Safari 4 Tabs. Fail.

Safari 4 beta is fast, nifty and… has different tabs. You may like that, but I certainly didn’t. Here’s what’s wrong with Tabs along the top…

1. With multiple tabs open you can’t read the full title of the page. Fail!
2. Double clicking the title area minimises the window, so with Tabs on top, accidentally clicking twice while selecting a tab minimises it completely. Fail!
3. Information about WHAT you are looking at is now truncated (1) as well as being further from the window. This is important, because it requires more work to scan across the bookmark and URL bars than it does to simply meet the top of the browser chrome. Fail!
4. The same goes for targeting a tab with a mouse or pointer. Fail!
5. The close button for the first tab is a hairs-width from the “close everything” button. Don’t hit the wrong one! Fail.

One proposed advantage of having tabs at the top is that it takes up less screen real estate. But then, have you seen how big some mac screens are?? Most Mac users (except for smaller laptops) would run Safari at less than full screen anyway, just so it useable.

This seems like a big usability blunder for Apple, probably so that Safari 4 looked “New” or something. Ironically, the best menu bar feature for Chrome, its two control icons on the right of screen, don’t even appear in the Mac version of Safari 4. Safari on a PC can be run without menu’s on, which is tidy.

I don’t get it, Tabs weren’t broken. Why change them?

Thankfully, Random Genius. has found a fix. Just open a Terminal window, type…

defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugSafari4TabBarIsOnTop -bool NO

And restart Safari. Your normal tabs are restored, and you now get all the benefits of a very fast CSS and JavaScript rendering engine without the frustration.

For more ways to revert bits of Safari 4 you don’t like, visit Random Genius.