this maybe of use its called 'tweaky' for safari …

http://github.com/cocoastep/tweaky/tree/master

as a side note
apparently the terminal commands don't work until the required entry for that command has been added to the safari/preferences/plist
that is the way i have understood it anyway …

Not at all, for one I didn't bleat on as if it was the end of the world. Secondly people were complaining about a beta when they had the previous full version to go back to. Thirdly I don't have the option to go back to "tabs on top".

So not ironic, just disappointing that a useful new feature was removed.

As for that new "Loading" sign, what a useless piece of nonsense, I liken it to having the speedo removed from my car and instead replaced by a sign saying "Driving". I've never been a fan of "progress" bars either, mainly because they don't give useful information, having a blue line that tells you roughly half our page has loaded isn't much help. It doesn't give you any indication on when the other half is going to load which is useful information. Whats wrong with the simple counter that browsers used to show ie "xx kb/ yy kb" where xx is the amount that has loaded and yy is the total size of the page. That could then give you an estimate of how long you still had to wait (indeed some browsers did show the amount of time to load the remaining data).

Dumped it on my XP PC, just too unstable

Still haven't gotten around to using it on my iMac...

Posting now from the iMac. So far, so good... I'll see how it holds up tonight.

So, used it all last night and this morning and haven't experienced any problems on OS X.

I'm suspecting they ditched the loading progress bar because, well, they really don't have a place in a web browser in 2009. They're completely fake at doing what they pretend to do . Ok, Look at it like this, your progress bar tells you how far a particular operation - in this case rendering a web page - is from completing. With a modern web page you simply don't know that at any given point. If your web page is anything other than plain HTML 1, it's 'total size' can vary dynamically. Images can take an undefined amount of time to load, CSS can cause extra things to be loaded in as it is interpreted, you have to consider things like server side includes or dynamic HTML, plugins that load data independently of the web page itself or god forbid AJAX. This is even more true if your browser is multithreaded and has different bits of the page all rendering at different rates.

Bluntly, with modern web technologies there's simply no way for a client to know at any given moment how much work it's got left to do to render a page. So if it doesn't know how much it's got left to do, how can a progress bar be anything like accurate? At best it's a vague estimate assuming standard things happen, at worst it's just completely wrong. How many times have you watched a progress bar slowly crawl a third of the way along, then zip through the final two thirds in about a second? How would you feel if the progress bar flicked back and forth like a fly in a jar as the system recalculated what percentage of the rendering task it thinks it's finished right this second? Does anyone think that would be at all useful, even if turned out to be correct?

Progress bars on rendering processes are a security blanket to users who want to know how long they'll have to wait, even though that's a provably uncertain variable at any given point in the rendering operation. You could quite happily just code something that went from 0% to 100% in a set time for every page and a lot of of people would be just as happy. To be honest, the 'working' tumbler is about as accurate as you're going to get because all the client actually knows is if it's finished rendering the page yet or not. I agree the new status indicator looks a little odd and it's obviously a first attempt but I'm kind of impressed Apple decided to throw out the piece of snake oil that is the progress bar and got a bit honest about it.

Jon

Well said Jon I wholeheartedly agree.

Having a moving progress bar is useful, in that it tells you that the browser is still working. The new round thing doesn't tell you that it is still working.

I've seen the same sort of thing used in many different programs and websites and the little animation carried on, even if the rest of the app has frozen...

I agree, they don't represent as much as they used to, but they are still useful. Likewise, in Firefox, I use LORI, which gives times of the initial response from the server, time to first byte and the total time taken to load the page. That is very useful as a developer, but I find it useful when visiting other sites as well.

Likewise a progress bar can stop moving yet the app is still functioning normally. The basic argument still stands that these "features" aren't giving any useful information nor providing any useful function beyond giving the more irate internet users something to shout at. What is wrong with a little meter/counter showing how much data is being downloaded and at what speed. Maybe colour coded to give less savvy users an indication that they are getting a good, average, or poor download speed.

All this bleating over a useless feature; you'd think the world was ending.

*checks world progress-bar* (8-p)

Edd

It is, see
http://preview.tinyurl.com/nczgdg
just where have YOU been???

You and Slartibartfast.

Jon

4.0.1 is out

Apparently fixes some compatability issues with iPhoto 09 and require a reboot ( ) so I suppose if you haven't got iPhoto 09 you might want to postpone it.

Jon

Whilst I refuse to use the "Coverflow" and "Top sites" features, I'm actually quite impressed with 4.0.1, which I updated to earlier this evening.

Peter.