Safari 4 Beta: one nice, one eh, one rant

First thoughts on the Safari 4 Beta:

• Top Sites/Coverflow History. Very nice. This feature is very similar to the one that debuted in OmniWeb a while back. I almost considered paying for OmniWeb for that feature alone, but that they had forked WebKit to maintain otherwise private APIs made me very nervous about long-term support. This’ll probably be a stake in the heart of OmniWeb.

• Tabs in Title Bar. Eh, I can take it or leave it. At first I hated it, because I thought it would really confuse new users. The title bar is the name of the document being viewed or edited, period. But then I realized that the whole concept of tabs blew that metaphor straight out of the water: it introduces multiple documents into a single window. Mac users may laugh at the concept of MDI, but it looks more and more like applications are returning to that model.

  How I would have preferred it: The Mac UI already has a metaphor for manipulating multiple documents at the system level: it is called the Dock. If it were me, I would have changed the tab bar to a dock-like entity, supporting hiding, magnification, and positioning on the window. Either that, or toss the Dock in 10.6 and replace it with a global application tab bar under the systemwide menu. Keep things consistent. (I don’t know why I bother: Apple engineers are bound and determined to pimpify the UI to Vista levels of unusability.)

• WebKit and Nitro. <rant>Somebody please tell me why, after four releases, Safari/WebKit won’t support the CSS2 “quotes” property that has been in the spec since 1998. That’s right, a whole bloody decade ago. I realize corporate pressure means that WebKit extensions that enhance the iPhone and Dashboard come first, but really. Less time dealing with Acid3 corner cases and more time on basic functionality, please?</rant>

  How I would have preferred it: Actually working. (If I could get WebKit to build on my machine, I’d fix it myself. But the Makefile assumes all paths are sans whitespace and I’m loathe to rename my drives.)

Addendum: Called it. OmniWeb is now free (and abandonware).