Safari UI Annoyances, Part 1: Huge Waste of Pixels
Note: This article is part one of a series I’m starting about various UI annoyances in Safari, OS X’s default browser. Don’t feel ripped off if this series isn’t too long — Safari is a pretty great browser.
Safari has been frustrating me recently. I use it because it’s a better browser than anything else out there, at least for me, but I have some gripes.
I really like how the Safari designers eliminated a need for a progress / loading bar at the bottom of the window. To replace this, they simply merged the Address Bar and the Loading Bar. But there’s another area that hasn’t been eliminated – the Status Bar. It’s necessary if you want to know where a link is going to take you, which I definitely do, so I have to leave the Status Bar on at all times.
But have a solution for this. When I hover over a link, just show me its destination in the Address bar.
I’ll show you what I mean.
When I’m just looking at a page, this is what I see in the address bar:
When I hover over a link, this is what I want to see:
Or, better yet, this:
This is what the whole process would look like:
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Ack, nice thought, but… no. Too much overload of the address bar. It’s hard enough for new people to figure it out without using the same space for multiple purposes.
And it doesn’t fit. For example the permalink to this page is something like 80 characters long and fills 3/4s of the address bar — add on a pointer and a URI of a page of similar length, and … where does it all go? Do you scroll the address bar (uck)?
If you turn on the bottom gray bar on Safari (Apple + /), in the lower left corner, you will see where the links were take you.
While I like your idea, and it does make sense to me, there is a way to see status built into Safari.
Nevermind. I misread your last sentence of your one statement. You already know about the bottom status bar.
I like the idea, although i would rather see the whole of address bar showing the destination address with a different colour when u mouse over it ( like you did show in the video ) rather then a arrow pointing to the destination address. Reason as someone has mention it wont work with ultra super duber long address.
Can I just say I completely agree with this.
I have a 12″ iBook G4, and the amount of real-estate that a browser takes up is crucial (I also have a 17″ lampshade iMac, where this is less of a concern, but still annoying), and I would wager such concerns are also pertinent for the 13″ Macbooks (and also, if Apple is designing a subnotebook for the MacbookPro line, like the rumours suggest, it’s even more so).
However, I too do NOT like surfing without having the feature of seeing what the url is behind a link … hell, I consider it basic security, not to mention simply making my online experience actually easier. Hence, I have to have the status-bar running at the bottom, despite the space it takes away from the window.
I would prefer the linked-to address was in a different colour (say Aqua blue, like the scroll-bars, etc) than grey, but that’s more of a personal thing. As another option, it could be organised so that while you rest the cursor over a link, the link replaces the title at the top of the browser window, that way it stops the address window from getting too crowded. But either/or works for me.
If they’re going to do the excellent thing and partially take away the necessity for the status bar, Apple should really go all the way and do it correctly.
or better yet:
“http://apple.com” in black then “/iphone/features.htm” right next to it as normal but in light grey!
This isn’t going to work for long URL’s containing many GET-parameters. Moreover, your animation excludes the fact that the address-bar is overloaded as a progress bar when a new page is fetched. You’re idea is to show both URL’s, but together with the progress-background this will be way too cluthered.
Furthermore, the statusbar tells me if the link is going to open in a new window, I miss this in your idea. Also, having a nice tall metal row at the bottom makes the desktop less cluthered: it serves as a separator between a large Safari-window and the dock.
The only annoying thing about Safari is that the tabs aren’t managable: I want to rearrange them, and something even better: group them together menu-style (for example, per site – or custom). This will eliminate my need to open multiple windows.
And I sort-of miss the ‘Page Info’ window in my contect-menu, which I used a lot (Firefox).
all i really want from Safari is a BIG warning when i inadvertently close the app with 4 tabs open: al la firefox. period
I wish i could push a button for a new tab and do the smae things like in safari for a new tab( double click right of a tab) apple t isnt always faster so
Oh please… the status bar is 16 pixels high. Even if you only have a 640×480 monitor, it’s 3% of your vertical screen estate. On a 800×600 it’s 2.6%, on a 1024×768 it’s 2%.
Willem van Duijn:
Leopard’s Safari has moveable tabs.