Chris Adams

Safari is really fast - OS X was always hindered by the lack of a fast, modern browser. Safari is faster than anything I've seen on OS X - it's perceptually as fast on my 400Mhz PowerBook as the 1.8GHz P4 next to it, which suggests that the bottleneck has shifted back to the network where it belongs.

They've done a really nice job with the minimalist interface, too. Everyone's moaning about the lack of tabbed browsing but I have to agree with Aaron - I've tried a few implementations on various platforms and tabs have never felt natural.

Tabbed browsing is really an attempt to hack around the fact that window creation is a heavyweight function on most operating systems, particularly OS X. Unfortunately, there's a stiff usability fee for this kludge as tabbed browsing breaks a number of UI rules:

• Normally tabs are used for alternate views of the same data - browsing aggressively violates this.
• Tabs won't show up in window lists - if you turn off the display of the tab headers to save screen real-estate, there's no indication whatsoever that they exist. They also break some assumptions - (Control|Command)-W will close the current tab if there's more than one instead of closing the entire window like it normally would but a window's close button will still close the entire thing, neatly breaking years of user experience.
• The keyboard shortcuts are completely different. Chimera was particularly bad about this since you're substituting a one-hand two-key combination (Command-`) with a three key (Command-Shift-[) combination which requires two hands.

With Safari none of this really applies - opening a link in a new window takes Safari less time than opening the same link in a new tab takes Chimera. In fact the Safari interface is extremely faster than I had thought possible for an OS X app, which raises the question of whether there are any new performance tricks in recent 10.2 releases which the developers are using. It's obviously not a system-wide improvement as the rest of Apple's iApps and Mail are just as sluggish as always. Can things like the standard Cocoa toolbars really be that inefficient?

The single major feature keeping me glued to OmniWeb is the lack of an equivalent to OmniWeb's background bookmark checker - that's almost as useful as an RSS aggregator. I'm glad to see OmniGroup with a constructive response recognizing that the strength of OmniWeb has always been the interface, not the rendering engine itself - since Apple is opensourcing Safari's engine, the OmniGroup people should be able to spend their time on the useful interface enhancements instead of refighting the CSS compatibility battles.