June 14, 2009

Safari 4 Release

Sven-S. Porst has a neat roundup of what's new in the user interface of Safari 4's release version.

While the beta version's tabs may not have been the best possible solution, I really liked having them at the top of the window. Maybe Apple should have taken a look at Chrome.

One small note on the combined stop/reload button: Combining the stop and the reload button is a terrible idea. Sure, it's impossible for both stop and reload to be active at the same time, so it seems like it would make sense. However, the button has a tendency to switch to reload just when you want to stop loading a page, which starts the page load all over again unless you quickly click stop again.

Apple has attempted to fix this problem in Safari 41. The stop/reload button doesn't immediately switch from one state to the other anymore. Instead, there is a quick fade between the two states. During the fade, clicks on the button are ignored, so when you want to stop loading right when the button switches from "stop" to "reload", the click is mercifully ignored.

  1. At least I believe this was fixed in the release version. It may have been in earlier versions, too. ↩︎

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But wait, there's more!

Want to read more like this? Buy my book's second edition! Designed for Use: Create Usable Interfaces for Applications and the Web is now available DRM-free directly from The Pragmatic Programmers. Or you can get it on Amazon, where it's also available in Chinese and Japanese.