DaveJays Blog

Safari Features and Thoughts

JUN 15th 2007 • 0 Comments

Here's a list of my favorite new features in Safari 3 beta. In no particular order

• The "Are you sure you want to close this tab/window" dialog.

  I stumbled across this feature by accident, but it's very useful. If you have anything typed into a field on a site, such as a comment box, and then close the tab it will ask you if you're sure first. Could potentially save people from a lot of grief if they inadvertently close a window they've been typing in. It's been a feature of applications for years. It's about time someone bring it to a web browser.

• Draggable Tabs

  This is common to many browsers already, but Safari has some added benefits. The smooth gliding of the tabs as they are dragged around is excellent visual feedback to the user. Also, you can drag tabs off the tab bar to create a new window. You can also drag them to other safari windows to move the tabs from window to window. Dragging from window to window is easier in OS X through the use of Expose and windows popping to the front if hovered over while dragging - so I can't see this feature quite as appealing to Windows users where each window tends to dominate the whole screen.

• Searching History

  I believe this feature has been in IE7, and I've been longing to have it in Safari as well. It's amazingly useful.

• Inline Search

  Other browsers have had this for a while too, but it's implementation in Safari is quite exceptional. It doesn't just highlight the search term in orange, giving it a little pop when it's found, but it darkens the window behind it too, so you're sure to find it.

• Resizable Text Fields

  This is an obvious benefit. Too many websites have such small comment boxes (like mine), that if you want to type a lot of text, you're limited.

Safari on Windows

Safari 3.0 was also made available for Windows users. I know that Apple's motivation for this was probably just to receive more money from the Google and Yahoo searches that are made in the browser. But honestly, I don't care why they did it, I'm just glad they did. Though I'm not sure how much of a difference Apple's clout and influence will have on the browser market. It's tough to woo people away from the browser they've grown accustomed to, no matter how horrible it is. There are still people who don't even realize what a browser is. But even if Apple can only take a small dent out of IE's market share, I'm all for it. The more ground that microsoft loses to standards aware browsers, the more likely it is that they'll get on the ball with Internet Explorer. Here's to hoping!

posted in: Apple |