Safari Saviour
I did sit down with the intention of writing about something completely different, but I thought that I would instead share with you the wonderousness and brilliance of a piece of software written by Apple. I’m one of those people who uses so-called ‘tabbed browsing’ to its utmost capacity: I often have two or three browser windows open –each with a different overarching ‘theme’– and then each of these windows will have in excess of 10 tabs, each pointed to some particular relevant website. A lot of these tabbed browsers will ask you if you really want to close a window with multiple tabs open, but I commonly turn this feature off as I find it unnecessary and annoying.
Unsurprisingly, this recently came back to bite me. I was online doing research for my final year project and had a large number of tabs open, all with content that I was pouring over trying to find certain pieces of information. Somewhere in the distance I heard someone mention dinner, and so in a flash I had reflexively quit my browser and closed the lid of my laptop. I managed to get all the way down the stairs before my brain kicked in and said something along the lines of: “Hang on, I think we just did something stupid…”
“Blast!” I said in return, “Quite correct, as always.” As with most things, I thought this problem could definitely wait until after dinner, and so proceeded to enjoy dinner and forget all about it. On the way back up the stairs, however, I had one of those feelings of dread - not too dissimilar to going to the dentist or some such. I would have to go into my browser’s history and open each one of the webpages individually, surely.
But no! Apple’s superior software design had completely anticipated a stupid mistake like mine, and provided the ‘restore last session’ functionality. This opened all the browser’s windows as they were when I mistakenly quit the browser, as well as minimising the browser into the Dock, as it was when I had quit it… Genius!
Apple’s software developers - 1;
Will’s brain - 0.
July 10th, 2007 at 7:30 pm
Firefox does that too, and there is a plugin available (”Session manager”) that lets you save and load sessions, undo closed tabs or windows, and even saves filled out forms etc, like if you’re writing an long email in Gmail or whatever. It’s pretty neat. I also find Firefox much faster, more stable, and more productive in general.
July 10th, 2007 at 8:23 pm
I have heard that Firefox is good, but most of the functionality comes from plugins. For any given function there are usually three or four different plugins each of which do almost the same thing, making it difficult to differentiate, whereas it’s all natively supported in Safari. Plus I’m too lazy to download Firefox.
July 10th, 2007 at 9:52 pm
I know we’ve been through this before, but for the benefit of others reading :
Safari is dodgy on Windows. Firefox rules in that domain.
That’s all!
July 10th, 2007 at 10:49 pm
Haha, ok, that is fair. Safari is a little slow/dodgy on Windows, and Firefox is therefore better. But I thought Hugo was a mac man, that’s all.
July 11th, 2007 at 3:17 pm
Just out of curiousity, what were you going to write about?
In case anyone cares, I’m a firefox fan. My sister, inherently, is a safari girl. I come from A Family Divided…
July 11th, 2007 at 7:57 pm
how dare all you firefox-ians… apple is the be all and end all of software devlopment… despite myself also being very lazy… firefox, like safari, has this feature natively, and had it for some time before safari…. ie long before… even as a mac man hands down firefox rules.
July 12th, 2007 at 12:02 am
Opera is also worth a try… very underrated
so… anyone else bored of holidays yet?
July 12th, 2007 at 11:13 pm
Ahh, now Sach, patience. What I was going to post about will have to wait until next time. Or maybe the time after.
July 12th, 2007 at 11:14 pm
Haha, holidays. I remember them. From my youth. I think.
July 12th, 2007 at 11:46 pm
The great thing about all web browsers is they enable to you to see what james has been up to in the last two weeks at:
Mt Hotham
and
Mt Buller
July 12th, 2007 at 11:55 pm
He obviously hasn’t been working on his final year project…
Great photos though James.