The Internet’s John Gruber posted a long, long piece about Safari 4, noting that the missing progress bar is a huge mistake and that top-tabs are not new and are quite unique and problematic. He notes, as I did, that grabbing the tabs now messes up the concept of “title bars” and “draggable space.”
That’s not perfect, but it’s clearly better than the actual tab bar design in the Safari 4 public beta. Consider: with the previous tab design, if you wanted to move a window you dragged the window, and if you wanted to move a tab, you dragged the tab. Now in Safari 4, if you want to move the window you drag a tab, and if you want to move a tab you drag the small grippy strip at the far right edge of a tab. This is more abstract, indirect, and worse. Chrome’s tab design suffers none of these problems.
Read the whole thing – Gruber is truly a genius – and pray for improvements.