Safari 4 was released today at WWDC and I’m pretty happy with it. There were more user interface changes than I thought I’d see between the beta and the final product. Not that they changed a ton of stuff, but I expected them to stick with the UI that they had in Safari 4 beta and just fix the bugs.

There were only a couple of things that I noticed that were different.

1. The tabs are back to where they should be.
   While I liked the way the tabs functioned at the top of the browser (and the way they looked), it’s just more practical to have them as close to the content as possible. Putting the tabs on top of the bookmarks bar and address bar just means that you have to move your mouse that much farther, and that can be a problem, especially if your pushing the cursor around with a trackpad.
2. There’s a “new tab” button for the toolbar.
   This may have been included in the beta, I can’t remember if I looked for it or not, but I’ve been waiting for this for a long time. Sometimes you just don’t want to press Command+T.
3. The “loading bar”.
   Smaller changes – the right side of the address bar now shows a “loading” icon when a page is loading and fades to white if the URL extends longer than the address bar.

They did take out one small thing, probably unintentionally, that I really liked. When you have multiple tabs open you can grab one of the tabs and drag it out of the current window to create a new window. You can also grab one of the tabs and drag it to another window, if you have one open, and move that tab to the new window. In the beta, since the title bar was the tab, you could grab the title bar, without extra tabs open, to another window and it would add that window to the other window as a tab. You can’t do that anymore, since the title bar is no longer a tab and it only shows the tabs when there are more than one of them.

It would be really nice if you could drag the title bar of a window with just one tab open to another window and have that get added as a tab to the new window. Maybe even let you drag the title bar from a window with more than one tab and have all the tabs in that window get added to the new window?

Update: I’m pretty sure the new tab button wasn’t included in the beta, as the [+] button was always at the end of the title bar.