Safari Beta 2

From about 199-2000 or 2001, web browsing on a Mac meant you had one choice: Internet Explorer. IE worked fine, but it was MS, and since it was the only real player in the browser market, you just had to accept whatever MS gave you, which wasn't much. Opera and iCab tried to add some new features to the browsing experience, but since they were buggy and didn't have all the basic features IE offered, they never gained much ground. When OS X came out, the default browser was still IE, but the Omni Group came on strong with OmniWeb, which showed a lot of promise. Of course, then came Mozilla, then Chimera (now Camino) and the mac browsing market was blown wide open. Enter Apple with Safari, now in its second "public beta." It's fast, it works on almost everything, it's not MS, and it adds some neat features. Here's a tip from Small Dog Electronics' weekly email newsletter, Kibbles and Bytes #312:

Here's a handy tip if you frequently use a particular set of sites and want to open them all in tabs. We use quite a few Web-based applications here at Small Dog, and I use this trick to open a window in Safari with each of these URLs open and then minimize it to have it in my dock for quick access. If you take a group of bookmarks and put them in a folder and then put that folder into the "bookmarks bar," you can select "Open in Tabs" and all the URLs will load in their separate tabs. Even faster, you can simply "command-click" on the folder and it will open all the enclosed links in tabs. If you have a bunch of tabs open and want to close all but one, you can option-click on one of the "close" buttons on a tab and all but one will close. A very handy little undocumented feature.

Also in the Mac world, Apple's scheduled a "media event" for tomorrow and it's calling it "Music to Your Ears." Will it announce a new online music distribution service? We'll see. For those of you who prefer Windoze or who have wondered what might be appealing about the Mac OS, check out "A Windows user spends a week with a Mac" for a mostly fair "hands-on" comparison of the two OSs.

Posted April 27, 2003 12:00 PM | mac geek