Reverting Safari's Tab Behavior
The new Safari 4 beta contains many welcome features, including faster JavaScript rendering, enhanced developer tools, and "Top Sites" and "Cover Flow" which are several features that exemplify Apple's core image and core animation technologies.
However, the change that puts the tab bar at the top of the window might not be so appealing to some users, especially those who have just become used to the tabs being at the bottom. There is no apparent enhancement for having tabs at the top, except that it saves some screen real estate.
Users can choose to try this new tab location, but if they do not like this new location, the tabs can be reverted to their old location by entering the following command in the terminal:
defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugSafari4TabBarIsOnTop -bool NO
After this command is entered, quit and re-launch Safari. To reverse this command, re-enter it with "YES" at the end instead of "NO".
Resources
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Wayne Lance
Shutdown Safari, go to the Terminal and:
defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugSafari4IncludeFlowViewInBookmarksView -bool NO
and to restore, do a:
defaults delete com.apple.Safari DebugSafari4IncludeFlowViewInBookmarksView
This removes Cover Flow from the bookmarks.
Great tip for getting coverflow out of bookmarks view.
Worked perfectly for me.
Macifixit and Kevin M. Dean rock!
Thank you
See the little drawer handle beneath the black box area - looks like 3 horizontal lines in a small box at the bottom-middle of the black area? Double click on that, and the box resizes first to a minimum display size and then to a 'closed' size.
Hey, this is a Mac - we don't do any of that 'command line" stuff! :-)
Thanks guys. GREAT STUFF!
BTW, still no issues AT ALL with Safari 4.0b
this worked perfectly.. Thanks! No issues at all with Safari 4 beta.
Wayne Lance
Under the slider in the center are 3 lines just drag that up or down ;)
you don't need terminal it out of life .. ;0
I don't like it when things move under my cursor. Making the tabs expand upon switching to them moves most other tabs, including their close button. That is quite annoying, and only because the title bar has been merged into the tab itself and thus to display the title the tab has to be wider.
I also don't like buttons which only appear if you hover over them.
And why no favicons in the tabs? They are very useful when you have a lot of tabs open.
- by WhiteDog February 26, 2009 2:00 AM PST
- There are so many substantial changes in Safari 4 that it is naturally going to take some time to get used to them. But if you simply cannot live without the old Safari, MacPilot (http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/20937) has already been updated to manage a wide variety of Safari 4 behaviors. Other utilities, like Onyx, will no doubt be updated soon as well - though MacPilot's list of options is the most extensive I've seen. Personally, I prefer using such a utility, rather than Terminal, to modify system behaviors because it's easy to go back and see what you've done - and to change it back. Keeping track of Terminal scripts is way more trouble than it's worth.
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(9 Comments)I, too, am having trouble adjusting to the tabs on top; however, I am resisting the urge to restore the old tabs before giving myself some time to adapt. How will I know if I like the new features if I don't try them? For instance, the "reload" button has moved from the tool bar to the end of the address field. Good? Bad? I don't know yet. As for the favicons, they were apparently sacrificed to the necessity of adding a "drag" handle to the tabs, which necessitated moving the "close" button to the left edge where the favicon used to be. This handle is needed because, with the tabs on top, it's now necessary to grab in a tab title to move a web page around the screen. The buttons "hide" in order to save space in a crowded tab bar. They reappear when needed - which seems reasonable to me.
Among the notable improvements in Safari 4 is optimized standards compliance - Safari now scores 100 out of 100 on the Acid 3 test (http://acid3.acidtests.org/), and is the first web browser to do so. And, on Windows, Safari now adopts the appropriate UI for the version of Windows it's running in. Heretofore, it was just plain ugly in Windows. Now it totally rocks. And, boy, are the Windows fans miffed!
Safari's Web Inspector has also been put on steroids so that it can compete head to head with Firefox for web developers. For the first time I think Safari can seriously be considered the superior browser - especially on Windows.<p>---<br>Don't anthropomorphize computers.<br />
They hate that.