WIRED
Apple’s latest desktop operating system, OS X Yosemite, won’t officially come out until sometime this fall. But now that its public beta is open, both developers and a large number of Mac owners are able to use a preview version of the landmark OS.
For those who’ve just started using it, or are anticipating its launch later this year, we’ve got some tips on how to best take advantage of the OS and its many new features. First up, a tour of Apple’s redesigned web browser, Safari.
Safari looks strikingly different from earlier versions, but veteran users should still be familiar with its basic functionality. The “chrome,” as it’s called, at the top of Safari is condensed and more angular. It takes up far less space than before so more of your screen is dedicated to the website you’re viewing. Its soft gray color is also slightly translucent, offering a hint of the content behind it as you scroll (this is actually a theme throughout Yosemite).
In the upper left of Safari’s chrome, you’ve got circular close, minimize, and expand buttons. These buttons ditch the stoplight-esque green, yellow, and red of Safari past and are instead a darker shade of gray than the surrounding chrome. Directly next to that are your forward and back buttons (their positioning took some getting used to, for me) and the “Show sidebar” button. This slides out a sidebar of your bookmarks, Reading List sites, and links you’ve shared from the left side of the window.
In the upper right is a share button, which you can tap to add a link to your Reading List, your Bookmarks, or share via email, Messages, or social media. Next to that, a “Show All Tabs” button zooms out to show a thumbnail-type view of all your tabs, neatly organized on one page (in Mavericks, I never used this feature because you needed to swipe to view screenshots of each open tab).
Tabs from the same site are stacked on top of one another, so if you went down a Wikipedia hole, for example, all those Wikipedia tabs would be stacked separate from your other open webpages. Also accessible with a two finger pinch, this feature is really convenient if you’ve lost a tab among dozens of open ones (which, frankly, is really easy to do because of the way tabs are currently organized). If you’ve got a lot of tabs open, the closed tab width shrinks to the point that you can’t tell what’s in each one. Chrome gets around this by at least showing the site’s favicon on the left of the tab. In Safari right now, that space houses an X button to close the tab. You can use a two finger sideways scroll to rotate through these open tabs, though. As you swipe, the name of each open page is revealed.
Next to the “Show All Tabs” button is the “Show Downloads” button, which you can tap to show a pop up list of the files you’ve downloaded through the browser.
In the top center of the screen is your URL bar, but it’s far more useful than it was in OS X Mavericks. When you click it, immediately below are a grid of quick links to the sites that used to populate your bookmarks bar. Below that is a grid of your frequently visited sites. When you start typing a search name or query, a dropdown menu appears first showing “Top Hits” for what you’re typing (for me typing “Wi” first pulls up the WIRED homepage, then the link to our CMS), and below that, autofill suggestions for Google Searches.
Screenshot: WIRED
Google is once again the default search engine, but in the app’s settings you can switch to Yahoo, Bing, or DuckDuckGo. Relevant iCloud tabs and sites from your history show up below that. In the left of the URL bar, you can click to switch to “Reader View,” which pleasantly strips the page you’re on of all ads and any other extraneous crap.
As with prior versions of Safari, if the layout and choice of these buttons doesn’t suit you, you can go into View > Customize Toolbar to switch things around. There, you can drag and drop in buttons like Mail, Print, and Autofill, if those are things you use frequently. And if you don’t like the changes you’ve made, you can drag and drop the default toolbar to go back to Apple’s preset interface.
If you’re looking for some discreet web browsing, you can now open a separate private window, with all tabs opened inside also being private (existing open Safari windows will remain un-private, which is different from the way private browsing used to work). As before, you’ve got a host of settings you can tweak in Safari’s preferences, like your homepage default, how new links open, autofill options, and privacy preferences.
We’ll wait to cast judgment on the nuances and performance of Safari (and OS X Yosemite in full) until its official debut, especially since key features like iCloud, Handoff, and Continuity won’t be ready until then. But overall, the changes Apple made to Safari make usability better and enhance the general web experience.
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