Is Safari 4’s Bad Tab Design a Clue to an Apple Netbook?

Last week Apple released a beta of Safari 4. Immediately userland was polarized over one significant change: the tab bar had been moved up and replaced the title bar. If this was indeed to save 25 pixels vertically, as most speculate, it makes no sense as we all have such large screens nowadays. However, what if it's Apple planning for smaller screens, and in particular, an Apple netbook?

Many people say they like the tab bar at the top of the window, many others despise it. Myself, I'm in the latter category, I loathe it. I tried it for a few days and couldn't grow to like it by any measurement. It is visually confusing and butt ugly - fugly in fact. If this is the sort of thing Apple is going to do during Steve's absence, it can't get him back fast enough.

MacOSXHints.com has a poll and 55% of people prefer Safari 3 style tabs. (Which just goes to show that 45% of Safari 4 users will like anything Apple does.)

It's been said this is like what Google did with its Chrome browser. Chrome, however, does not break the boundaries of the containing window. That's not to say I like Chrome, but it is certainly a better implementation of the "tabs at the top" philosophy.

Both apps are functionally wrong, though. In Safari 3, Firefox 3 et al, the tabs are directly connected to the page - like tabs on physical pages. So the metaphor is consistent. It also makes changing pages very quick, as you only have to go to the top of the page to change the page. Very efficient and logical.

With Safari 4 you go outside the page, over the bookmarks bar, over the toolbar, and finally to the title bar to change the page. It's a little thing, but in the few days I tried to persevere with fugly tabs, it was noticeably irritating.

Visually, it's very untidy and confusing. A window is a self contained unit. It can contain other units, but that is it, they are contained within its boundaries. Consequequently, when using a window, you can clearly see where its borders are, there's no confusion with surrouding objects. Safari 4's tabs blow that away. There is no clear upper boundary, no fence. Consequently the eye becomes very confused because of that lack of a clear border. The visual clutter grows. This image is actually two different windows, despite how it looks

But maybe worst of all, when you have more than a few tabs open, the window titles get cut off, as you can also see in that image above.

No, wait, actually, worst of all is it creates an inconsistency with other applications and design in OS X. Unless. . . is this what Finder in Snow Leopard will be like? Please, Steve, no!

Furthermore, the colors are back to front. The selected tab is the same color as unselected windows. And the unselected tabs are the same color as the selected window. Hence further visual confusion with any windows below.

There is enough visual confusion as it is in OS X with the subtle variations in the greys of the front and back windows. And now Safari 4's fugly tabs make it even worse.

And, getting back to Chrome, it's a furphy that Safari 4's tabs are like Google's Chrome. Chrome still has the window bounding box and the tabs are contained within the window, as this image shows (and even if that pale blue was grey, there's enough space to not cause confusion with the window below):

Now, some of these points, such as the color confusion, will be fixed, as this is just beta. But there's no doubt the tabs in the title bar is here to stay, although I would hope Apple provides the option to disable it in the preferences.

So, after all that, after my arguments about why the tabs at the top are so wrong, Apple has still done it and will likely still do it in the final release. But why? As they say, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. The majority weren't calling for this, and in fact as that MacOSXHints poll shows, the majority still want it the old way. The tabs weren't broke.

Surely, with our mega-sized screens, we haven't become so addicted to space that we are so desperate for vertical real estate that 25 more pixels has us rejoicing in the streets, even though it sacrifices aesthetics? I hope the answer is no.

However, if you were on a 7" to 10" MacNetBook I can fully understand you saying yes. And for that reason it makes me wonder if this is the strongest clue yet that Apple is planning to release a netbook.