He’s a brave man

· technology ·

In a rash fit of openness, Dave Hyatt has encouraged people to comment or trackback to his blog to suggest what the [GUI]{.caps} of Safari should be like. There are 231 comments and 12 trackbacks as I post this. That'll keep him occupied.

My tuppence on the matter:

  • As many others have suggested, some form of tabs would be great. As many have observed, tabs themselves aren't ideal, as they take up too much vertical browser space and the names get truncated if there are a number of tabs. Dave's probably already seen this, but I think that some form of interface like this one — developed by Look Designs — would be a great solution. And of course, you should also be able to turn it off: people either love or hate tabs, and we should have a choice.
  • Support for alt tags as soon as possible (I find this rather irritating, as I use alt tags quite a lot when browsing). I know this isn't a [GUI]{.caps} suggestion, but he did say we could comment on priority [CSS]{.caps} matters.
  • I haven't yet found a way to directly add a new bookmark by typing it in rather than visiting the site and choosing "add bookmark".
  • More integration with the keychain â€" it seems a bit patchy at the moment.

Keep up the good work! Safari is already a great browser, and eminently useable. It just needs a few rough edges smoothed off to be the best browser on MacOSX.