browser ponderings

[egypturnash]

Every now and then I survey the web browsers. These days I use Safari; its Maciness prevails over its general lack of extensibility.

I checked out Opera and Omniweb. Both are, in theory, Speedier. In practice, they end up feeling much clunkier and awkward to me. One of the major reasons in both is a chunk of prettiness: tab thumbnails. Opera pops up a thumbnail when you hover over a tab. Clever, right? Except it's not smart enough to realize that you probably don't need to see a thumbnail of the page you're viewing - so I click on the tab with the trackpad, then leave the pointer there and navigate with the keyboard. Then I have to flip the pointer somewhere else after a beat to get rid of the stupid thumbnail.

Omniweb is even worse. It doesn't have a tab bar. It has a tab drawer. While this means more space to show them, it also eats up tons of screen space on a laptop. It also lets you choose which side the tab drawer opens on, and will "helpfully" reposition the window to make space for the drawer. Even if there's ample room for the tab drawer to open on the other side. Where's the 'use normal drawer behavior' choice? Go figure. It was cool to implement, that's what matters. Even if I keep on clicking on the open tab drawer when I think I'm clicking on a window half-hidden by Omniweb.

One thing they both do that I'll miss when I go back to Safari is natively support site-specific stylesheets and prefs. I use PithHelmet to do this, but it's a bit kludgy. OmniWeb does this far better, with a button in the browser toolbar whose image is the OSX preferences app's icon, with the Apple logo replaced by the site's favicon. Hitting it lets you very easily set preferences for this site: custom stylesheets, change the font size for good, manipulate the ad-blocking... very very slick.

But god, that tab drawer just takes up so damn much screen space, and it keeps popping out, and there's no option for having a tab bar, rather than a list of names or thumbnails.

I guess I should see where Camino is, these days. While I'm at it maybe I should get one of the nighties of Safari and check out its take on webdev tools...

I might consider switching to Omniweb, if not for how annoying I find its handling of tabs. I don't think I'd switch to Opera; its unMaciness really gets to me in the same ways Firefox does.

Comments

[porsupah.livejournal.com]

I am, I should note, an unabashed OmniWeb fanbunny.

Bear in mind, though, that OW's drawer behaves like any other drawer - if you want it to scooch in closer, just pull it in a bit, and the thumbnails will shrink to suit. (It's also an option to close the drawer, but, as you probably found, it never really feels natural to have to do something like that manually. Maybe some degree of springiness would help, or even a mouse gesture. I prefer having as little screen space used as necessary, per application. So I maintain a distinctly uneasy relationship with Mail and its godforsaken panes, lacking any means of switching mailbox without having that pane exposed, unlike Eudora, which had that as a menubar item)

The benefit, of course, is that you're then scrolling thumbnails or URLs vertically - so it doesn't matter if you've got sixty tabs open, as every one is equally visible, rather than collapsed to a minimal representation of a tab.

Also, you might like trying out OW's workspaces - then you can keep collections of windows and tabs separately, which might help simplify your tab collections. You can tell each workspace to either remember windows/tabs/scroll positions as you go along, or to restore a frozen set each time you come there.

As for speed, be sure you're trying OmniWeb 5.5b4 (http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omniweb/download/beta/), rather than 5.1.3 - the use of a much more recent version of WebKit makes for a great difference between the two, though probably much less of a contrast between 5.5b4 and the current Safari.

You might also consider thinking out The Best Way™ of handling tabs - or just another way - and dropping them a line with the suggestion, using the Help: Send Feedback menu option. They do read (and reply to, where appropriate) all their email, and take ideas and priorities on board.

I'd like to love Firefox, with that incredible extensibility, but it's really not a Mac app, so much as an app that runs under OS X. Opera I've not tried in years, so any impression's well out of date. iCab I used to have as my primary under OS 9, but the lack of CSS support eventually drove me off - it seems to be much better now.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

See, in my opinion, tabs just don't belong in a drawer. Drawers are for auxilliary things you don't need most of the time. Drawers are for things you want to hide.

A drawer is good for selecting security/icon/backdating/disabled comments in XJournal. You need these things sometimes. You don't need them for a lot of posts.

A drawer is good for the site list and error logs in Cyberduck. Open a window, use the drawer to quickly pick an ftp site, get rid of it. If something goes wrong, a drawer opens with the error log. If everything runs right, you never see it.

A drawer was bad for Mail; navigating between mailboxes is one of the major things you do in a mail client.

Tabs, to me, are a major part of web-browser use.

A drawer for tabs might work on a large screen. I dunno. On my laptop, I'm constantly clicking from one window to another (I don't use Exposé much, what with half the keys being used for the screen brightness), and the drawer just doesn't read as part of the browser window. It looks like another window, half-hidden under the browser. And it's not something I can really hide, with my tab-embracing usage pattern. So I'm playing with OmniWeb and I have this list of a handful of tabs, and this huge chunk of whitespace beneath it running all the way down my browser window. Hell, it'd probably be worse if I still had a desktop system with a 1600x1200 display - I'd have a half-dozen tabs in a drawer running down the whole screen. On a laptop, giving the browser about 700-800 pixels of width (as is my habit) means that the tab drawer is obscuring most of my screen. To show blank white space. Instead of my desktop image, or an IM conversation, or the corner of a window with whatever creative thing I should be working on instead of browsing the web...

[wolflahti.livejournal.com]

Firefox rules the Net

[eriscontrol.livejournal.com]

Only on the Windows side. I've found it sub-optimal on Mac and Linux alike. The load times on both platforms are ridiculous, and it behaves very much like a Windows application even on OS X.

I have a feeling that part of the load time issue on OS X comes down to the size of the executable portion of the application: Firefox contains over 27 megabytes of executable after thinning it to a PowerPC binary; without any thinning, it is over 40. Safari is about 1 megabyte of executable as a universal. :)

On the Linux side, well, I don't really care. On the rare occasion that I'm stuck there, I use Konqueror.

[wolflahti.livejournal.com]

Interesting. I use Firefox under 10.3.9 on an aging Quicksilver G4 and find that it loads pages far faster than Safari ever did - and that's without adding any of the speed-increasing hacks that abound.

[eriscontrol.livejournal.com]

By load times, I was actually referring to the time it takes the application to load. Page load times are only a little worse than Safari for me. The application load time for Firefox has decreased by a lot after a recent memory upgrade, but it's still absurd.

I'm afraid I'm not familiar with the term "Quicksilver G4"—care to enlighten me? I have an aluminium G4 Powerbook (second-to-last release, I believe) running 10.4.7. I did a fresh install of 10.4 shortly after I got it.

[wolflahti.livejournal.com]

One of the many models of G4 Power Mac towers, the Quicksilver was made in 2002.

[eriscontrol.livejournal.com]

I hate to be the bringer of bad news, but I'm willing to bet that Camino is almost exactly where you left it! They haven't had a version update in so long that the page is collecting cobwebs. The only ongoing coding is bug fixes, and you have to download the nightly build to even benefit from them.

Anyway, it still suffers from long load times on my end, but your mileage may vary.

[orb2069.livejournal.com]

The next time you tinker with FF, you might want to try out the GrApple (http://www.takebacktheweb.org/) theme, which uses Graphite widgetry for the interface - Which (At least on my G3) speeds things up a bit.

[protocat.livejournal.com]

I've been following Shiira's development. The 2.0 seems interesting but it's not quite there, yet.

Also: A major thing I want from a browser is solid keyboard navigation and really Opera is the only game in town for being able to quickly jump links spatially with shift-arrow keys instead of cycling through a list. I also want text *and* image scaling when I zoom, which so far I've only seen with Opera.

But, that being said, Safari/Webkit/etc has caught up with Opera for pretty much everything else I'd ever notice or care about.

[eriscontrol.livejournal.com]

Shiira looks rather promising to me. I've tried it a bit and enjoyed using it while I did, but there were a few little problems that always drove me back to Safari.

I downloaded the 2.0 beta last night and I plan to try it out right now. :)

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

I found Opera's full-page scaling really, really annoying, to be honest! I'm used to breaking the layout of sites that insist on small text by hitting apple-+ a few times, and Opera preserves the layout precisely when I do that - so it grows horizontal scrollbars for me half the time.

I looked at Shiira a while back, but haven't lately.

[eriscontrol.livejournal.com]

The up-coming 2.0 release is indeed interesting, but I nearly shat myself when I saw the default toolbar!

There were so many buttons there that the address bar was relegated to the width of the search bar in Safari.

[tracerj.livejournal.com]

Try the 'fit to width' option; I made a button for it so I can toggle at will. It tweaks the layout to make sure everything gets a reasonable amount of space on the page, and that includes scaling images as needed. It's usually brilliant, though the best part is that it can be turned off when I wish to preserve original layout. It also interacts flawlessly with the ultra-easy scaling of pages, so can get pretty much the functionality you're looking for.

[tracerj.livejournal.com]

Opera. I love Opera. I love all the things it can do. Don't like the "tab-bar?" (Opera had it back when most folks insisted they hated tabs!) Don't need the thumbnails? Want a vertical list of your open windows that you can pop open when the mood strikes you, then close to no width when you want it out of sight?

On the left side of the browser window, there's a panel. If there's not, click the extra-wide border there to make the panel appear. At the top of it, there's a header that says "Mail" or "History" or something. Click that and select "Windows". If that's not there, right-click on it instead, select 'Customize', go to the 'Panels' tab, and add or remove it at your whim. You'll love it.

Funny thing is, those thumbnails are a very recent feature, as in Opera 9. I'm surprised they didn't put an option right in the preferences dialog to turn them on or off. I expect that'll be real soon in happening. Anyhow, I'll admit to being a drooling Opera fan-thing, have been since version three. It may not have the same extensibility as Firefox, but it makes up for it by not being nearly so egotistical or memory-hungry. *grin*

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Opera's non-Mac-look put me off pretty quickly. If I'm going to use a browser that looks like a refugee from Windows (especially in the prefs panels) I might as well use Firefox so I'll have all the funky plugins available.

I gave up digging for a switch to turn off the thumbnail tab popups and, ultimately, just went back to Safari (after playing with Omniweb for half a day).

[tracerj.livejournal.com]

Ah. I like the Spartan appearance... in fact, I turned off all the graphical glitz, so it's pretty much precisely as square and grey as the rest of my programs. In this way, the content is king, not the picture-frame. Then again, this may be a result of my mixed-up brain, the same one that can complain about which way the roll of toilet paper faces in the holder, but leave the seat up....