I am actually glad that Safari opens a new window for each URL launch from NetNewsWire. My morning routine is this: I go through each blog/feed to which I'm subscribed, looking for headlines that interest me. I double-click, and then Apple-Tab back to NetNewsWire, and repeat. I am then left with a bunch of open windows containing things that looked good. I then go into Safari mode where I read the article, close the window, and repeat.

Patrick

There should be a preference for this.

Same here. What I really wish is an option for NNW to keep focus after clicking on a story, but that would be more of a NNW and not Safari issue.

anode, that is an option of NetNewsWire. Open Preferences, then General, and down the bottom is an "Open pages in background" checkbox. Presto!

I agree with Patrick; it would be a fine preference, but the choice does need to be there.

I don't want to start a debate over tabs, but my gut reaction to this is that instead of reusing windows the tab feature would work admirably in this situation.

Like Patrick I go through my subscribed news feeds/blogs in the morning (noon & evening!!) in the same manner. But being a freakoid when it comes to screen clutter i prefer the 'cleaner' look of tabs

To look again at how Safari spawns new windows would be advantageous as I think more and more people are going to be using news aggregators for specific news/info and a more elegant way of working would certainly be good for the more anally retentive of us users... ;)

If not tabs then why not windows that spawn but are not offset from the last window (although this itself can be a positive effect when viewing only a couple of sites at a time), or a window manager that makes the chosen window visible when required... i could go on!!

Apple, how about a job as an imagineer!!

Probably the best implementation of tabs so far for Safari is a little program called Pith which runs along-side Safari giving a nice list of open windows in a palette.
It's not quite there yet but does give pretty good functionality. Check it out here http://www.blacktree.com/apps/index.html

I genuinely feel that with a little work tabs could be implemented in this way.

Personally, I despise when apps reuse the same window. I find it very counter-intuitive, and irritating when i want to open a bunch of browser windows and then look through them together.

Though I can't really object to having it as a (non-default_ preference, now can I?

YMMV, of course.

No!!!!!!!!

If you must, please make it a non-default preference. The fact that it opens a new window for clicked links is the one of the main reasons I like Safari better than all the others!

If anything, a preference.

Reusing a window sucks and sucks bigtime. It means you can't remain focused on what you are doing, you have to only follow one stream of conciousness at a time.

What I really want is for NNW to open the URLs in the background. I can click through a bunch of urls to follow up on once i'm done w/NNW.

Window reuse is only truly useful in a context where you have a feature *like* tabbed browsing that allows all content to be in a single window. Tabs suck, but the ability to have multiple pages of content easily swappable in a single window is very useful.

Am I the only one who would appreciate EVERY program having a "Cascade" or "Tile" function under the window menu, a la Photoshop? With many windows open at different sizes to boot, this seems like a simple way to minimize clutter without the UI trickiness of tabs.

Another "nooooooo!" reaction from me. I love that Safari opens a new page for each link I click in NetNewsWire. If it kept recycling the same window I would have to dramatically alter my reading habits. Please don't do this.

Please don't do it!!

Opening many pages in the background from NNW is the only way, cmd-tabbing back to NNW for each article would drive me insane!

Of course FullScreenSafariApe should be built into Safari because the darned cascading windows is irritating. I could see opening many windows that cascaded would be a bother.

Cascading is more useful when you are running your monitor at 1600x1200, but for my ibook at 1024x768, that is extremely annoying because you have to move _every_single_ window back.

Without the cascading (FullScreenSafariApe), I hardly miss tabs because cmd~ works like a charm is every app. But multiple windows is a must.

New window? Good.
Re-use window? Bad.
New tab? Best.

Yes, I'll leave now... ;)

! ! ! ! N O ! ! ! !

It absolutely ^$*#s me when a browser works that way. I leave a few browser windows open because I need, or am still reading, the information in them - if I didn't need them I'd close them. So I'm reading an e-mail or whatever and click a link - what happens? One of my precious browser windows decides "Hey bugger whatever the user was doing here, I'm gonna load that link". NO THANKYOU, open it in another window please (ie leave my work intact).

PLEASE make it an option. Imagine filling in this blog of yours, you get an e-mail, you click the link, and whammo your blog entry is gone because Safari has decided to ditch it and start loading your link. This is NO DIFFERENT than working on a Word document, you open another, and Word decides to discard your current document WITHOUT SAVING and loads the new one - DUH!?!?!?!

Preference option please, please, PLEASE :(

On the lines of Safari opening or not opening new windows, I think this behavior should be determined, at least in part, by the appliacation sending the Apple Event to Safari.

It is common practice in other browsers to recognize the WIND parameter of a GURL or OURL Apple Event to decide which window to use. The parameter is a Window ID value. A value of 0 usually means to use the current active window, and a value of -1 means to use a new window, regardless. The WIND param is not always supported by applications implementing GURL, but almost always by apps implementing OURL.

(see http://www.srm.com/qtma/wbl4014/sources/resae.h.html)

The described behavior can be found in IE and Netscape - OmniWeb and Mozilla/Chimera also subscribe to this I think.

Perhaps a user preference could assume a default behavior of new/old window if the apple event lacks a WIND parameter.

Advocating standards,
skylar

While it might not make total sense to have NNW and Safari be the same app, I think there's a case to make for some sort of integration, perhaps through an API. What I would like is for the information about what links have been visited (e.g. items read) to be shared. So if I go to the MacCentral.com web site and browse around, then later fire up NNW, it will know which things I've already looked at (and vice-versa of course).

The other piece of integration could also be useful just within Safari. A problem I have when browsing is not being able to queue up links I'd like to follow as soon as I'm done with the current page(s). I'd love a queue (maybe a temporary bookmark list) that I can add things to and then have a simple gesture to load the next link in the list. Kind of a "snapforward". Given such a feature, NNW could add items to that list for later reading. And if there was a "prefetch snapforward pages" command, you could later read them offline like some people have said they like to do.

Joshua, sounds like what you need is tabs!

[ducking...]

Or maybe Apple should buy NNW and integrate it with Safari... This would be the killer app of the year!

I find it time consuming to always go back and forth between NNW and Safari.

The UI is already there. Just reuse the bookmarks tab. That's it!

Won't NNW simply include a browser widget embedded in one of its panes when WebCore is ready for such?

ps I've come around on tabs but am wondering if they really should be implemented at the very top of the window, above the title (since the title, address, buttons, etc. will be referring to one of the tabs, not the whole window).

Me too on "nooooooo!". It takes nearly-zero effort to hit Command-W a bunch of time when I have too many windows open. There is no recovery for the other application blorting out what I was looking at or, more importantly, filling in the form on.

Just like to throw my towel in with the do-not-reuse folks. I really like the opening of new windows. I actually tend to keep one hand one the apple-W key to close them all off; I too work in 'batch mode' scan a bunch, opening as I go and then go read.

Now if only window-cycling worked more intuitively....(I am guessing that is an OS X issue)

One more vote for "Do NOT reuse windows". I really appreciate the fact that Safari does not do this today.

I hate to "me too", but I really prefer the way it works now. I downarrow through stories in NNW, hitting on ones that interest me, and only when I've been through everything do I switch to Safari and read.

It's the ability to work this way -- and to do cmd-shift-click in web browsers to do "open behind" -- that makes the Mac a uniquely productive browsing environmnt for me.

The only thing that might be better is if all the URLs from NNW opened in the same window, different tabs. That is, the first request from NNW opened a new window, the later ones reused the same window by using tabs.

Oh, that's one of my small, petty peeves with Safari. Adding a preference to either reuse the existing window or open a new one would be just marvy, thanks.

Can I add my voice to the 'Never, ever, ever, load anything new into an existing window' camp, please? I can't count the times I've had OtherBrowserX load a page from a helper application over something I was reading, filling in, or (worst) editing. I don't mind this being available as a preference, but I'd far rather close extra windows than have the browser randomly grab existing windows for new content.

I would like to Safari implement whether or not a new window gets opened or use the same window as a preference. IE, Chimera and OmniWeb support this preference.

I don't like that when using NNW, Safari opens 10-15 new windows.

Am I right in thinking that window cycling in Cocoa apps goes in the opposite direction to Carbon apps?

Does anyone agree with me that Cocoa's way of doing things, until you get used to it at least, is counter-intuitive, and, perhaps, just plain wrong?

Hmmm... The windows should be *smart* in that they open a new window for each application that requests it. That way NetNewsWire gets it's own Safari window that if it opens another link, it still uses the original NetNewsWire Safari window. I'm sure Apple's GUI gurus could come up with a really good way to make use of the AppleScript access and Cocoa API to make this work out easily.

Another idea real quick... INSTEAD OF TABS, have a little snapback type of button that lets u quickly snap to another window by dropping down a quick menu of other windows. This way the tab users are happy and the seperate window users are happy. Also maybe have a quick little keystroke that quickly brings the next one in front.

Yay! The fact that Safari opened a new window every time I clicked on a in NNWL is the only reason IE is still my default browser. I'm thrilled that you're observing the same thing.

(As an aside, thanks very much for this site, Dave. Getting a peek at thoughts of one of the programmers of one of my favorite pieces of software is a rare treat indeed.)

You're coming up with an interim solution for something that already has a permament solution coming. After all, when the Apple web kit is available these apps will just perform the display inline.

One more vote for "don't obliterate my existing open pages by reusing Safari windows".

There is only one aspect of opening a new window which I find distasteful, and that is the staggering. If a new window is opened with exactly the same bounds as the existing one, then I'd be happy for it to be a new window. The key thing for me is not which window, but rather that nothing screws with my preferred window size and position. I am very anal about that. :-)

-Walter

Please do not reuse browser windows. This is horrible as it destroys user data without notice or permission (literally, in the case of filling out a form, the back button does not help) If you must have it, make it a preference that the user (not the program) can override and by default leave it off.

The irritation of losing data takes clear precedence over the irritation of hitting a close button.

Window clutter can be solved by tabs or some other means, but re-using a document window should be off limits. You don't go wiping out what a user was doing arbitrarily. I have this problem with IE in Windows all the time and it is infuriating (the worst part is that I never know when an action will reuse a window or open a new one).

What if opening a word processing document simply erased whatever you were working on and loaded the new document into the same window? That's a horrible thing.

How about adding a common target for the NNW links? Like target="nnw" instead of target="_blank" or whatever it must be now.. Oh, as an option of course ;)

I'd have to concur with so many others before me: spawning a new window for a _new_ URL is intuitive. Replacing a current window's content with something that's in-coming from another app is just plain evil.

If folks want that behaviour, they should have to toggle something in the background _away_ from the default behaviour.

IMHO.

I would love to see all links from a given RSS feed go into tabs in a single window. All links from a different feed would go into a new window.

One of the things I love about Safari is that it opens each link from mail or whatever in a new window. If it didn't you'd spend your time losing pages - particularly as the immediate history is so short. A preference is a must. Please don't deny us! :)

No self-respecting UI expert would obliterate a user's existing window, with no warning, to load some new data. After all, @#%&ing IE does this to me all the time at work where I'm forced to take it up the @$$ using a POS Wintel 'puter. Don't reuse windows. Even if the user wants you to. ;-)

good article