Put Safari 4 Tabs Back Where They Belong | Mac Guru Lounge

Put Safari 4 Tabs Back Where They Belong

"Favorites" on del.icio.us

If you go to anyone’s page on del.icio.us, the page title is now called “username’s favorites on del.icio.us” (here’s mine). Didn’t they used to call them “bookmarks?”

Update Feb. 9: it looks like it’s browser-related. If I load my page on IE it’s called “favorites,” in Firefox it’s “bookmarks.” I guess they scripted that in there so that you’d get a term you’re more familiar with.

Firefox 2

Hot on the heels of IE7, Mozilla released a new version of Firefox today. Ars Technica wrote a review of one of the betas which is mostly still relevant, if you want to know about what’s new in this version. Mostly it’s just polish, with some performance fixes and a new phishing detector to protect you from sites pretending to be your bank. All the polish adds up to a nice browser, but there aren’t any major new features that will change how you surf the inter-tubes. Still, it’s free and it renders webpages better than Internet Explorer, so give it a download.

IE 7

Microsoft officially released Internet Explorer 7 yesterday, which can be downloaded for free at microsoft.com/ie. The big catch is that it only runs on Windows XP SP2. In November it’ll start showing up in Windows Update, but there’s no reason not to upgrade now, except for the fact that there’s no reason you should be using IE at all as Firefox is still a better browser. C|Net’s review of IE7 is pretty good. IE7 plugs most of the security holes found in previous versions, has tabbed browsing, and does a better job of rendering webpages properly than it used to, but Firefox is still faster, more secure, and supports web standards more completely.

In Mozilla news, Firefox 2 will be out this month as well. It’s not a huge upgrade, but they’ve squashed a bunch of bugs and improved the app’s operation in a few areas.

CTRL-Tab

A-ha! I’ve been trying to figure out the keyboard command in Firefox to switch between tabs for ages now. The answer is CTRL-Tab. Of course, this means my poor brain will have to learn to switch between that and the Safari command of CMD-SHIFT-[ and -].

Imported comments:

FYI: in case you find yourself stuck on a Windows machine, Ctrl-Tab will switch between subwindows/panes within most Windows applications.

Hand Stretches and Plus Buttons

At work I make constant use of the “new tab” button on my Firefox toolbar. At home I use Safari which has no such button. The keyboard shortcuts to open a new tab are almost identical in both applications (CTRL-T for Firefox, COMMAND-T for Safari), yet I never use the keyboard in Firefox because the “T” key is too far away from the “Control” key to hit comfortably with one hand, whereas the “Command” key on a Mac keyboard is where the “Alt” key is on an IBM-compatible keyboard, making it easy to hit T with my left middle finger and COMMAND with my left thumb. The problem is that Safari’s “new bookmark” button is a plus sign, which is the prominent glyph in Firefox’s “new tab” button, which means that I’ll sometimes accidently try to bookmark a page instead of opening a new empty tab. I’ve moved the button in my Firefox toolbar a little (it was just to the left of the address bar and is now left of the “print” and “email” buttons), so we’ll see if that solves my problem.

The Browser, Patched and Hacked

A co-worker today called tech support to get rid of the spyware/adware that had crept onto his machine. After running their cleaning tools, they installed the Google Toolbar for him to get rid of pop-up ads. The toolbar is a fine utility - I use it on my work machine, too - but it’s only useful because it plugs an Internet Explorer feature hole. If IT would just let us use Firefox, we wouldn’t need an extra software to block pop-ups and we wouldn’t get nearly as much crapware on our machines due to its decreased vunerability to security issues. But I guess if they gave us tools that work properly they wouldn’t get paid to fix them, so instead we have to live with an intentionally inefficient system.

Firefox 0.8

The Mozilla people released version 0.8 of Phoenix Firebird Firefox today. I know I’ve ranted about web browsers before, but to quickly summarize why you should be using Firefox instead of Internet Explorer: pop-up blocking, tabbed browsing, Built-in Search, no major security flaws that let people steal your bank passwords, and standards compliance. True, two of those are features of the Google Toolbar, but they work better when integrated right into the program as opposed to as add-ons. As for why you should care about web standards compliance, it’s really a favor to web designers. When designing a page, you do a lot of work to make it pretty, and then once you’re done you usually spend another two or three days accounting for bugs in Internet Explorer and often dumbing down the page and making it less cool because Internet Explorer’s bugs cause too many problems. If everyone used a better browser, it would save me lots of aggrevation regarding The IE Factor, let you see better-looking pages, and save people money when their tech people have to spend days and days fixing bugs that shouldn’t occur. Windows users: go download Firefox — it has the daveXtreme seal of approval!

Smart Bookmarks

So here’s what happened: I had this post all thought out in my head about how whenever you bookmark a page your web browser should automatically check to see if that page has an RSS or Atom feed so that you’d only have to visit bookmarked pages if you knew they’d been updated. Then I found that OmniWeb 5 is already going to do that, and it comes out tomorrow. So while The Omni Group’s genius was a few months ahead of mine, I’m still going to write about why it’s a good idea.

Most people don’t use newsreaders. Even if one-click subscription worked well and using newsreaders brainlessly easy, it still wouldn’t make a lot of sense for most people to use a separate program for update notification. Obviously there are plenty of hardcore users who read hundreds of news feeds a day and want to be able to quickly scan through their sources, but most everyone else keeps it under seventy-five. Most people just want to be notified that a page they like has been updated. Most people would also prefer to read the page in its original context instead of as a stripped down version in a newsreader. Many pages often contain ancillary content that isn’t syndicated but readers might enjoy. Additionally, many sites are supported by advertising that doesn’t get syndicated into XML, so if readers visited the actual sites, they’d be doing their part in supporting the content provider. Jeffrey Zeldman argues very eloquently against reading pages in really simple syndicated formats:

[…] text alone does not equal content […] We can readily see the benefits of an RSS feed for BBC News, and it also makes sense on sites where page layout is primarily a delivery system for writing, as cigarettes are a delivery system for nicotine.

But most smokers would rather puff than inject nicotine, and most of us used to be as hungry to see a site as to read its words. RSS feeds may subtly discourage that impulse to seek, see, bookmark, and return.

That’s just a small quote; everyone should really go read the entire post. When you come back I think you’ll agree that in context content and form shouldn’t be separable. Power uses may still want to view everything in their newsreaders, but most people would rather get right to the page.

Comment notification

Assuming that OmniWeb’s smart bookmarks work like a charm, it’ll be easy to visit my favorite sites whenever they publish new articles. It’ll also be easy to participate in discussions on weblogs. But as I’ve said before, weblogs don’t do a very good job of keeping discussions going. Weblogs need comment notification. I had suggested that pages should automatically send out emails to let people know whenever new comments are left on a weblog post they’re interested in. xwhite pointed out that this would probably get out of hand. He says:

I’m still not 100% convinced that emails are what i want from subscribing. Ideally for me threads I have subscribed to would appear as something more like an alert/notification. A My Threads section maybe?

I see some problems with the emails too. […] If I went to lunch after commenting on say… 8 posts… I might have 40 emails that are now out of context and i’d have to open and close them each of them.

Also, you only need to know that a new comment has been left on a post, and wouldn’t really want one email per comment. So what you actually want is just to know that the page has been updated since you last visited it, which RSS aggregation would do perfectly (as Courtney suggests).

I usually don’t care about keeping up with comments on most of the posts I read, so I don’t want my aggregator to notify me whenever a comment is left on any post on a page. What I’d like to see is a smart bookmark folder just for comment feeds. Whenever I go to a site and find a thread that I want to watch, I could add it to this folder and my browser would keep a handy list of all the discussions I’m following. This way I’d stay up-to-date on the discussion, and the conversation could move much more quickly as people wouldn’t be simply forgetting to participate. People could stay involved in many threads at once while having notification handled by one centralized solution.

Google Toolbar

My company uses Windows. I deal. Yesterday I got very annoyed because Outlook refused to let me make some text green isntead of red. Outlook doesn’t usually bother me, but Internet Explorer does. Once you’ve gotten used to tabbed browsing, auto-fill, integrated searching, and pop-up blocking, it’s hard to go back.

Two days ago day I finally looked below the search bar on Google and read that the new version of the Google Toolbar takes care of three of those features. It even keeps a little counter of how many pop-ups it has managed to deflect! I strongly recommend it to anyone whose IT department refuses to let you install a better browser.

P.S.: You can drag the toolbar around if you don’t want to waste too much screen space on it. Mine hovers to the right of the “Help” menu.