Loading Bars

Noticed something about the new loading bar in Safari 4.
 
Well, first of all, it's has a different look from the one presented in Safari 4 public beta. In the beta it's just a rotating set of bars at the edge of the address bar. In the final version it's a rotating set of bars on a button near the end of the address bar.
 
In Safari 3, to let you know that a page is being loaded, the address bar gets filled up with an incremental blue bar that tells you how much of the page has been loaded. For me this was helpful in situations when my connection is flaky and I need to know roughly whether it has stalled or not or how much to go.
 
For whatever reason, the Safari team at Apple thinks this blue bar is junk and decided to do away with it, replacing it with a button that shows a different shade of gray depending on what is loading. Looks like I'll have to hit the webkit blogs to find out if they explain it there.

Update: I remember reading a response on Twitter from Maciej Stachowiak, WebKit Developer, regarding the removal of the blue bar from Safari some time ago so I went to search for it and found it. He said, "The big blue progress bar led to users waiting for mostly-loaded and usable pages. Removing it makes browsing effectively faster." I'm not entirely sure how he came to that conclusion, most of the times when the blue bar hasn't finished loading the page remains blank. Mobile Safari, even on iPhone OS 3.0 still uses that blue bar.

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This was out nearly one week but I haven't got the chance to grab it. I've been a long time supporter of Camino, one of the few original Mac browsers. It first came out as Chimera before Firefox (Phoenix) even existed and I've always kept it updated all these years, foregoing the official release builds and skip straight to the latest stable beta and sometimes even the latest nightly build.

Going from 1.0 to 2.0 will have been quite a long journey unlike Firefox who shot through four major releases since 2004. Camino skipped through from 0.1 to 0.7 in under a year but took 4 years to get to 1.0, and two more years to get to the current 1.6 and will be nearly 3 years to 2.0.

This past week the Camino team pushed out 2.0 beta 1. Since I've had very little problems with Camino alpha and beta releases, I hold no qualms about replacing Camino 2.0a1 despite their warning and disclaimer about it being unstable and unsuitable or daily use especially when they have these updates spelled out in the release notes:

Camino 2.0b1

• Tab Dragging: Tabs can be rearranged by dragging and dropping.
  
• Tab Overview: There is now an optional toolbar icon for opening and closing Tab Overview.
  
• Blocking Flash Animations: A new exceptions list allows disabling "Block Flash animations" on a per-site basis.
  
• Gecko 1.9: Camino 2.0 Beta 1 includes changes that improve stability on Mac OS X 10.4.
  
• Downloading: On Mac OS X 10.5, the downloads folder in the Dock will bounce when a download finishes.
  

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