Geek & Mild by Sean Sperte
Hello. Welcome to the weblog of Sean Sperte. This is an article originally posted on March 4, 2009. Read more →
John Gruber’s thorough ‘observations, complaints, quibbles, and suggestions regarding the Safari 4 Public Beta’ is a great read for anyone interested in interface design – regardless of their OS or browser preference. (He also mentions my suggested design for the new Safari tabs.)
He summarizes my main beef with the tabs:
Consider: with the previous tab design, if you wanted to move a window you dragged the window, and if you wanted to move a tab, you dragged the tab. Now in Safari 4, if you want to move the window you drag a tab, and if you want to move a tab you drag the small grippy strip at the far right edge of a tab. This is more abstract, indirect, and worse.
I may be able to speak to the progress indicator from an application programmer standpoint. Safari is very fast, to the point that they are clearly squeezing every bit of processing they can.
Anyone who has ever programmed a progress indicator knows that it means breaking up the process that you are measuring to record or test some data about it’s current status. This, as you might guess, doesn’t speed things up. It is possible to minimize this delay, but it will always be there. Judging by the relative accuracy of the previous progress bar, I’m sure it wasn’t a negligible process.
Especially with the speed of the web today, I can easily see cases where measuring the speed of a page load could double the length of the load.
§ Chuck Skoda · 04 March 2009