I have been a happy Chimera (when on OS X) user for the last 3-4 months. Before that I used Mozilla mainly cause it less bugger then, not much slower and had more features I liked. Chimera kept improving; got bookmark import ability and I switched. My Girlfriend, only in the last 3 weeks changed to Chimera from IE. She had to wait for image drag and drop as she save a lot of images to her HDD this way.

I was fine in Chimera. Perfectly happy, and I still am (apart from the fact that I am in Safari at the moment) It does everything I want pretty much. Except today, I had to load safari to edit my gallery cause Chimera wasn’t working properly with the menus the gallery app uses to manipulate images and albums.

This is what led me back into Safari. I downloaded Safari a few hours after it was released. I ran it for 5 mins, thought “hmmm, its nice, but no tabbed browsing or tab bookmarks.”, quit it and went back to chimera. I have used it a little in between then and now, mainly to test a site I am working on, but I always miss tabs and quit it with frustration. This will most likely happen again once I have finished this entry

Text and widgets look nicer in Safari. It is quite a lot quicker. Bookmarking is a bit nicer. It really is only tabbed browsing and tab bookmarks that keeps me with Chimera. Oh, and Safaris quirky window placement

With my computer interface, I like to be able to see some things at a glance. Things such as time, what app is to the front (pretty standard), CPU usage and in the case of when I am using my windows PC, winamp displaying controls and what song is playing currently. The latter, I would LOVE to have. the menu bar is crying out for this and I don’t see why it hasn’t been done there are controllers, but nothing displaying the text (artist-album-song-track#) of what is playing. This is subject for a separate blog entry with a mock-up of how I see it being done.

So why do I dislike non-tabbed browsing? well I was talking about this to Aaron Swartzabout this earlier. I will Copy and paste the brief discussion:

<atariboy> do you reckon Safari will get tabs?
<atariboy> im REALLY enjoying using it for the most part.
<AaronSw> i hope it doesn’t
<atariboy> i dont like having to go to a menu to see what i want to switch to
<atariboy> seems very backward to me
<atariboy> i always prefered windows for this reason when browsing. you could see the various IE windows one had open in the task bar
<atariboy> tabs are better though compared to that
<AaronSw> i’ve never been in a situation where I wanted to see what I was switching to
<atariboy> so you never have 5+ pages open?
<AaronSw> i often do
<atariboy> hmmm. I would like to understand how you like not having tabs
<AaronSw> and when i’m done reading one page, i close it. and if i want to keep a page for later, i hit command-~
<atariboy> hrmm. thats it?
<AaronSw> why would you want to know what the page is called before viewing it?
<atariboy> i am often switching between windows
<atariboy> say i am writting a blog in one window. and looking at a forum in another
<atariboy> *writing
<atariboy> with tabs, i KNOW where to go to and switch to the one i want to go to
<atariboy> especially when using tab bookmarks. they are always in the same position. menus change depending on if you have opened another window
<AaronSw> Interesting.

I know this has been talked about heaps by lots of people; I guess im trying to fully understand this subject personally by extrapolating my thoughts. WHY do some people prefer one way or the other? Is it that the non tab browsing people haven’t really got the tab method into their heads or is there really some advantages to not use tabs? The only one I can see is that you can run out of real estate on the screen to have tabs, then you need another window to house more tabs