Tabs, Speed, and Spellcheck -- Safari Browsing

Tabs, Speed, and Spellcheck -- Cool... Thanks to Derrick Story at O'Reilly (written way back in January, but found by me today), I just found out that my biggest beef with Blogger's weblogging solution -- the lack of spell checking for Macs -- is no longer an issue, thanks not to the Google/Blogger folks, but to Apple and their newish Safari browser. This would have come in handy the other night when I put out a longish entry on my business blog while under the influence of a bit of the vine. For those that haven't found the feature, it's under the Edit menu at Edit-Spelling-Check Spelling As You Type. (Now my biggest Blogger Beef is the lack of a "Blog This" java link for Safari, but it's not so big an issue, thanks to Safari's tabs...keep reading...I'll get to tabs.)

While I'm on the subject, I've written from time to time on the business blog about on how RSS feeds and the NetNewsWire reader have change my web-browsing experience by giving me direct access to a growing list of regular reads plus other news sites. Having switched from Microsoft's Internet Explorer as my browser to Safari has introduced a whole 'nother speed-bump to my browsing. While Safari is significantly faster at loading we pages, that's not what I'm talking about. I've discovered tabs. (OK, OK, I know that other browsers offer tabbed browsing, but somehow, I never stumbled on anyone using them to see what they could do. If I knew then what I know now, I would have switched long ago.)

Tabbed browsing, for those of you still stuck in the MSIE world, allows multiple pages in a single window, accessible by tabs. A neat aspect that I use every day is that for a set of sites that I check daily and that are in a folder in the "button bar," at the bottom of the list, Safari adds a command to "Open in Tabs." I choose that option, and all my daily non-RSS sites load in individual tabs. Doing this in the background, while I'm reading RSS in NetNewsWire, or email, they're there ready for what feels to me like instant access. And instant access, even with a cable modem, is a good thing.