However, power-users will quickly bump into a kink in their workflow. The lack of tabs. If you’re anything like me, when you visit a news site you skim the front page and open any interesting article in a new tab.
The iPad’s Dirty Secret
Thankfully, someone wrote something on this, enough to get my blood boiling long enough to write this post.
I bought the iPad, not for the “Apps”, but for the 10 hour browsing experience. I was much more interested in how touch would change webapps.
I dislike Safari on the Mac, but oh man I hate it largely because of how much potential it has, and I hate waiting for the improvements to occur. The iPad browsing experience is better than a desktop experience in some ways, but in most ways it’s still not.
The post above sums up a couple of issues I have, one being the lack of a quick way to get at the tabs. I hate the Expose tabs button’s location and existence.
At first glance this appears to be a fair compromise, but as time goes on, it has proven to be a grinding experience. Having to touch a button to view your open windows is the equivalent of having to right click on a computer, pull up a contextual menu, and then selecting the window that you would like to switch to.
Sure, it looks nice, flush with all the other buttons, but it not entirely useful.
The Wishlist
Silent removal of tabs: This exists on both the iPhone and the iPad, but I hadn’t run into it until I used the iPad. I never used Safari on the iPhone long enough to open up more than a few tabs within one session. But on the iPad? I live in Safari from time to time, grazing the Internetz. How amazingly annoying it was to find this out by experience…
No history? I can’t undo closing tabs. (Shakes iPad. Nope, that would be too magical.)
Open pages in the background: “Middle Click” equivalent gesture would be awesome.
Gesture for Expose view of all pages opened: A nice three or four finger fan out would be nice.
A Home Screen’d app should not add to the tab count.
This infuriates me to this day: I have Gmail as one of the Dock icons, and to go to my browser, I instinctively hit the Home button, then hit Safari, just to realize I was in Safari already. Oh, and that it just ate up one of my nine tabs.
Really, Home Screen’d apps should behave like a separate app, much like how Fluid does it. When I quit it, actually quit it like a normal app.
Scroll To Bottom: Yes, webpages get long. And two fingering it doesn’t really work for me. (Flicking alternate index fingers. It’s fast, but not pretty.)
Find. Freaking FIND.
I’m hoping for Opera Mini to come to the iPad soon (it wasn’t pretty on the iPhone… but maybe on the iPad?), but I would be much more interested if Chrome came to the iPad ever. Fennec would be nice, too.
While writing this post, iPad Safari has crashed for the first time. The page is greyed out and completely unresponsive to any touch on the page. I had to shut it down. For the first time.
I think I angered some human deity somewhere.