabBarIsOnTop

Chrome for Mac

Everyone who would like to try Chrome for Mac, can actually download a nightly build of the Chromium project. Chromium is the open-source project behind Google Chrome.

Of course, there is no official release yet and all those builds are potentially (and very likely to be) unstable.

However, it worths a try.