From using the new Safari 3 beta with my everyday browsing patterns, here are a couple of things I noticed:
- The find-highlight feature, which I thought was useless eye candy before, is actually quite useful, and the kind of best-user-experience-improvement-I-didn’t-know-I-needed thing that Apple specializes in.
- You can’t close windows. Not with the red button on the top left, not using the hotkeys. Not at all. You can close tabs in a multi-tabbed window, but if you want to close windows, you’re stuck. The only way I found to work around this is to use the “Merge all Windows” menu option—one which moreover doesn’t have a hotkey assigned to it*—and then close the tab(s) you no longer want open.
The latter is a deal breaker. I think I’m going to be uninstalling the beta in favor of Safari 2.
* Yes, I know that you can manually assign a hotkey to any menu option through the system preferences, but how many non-power users are going to know about that?
Update 2007-09-08 0134: It turns out I was wrong about the closing windows thing. This problem was caused by the Safari extension Taboo, which took care of warning you if you tried to quit Safari when multiple tabs were open. Removing Taboo caused Safari 3 to work just fine when attempting to close windows using Cmd+W. So now I’m using Safari 3 on on of my computers and am very happy with it thus far. Though the fricking Adobe Acrobat Reader plugin keeps making it crash. God, I hate Adobe software.