The Oracle of Apollo Snippets from the life of Apollo Lee

Feature Request for Safari

While I’m at it and I’m feeling complainy (to coin a word), I have a feature request for Safari. Safari is fast and it’s standards compliant, but there’s one little behavior that it exhibits that will keep me from using it on a regular basis for real, productive browsing.

In Firefox, speaking of tabs, if I have lots of tabs open and I’m at the keyboard, I can use a key command to switch tabs. I can also do this in Safari, but the difference is quite noticeable.

Firefox Tab Switching Key Commands:

1. Close tab: Cmd-W (⌘W)
2. New tab: Cmd-T (⌘T)
3. Next tab: Ctrl-tab (^[tab])
4. Previous tab: Ctrl-shift-tab (^-Shift-[tab])
5. ⌘-number: Goes to tab number (e.g.: ⌘1 goes to the leftmost tab) — THIS IS EXTREMELY INTUITIVE.

Safari Tab Switching Key Commands:

1. Close tab: Cmd-W (⌘W)
2. New tab: Cmd-T (⌘T)
3. Next tab: Cmd-shift-right arrow
4. Previous tab: Cmd-shift-left arrow
5. ⌘-number: Goes to the corresponding item number in the Bookmarks toolbar (e.g.: ⌘1 goes to the first link, in my case, craigslist) — This always messes me up when I’m working on something.

There should be an option in Safari where I can modify that behavior to mimic the Mozilla-based browsers. Having a keyboard shortcut to pick a specific tab would make me be more interested in using Safari.

[…] Tab behavior. Camino emulates Safari’s tab behavior. I’ve addressed this before and Camino drops the ball on this one. Not only do they not get command key tab selection correct, they’re not using a standard key mapping when compared with other browsers. Option-command-arrow? Please. Get this one right. […]

[…] Tab changes – Now, you can rearrange tabs on the tab bar by dragging them around. I can do that, though, with the keyboard in Firefox, as well as with the mouse. Still no love with the key commands, though. But, now Safari warns you if you try to quit with multiple tabs open. […]