There are a ton of responses and thoughts about Safari’s new look in the recently released beta. On the whole, I’m a rather big fan of Safari 4 already. It’s noticeably faster than Safari 3 and other browsers and I’m keen on some of the changes that have been made. There are a lot of things that I like and a few things that I don’t.

The obvious thing to start talking about in regards to Safari 4 are the tabs on top. Some people hate them, others just kind of like them. I actually like them theoretically but not so much in practice. Having tabs on top returns the application to a document model. It becomes much more clear that the application is a series of documents (web pages) rather than an app with a changeable view. It may not seem like much, but it makes it more psychological satisfying than simply changing the title when a tab changes. Instead, it feels like the entire view port is changing to show something else. I love this conception of tabs for this reason. However, when you’ve separated the tabs from the content, there’s another issue at stake. The content is separated from its identifier. It used to be that when I switched a tab, I noticed that the content and the tab changed together since they were adjacent. Now, I rarely notice when a tab is changing because my eyes are in the content. I’m not a fan of this, but there isn’t really a solution other than moving the tabs back. And I think the psychological advantage of making tabs really represent documents far outweighs this mild inconvenience.

As a side note, the new tabs are missing a feature that needs to come back. In previous versions of Safari, you could command-click on the title and get a path back to the root. It was nice and handy. This and the yellow-arrow button that would take you to the root of a site are now gone. This is a damn shame.

What I really dislike is the new reload button and progress spinner in the address field. If Apple wanted to save space, they should have removed the damned search box. Look, don’t make people think if they want to search or make them find the appropriate widget. If something looks like a URL, treat it like a url. If it looks like a series of search terms, treat it like a search. One text field that does both. There, just saved a ton of space.

But I can never find the reload button. It isn’t where I am used to it being: a button on the toolbar. They’ve also moved the progress spinner there. I don’t really understand this decision. The progress bar behind the text field was one of the characteristic points for Safari. Hell, I learned to love it. It was large enough to be easily viewable and it gave me immediate feedback on what the page was doing. Now, I have a really small circular spinner that tells me nothing. Worse, I often click on links and sit there and wonder if I actually clicked on anything. The spinner is so small that it simply goes unnoticed. This is horrible. When I click on a link, I want instant feedback that something is happening. That feedback has to be immediately noticeable. The progress indicator behind the address bar did that. I know this can be changed with a hidden preference, but it’s a poor UI decision that should be rescinded.

Finally, in order to install Safari 4, I had to update to the latest version of OS X (apparently I was 0.0.1 behind) and restart. Then I had to install another update and restart. Then Safari 4 required a restart. Seriously. I’m glad that OS X has come so far, but Apple would do well to find some installation technology that removed the need for restarts. The least it could do this time was allow me some method to coalesce these updates so I’d only need one restart. However, imagine pitching to a Windows user that you never need to restart when you update your machine. Imagine telling that to a systems administrator. I know, brilliant, right?