Overall I’m very pleased with Safari 4’s updated UI. The public beta’s tabs-on-top implementation is gone, where the tabs were in the titlebar. An interesting experiment, but one that ultimately proved that such a feature is really quite irritating. I would have liked to see it go the Chrome way, where the tab bar is between the titlebar and the toolbar, but this is fine.
Somet other things:
- I love the new tab button. It’s clicked vs unclicked state is very pleasing.
- The tabs still have that stacked feel to them.
- The Top Sites feature where you’re able to drag another website into your Top Sites while pinning it at the same time was broken in the public beta. It is now fixed. Finally.
- That reload button is still in the URL field. How annoying.
- I’m not entirely sure if this was possible with the public beta, but the Add Bookmark button that is attached to the URL field is only default behaviour. If you add the standalone Add Bookmark button to the toolbar from the Customize Toolbar sheet, the attached Add Bookmark button will be replaced with the standalone one. Then simply remove the standalone button. Yes, this is a very awkward workaround to just having an Add Bookmark-less URL field in the Customize Toolbar sheet.
- Yay, the hierarchical site structure contextual menu is back!
- A tab only shows its close button until you mouse over the tab. And they also have click-through. Blegh.
