When Safari 4.0 beta was released many fanboys hated the fact that the tabs were moved right to the top of the window, thus saving space and screen real-estate. Important for me on this 13" screen. It still had the dumb feature of forcing you to save passwords you might have forgotten before allowing you to login and stuff, but I figured they might fix that for the final release. Wrong! Not only is the do-you-want-me-to-remember-the-password-you-just-typed feature still dumb, they moved the frickin tabs back to the luddite position! The travesty!
So I tried the Opera 10 prerelease. Close, but no cigar. I know Opera innovates and the others emulate but even with John Hicks' fantabulous new native skin and a pleasing tint of "sea" it's just not ... quite ... right. Maybe it's the wasted pixels in the "Personal Bar" that annoy me and the staccato scrolling. And the fact it tries too hard (it's an email client, a bittorrent client, does widgets, etc etc). Talk about convergence. Markets always - always - diverge. You think the iPhone is a converged device? Think again. It's a new category of device, it's just in the interim no one really knows what it's called. It's a diverged form of computer in an ultra portable form-factor. Smartphone will stick I guess. So like the iPhone is not a phone without the smart, Opera is not a browser without a suite of crap I just don't use. Not that it's bloatware, it's anything but. It's just ... annoying and somehow unsatisfactory.
So I updated my Firefox to 3.5b99 and grabbed Annorax's GrApple Crisp and am thinking, no loss here. And the password-asking-remembery thing allows you to say "okay, remember it!" after you can see a successful login with the correct password.
I guess I'll be fine until Google Chrome is released for end-users. I'm such a Google whore.









