Posts Tagged ‘tabs’

Apple Safari has really come up with highly interactive and user-friendly tabs. Today a lot of other web browsers such as Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Internet explorer and Netscape Navigator offer tabbed web surfing, but the way Apple Safari has created its tabs totally captures the interest of window users.

You will find a lot of vital features in Safari’s tabs which are absent in the other browsers. Safari tabs are more creative and exciting to work with. The major advantage of Safari tabs is you can drag a tab and it will show you a small snapshot of the web page associated with that tab. If you drop that tab anywhere outside the tab bar, a new window will open showing the web page of the corresponding tab. If you are working with more than one tab at a time, you can also rearrange them by simply clicking on a tab and moving it either left or right inside the tab bar. You can clearly see that the movement of other tabs when they adjust themselves according to the shifted one. This animated property of tabs makes it easier for the users to determine where the tab will get placed (which is being shifted) and how this rearrangement of tabs will look like. Mozilla Firefox does not have these kinds of animated tabs and thus I frequently face issues whenever I rearrange my tabs. Apple has really shown a great piece of innovation.

Safari Tabs showing a snapshot of the web pages when getting dragged

Picture: The Mac Observer

Rather than keeping an infinite number of windows open while browsing, many people simply choose to open up a new tab to avoid the clutter. Safari 3.1 includes multiple and very intuitive ways to use this valuable feature more effectively. Instead of using the Command-T keyboard short cut to create a new tab, you can simply double click on the tab bar. Safari then produces the new tab and makes its your active browser window automatically.

There is also another handy trick for those tab aficionados who would like every link to open in a new tab, rather that in a new window. Simply open the Terminal from the Applications/Utilities folder and enter the following:

defaults write com.apple.Safari TargetedClicksCreateTabs

-bool true

Now every link will open in a new tab. To reverse the code simply enter the following in the terminal:

defaults write com.apple.Safari TargetedClicksCreateTabs

-bool false

These are just some examples of the many useful features inherent in Safari 3.1 on Windows, and we will no doubt be reporting on many more to come.