Dave Hyatt is one of the developers of Safari, Apple’s new OS X only browser, and he’s paying attention to trackbacks about the software.

I wanted to love Safari. It looks great, it’s fast. Everyone’s talking about tabbed browsing and while that would be nice, there is one reason why I went back to Chimera as my choice for browsing:

I rarely just sit in a browser and read sites. On most days, I check my email first and click on links that I want to read from my mailing lists. Then I may go over to NetNewsWire Pro and go through some of my 150 or so subscriptions, double clicking on the ones that interest me to read in my browser. If there’s still time, I’ll load up Thoth and check out some newsgroups, maybe clicking on a few links there. When I do this with Chimera, I may end up with at most 5 different windows open and maybe a tab here or there. When I do this in Safari, if I don’t consciously close windows after I read a page (which I never remember to do) I can easily end up with 75 different windows bringing my browsing and Mac’ing experience to a grinding halt as Safari takes up whatever RAM I have in this iBook and then some. What’s the point of blocking ads if I have to sit and close windows that I’ve spawned myself anyway?

So for the love of everything, Dave, please. A simple preference item: Clicking on a link in an external application reuses current window.

Thank you.

BTW, this is the first time I’ve ever pinged anyone in a trackback. I hope I did it right.

Update: Duh. I pinged the wrong entry. I think I got it now, sorry about that.