It's great to hear that the bugs are getting fixed so quickly.
What would be great to see soon is an updated beta that
includes a more precise list of what Safari is expected to
support so that people could hold you to that rather than
sending out the 15,387th request for tabbed browsing. :-)

Is the "release" goal actually going to be complete CSS1,
and DOM Level 1 and essentially complete CSS2 and DOM Level 2? I found (and reported) a bunch of bugs in the
DOM support that were easy to find from the O'Reilly technet articles on DOM 2.

Thanks again for the speed, and for the emacs editing keys
in text entry boxes. :-)

Sounds great. When are we going to get an updated beta?

See, this sort of thing is why nightly builds would be great. We wouldn't have to hear about these fixes, then wait around for weeks before being able to use them!

Can I be über like you, David Hyatt?

excellent news on the hover changes and the CSS updates! I am now using safari about 75% of the time (chimera the other 25%). I for one don't mind waiting for the next release, as the chances of another major bug like the directory deletion issue are less likely to arise if things are not rushed. Seeing the progression through your personal log is massively satisfying in and of itself.

I don't know if you care to comment, but do you feel the 1px dotted border should be drawn dashed as in the current release, or will it be modified to match the expected behavior as in the gecko and tasman engines?

While you're at it, could you please enable the title attribute on links and images? Preferably the way Chimera does it (and the way IE Mac OS Clasic and IE Win do it) -- i.e., not truncated (e.g., the way IE OSX and Mozilla/NS inexplicably handle it).

Will you people stop blabbering about nightly builds? It *wont* happen. So stop asking :P

Just wanted to say thanks for all your hard work. Safari is an awesome browser (the only one I use now) and it great to see that it is going to keep getting better. Many Thanks!

Great job done indeed! Should be killer ap with tabbed browsing ;-)

if you're impatient, you might as well look at konqueror (lots of action taking place at http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde-cvs&r=1&b=200301&w=2)

The only reason that 100% is not my only browser is server-push support. Safari chokes on Bugzilla sites...

Apart from that, I'm a happy camper.

Despite its many bugs this browser is really getting somewhere. Its really really fast. Can't wait till Apple trashes IE and lets Safari automatically sit in the dock next to Mail. No more "why is browsing so slow on Mac" from switchers. Then it will simply work and all us enthusiastic Mac fans around the world wont have to explain our selves to death.

Great work Hyatt and team :)

CodeBitch of MacEdition once wrote an insightful article

http://www.macedition.com/cb/cb_20021216.php

in which she pointed out a frustrating social problem with public bug lists: people will misuse them as evidence that a browser is horrendously buggy, when all they really mean is that somebody took the trouble to look hard and compile a long list.

Usually what happens is that person A puts up the list, peppered with careful disclaimers about how the browser isn't that bad on the whole, but could be even better; person B complains somewhere else that a given Web page won't render right; and person C, without actually taking the trouble to see whether the page is faulty, just links to A's list saying "it's the browser's fault; see how buggy it is?"

The result is that people tend to expect every browser to render pages just like some popular one, even pages that are malformed; and the only way to do that is to replicate all of the popular browser's bugs and quirks, which makes browsers more buggy rather than less.

So it bothers me when people talk about Safari's "many bugs" just because Mark Pilgrim did the world the favor of collecting them in one place. You could compile a list much longer than that by subjecting any browser to sufficiently arduous tortures; it's just a question of how obscure the resulting bugs will be.

In the case of Safari, it has some way to go before it renders pages as well as Gecko, but it's already ahead of IE6/Windows and Opera, and about neck and neck with IE5.x/Mac, which is to say that it's doing very, very well on the whole. Some people, particularly people who don't have Macs and are relying on secondhand reports, are overreacting to bug reports by deciding to treat Safari as a tag-soup browser best handled by sniffing for it and serving special code; there have even been proposals to introduce intentional bugs to make this easier. I think this is the wrong way to go about it. Safari needs to be fixed, not hacked around. CB seems to agree:

http://www.macedition.com/cb/cb_20030114.php

Love seeing the progress Dave. Although you had me going there when I went to check Eric's menus and they did not work for me. /smacking self :-)

Keep up the good work! I use Safari about 85% of the time now, sometimes needing IE/Chimera for forms and scripts which Safari chokes on. Doesn't crash though. Yum.

Was just :hover reworked, or did you fix all pseudo entities to work with everything [not just text links]. I hate having :hover and others ignored on images, boxes, etc.

I don't want tabbed browsing. This is just an opinion, so feel free to tear it apart, but keep in mind my reason:

There is already a metaphor for working with multiple documents in Mac OS, and that's with a separate window for each document. Introducing a new metaphor in what is probably the most commonly used application (i.e. the browser) creates expectations that this metaphor also works everywhere else (e.g. Word or Photoshop). Now you might argue that a tabbed interface for multiple documents might be a good idea for Photoshop and Word as well, but in that case that decision should be made by the OS designers and offered as an interface element to all developpers; it should not be hardwired in individual applications.

Just an opinion - but there is some merit to it.

Is there any kind of roughly planned 1.0 timeline? Is a 1.0 likely in the next 5-6 months?

Way to go Dave! is there a Dave Hyatt fanclub somewhere?

Orestes, that would be a valid concern... if Web pages were documents. But as Weblogs, messageboards, search engines, and so on show, Web "pages" are not really documents at all. They're small applications.

Think of an HTML file as like a .nib: it specifies the interface to an application. That app may not be interactive at all -an app that does nothing but print "Hello world" on the screen is still an app- but that doesn't change its status as an application. Why, then, should a Web page be any different, when viewed in a browser?

Among the "kosher" uses for tabs is to separate different elements of functionality within an application. Web pages, as small, functional mini-applications displayed in a larger app that we call a browser, fit this paradigm perfectly.

"Web 'pages' are not really documents at all. They're small applications."

I think that's kind of a reach. Web pages are not documents in the sense that a TextEdit file is a document; you don't modify and save it. But I think a web page is quite similar to a PDF, and we call PDF's documents.

In any case, it doesn't make any sense to use a tabbed UI for multiple windows from multiple single-window applications. If I launch iTunes, iPhoto, and iChat, I get three different windows, not one window with three tabs.

It really sounds like we're starting to talk about this more in terms of the window manager than the application-document-window relationship. There's a thread over on Slashdot in which one poster asked what the ratio is of people who prefer tabs to people who run their browser windows full-screen. I find *that* to be the really revealing question on this point.

Why does everyone focus on the tabs? That's a UI hack. The main benefit of tabbed browsing is 1) being able to quickly switch between documents without losing your place or any form data and 2) keeping track of links you want to visit in the near future.

We already have pieces of a useful mechanism for this: bookmarks, history list, and snapback. Just make a per-window "snapmarks" drawer, which you can add links to by command-shift-option-triple-clicking (or whatever is available :-). Make it so the pages are pre-loaded/cached, and you've got the benefits of tabbed browsing without the confusion of tabs on the document window. You could drag links to/from your permanent bookmarks, and you could rearrange the links or move them to new separate windows.

Well, this isn't the right place to discuss this but I just wanted to point out that tabbed browsing isn't about the tabs. Also I'm *really* hoping the Safari crew is thinking about this type of feature and not dismissing it outright because of all the "pleeze add teh Tabbed browzing1!!" noise (including this post)!

Keep up the great work!

Why can anyone _not_ want tabs? It's much faster than any OS can work with multiple windows. Especially with news sites and sites such as /. or macsurfer. Command-(or control- if you're using X11 mozilla like me for speed) click all links, and then read using only the space bar and command-(or control-)w. Takes only a few minutes to browse through the news that way (much like reading usenet news where no graphical browser can compete against text based ones IMHO). I know Safari is not yet in the stage of UI improvement (first get the basics right) but I sure hope it will get tabbed browsing. Speed=key.

i, for one, LOOOOVE tabbed browsing. i only started using Chimera (and Phoenix at work on my infernal Windowz box) quite recently, and i now don't know how i lived without it before.

having said that, if the Safari team chooses not to include tabbed browsing, i'll still use it. tabs/no tabs isn't a hill to die on for me in this case. if it takes me one step closer to finally having no micro$oft products on my computer, i'm all for it.

keep up the good work, dave and co.

Dave,

Any word on the 1-pixel-dotted-CSS-border-showing-up-as-a-dashed-border bug?

I'm dying here!

Still, an incredible job on the whole.

First off: I'm not a Mac user, and probably won't become one for some time to come. I do however follow the Safari project with great interest, because I believe that the launch of Safari, Opera 7 and Mozilla in the relatively near past means a healthy revival of the browser wars.

There now are four major rendering technologies out there, each one substancially different. Which is a good thing. Let's hope this forces site designers to create valid and sane designs.

But back to the issue that seems to concern everyone here: Tabs. One should not judge the usability of tabs from the implementation found in Mozilla/Phoenix, as the solution here seems half-baked and counter-intuitive. For instance, web sites that opens new windows, will open a new instance of the browser instead of a new tab. Other problems: The tabs lack individual address bars, but instead shares a common one. The tabs aren't individually resizable.

If you want a benchmark on how tabs work, look at Opera's smooth implementation of tabbed browsing: you have individual address bars for each tab, they are individually resizeable, and you have a great freedom in how you choose to cycle between tabs.

Whether you choose to implement tabs or not is entirely up to you, but should you in the end choose to implement it, make sure that the user can choose between SDI/MDI-modes him/herself.

Please don't foul up safari with tabs as the default. I don't use em, I like to control-~ tilde to switch between windows and tabs just get in the way. I don't find em useful.

Tabs rock -- nothing like opening up an entire set of tabs for nightly surfing of the same sites with just one bookmark. There does need to be a key-stroke to switch between them though. Perhaps CMD-OPT-TILDE? I would love them, but understand how some do not like them. Perhaps making them an option is the answer?

As for nightly builds... I would love to see scheduled builds -- whether they are nightly, weekly or bi-weekly. I believe that these builds could provide some useful feedback. With 1 million + users, these users could certainly visit more sites than the Apple coders and testers. The problem becomes one of wading through the reports.

"Why can anyone _not_ want tabs? It's much faster than any OS can work with multiple windows."

Well, Quartz Extreme buffers the window and uses GP hardware assist, so switching windows in the main GUI should be faster than having the browser rerender and redraw. Even if the browser holds an offscreen bitmap and CopyBits the bitmap to the window, Quartz Extreme is likely to be a bit faster.

In other words, that's not a good reason to prefer tabs, at least on Jaguar. (It says nothing about other arguments for/against tabs).

For myself, the work machine is still on 10.1, so Safari is not an option there, but Chimera is.

http://www.mozillazine.org/weblogs/hyatt/archives/000001.html

I think proponents of "tabbed-browsing" are obscuring an important point by clamouring for Apple to implement their pet feature.

The real innovation made available via tabbed-browsing (and via Cmd-Shift-Click in Safari and others) is the ability to mark a link as interesting without interrupting a page. Because the interesting link is loaded while he's reading the current page, the viewer is spared the agonisingly slow download.

I think we would all benefit if Apple were to investigate this behaviour and adapt it to suit Safari, rather than simply adopting a technique which complicates things (by adding yet more key-bindings for opening a tab and switching between tabs). I would be delighted to have a "Morning News Bookmark Set" which opened all six or seven sites I regularly read in the morning.

I have confidence that the clever devils who brought us the SnapBack feature will be able to craft a clever solution to this common technique.

Michael - Yes, it is probably faster for the machine to switch windows than tabs. However, since the tabs use separate views for each, this isn't because of any need for the browser to reflow or anything like that.

But that speed difference isn't likely to be noticeable to humans, so it's a wash. Then it comes down to *user* speed: how fast can a user tell what's what, and then perform the necessary actions to switch to what they want? Tabs win this category over windows hands down, which is why people like them so much.

The last post is entirely correct. Command-Shift-Click isn't ideal for this because you can't see everything you have open (I run at 800x600 and find non-fullscreen browser windows to be very annoying, so multiple windows is fairly impractical for me). Tabs may or may not be the solution, but I have yet to hear of anything better (the drawer idea posted on macnn seems really annoying. The bookmarks/history drawer in Chimera is bad enough in the amount of space it uses. This would be open most of the time, and would use at least as much space).

Tabbed browsing seems to be just the start of an innovative way of browsing; it can be extended in so many more ways. How about drawer browsing? This would offer the convenience of tabbed browsing, but you could hide the drawer if you really wanted to (so you won't lose any screen real estate), and you wouldn't be limited by the size of the tabs. This seems a much more elegant way of implementing such a feature.

I suggest that Apple investigate all possible solutions, and implement the one that is the easiest and the one that works the best. Tabbed browsing is definitely not the only new way of fast/easy browsing.

Sorry, I forgot about two things!! *shame on me*

1. It has a useful command to get full screen.

2. the download-manager in the sidebar is a GREAT(!!) idea! And you can search bookmarks there too! (search for keywords)
that could be integrated into Safari easily, right?;)

Peace and thanks for your work!

Takeo

David,

It's me or the last Safari build doesn't support titles on acronym and abbr tags?

Hey Takeo,

Guess what? David Hyatt is a major contributor to Phoenix.

FYI

Jason

So, Dave Hyatt how does it feel to be a
(for now) small star in the Apple community?
Thanks for the work you and your team are putting in, and I hope that it will last for a long time.

So umm any chance we will get to see a pop up blocker in Safari? :)

Servaas D,

there already is a pop up blocker. under the safari menu there's an option that says block pop up windows.

Hey Jason,

didn't know that. Thanks FYI!:)
I hope he did read my post;)

Takeo

My goodness, people, this was a post about a CSS fix in Safari. Don't you have a bug button on your copy of Safari where you can rant all you like about tabbed browsing? Or join any tabbed-browsing thread on a discussion site. There is no shortage of them.

I'm sure Mr. Hyatt has heard more than enough about tabs, and it's off topic here. Sheesh.

Thank you for exposing some of the development process here, David. It's great fun to read about Safari's progress.

I love the tabs in Mozilla, but I'd rather see them implemented as DRAWERS in Safari. I've got more width on my screen than height, so I want to use the drawers on the left or right, like Mail.app, instead of at the already-crowded top of the browser window.

As for how to move from tab to tab in Mozilla, use Cmd-PgUp or Cmd-PgDn to cycle through tabs.

The fear of death is the beginning of slavery.

good stuff