things I dislike about Safari 4

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I've been a Safari user for ages. I'm not a Firefox fan (just don't like the UI, plus the fact that it doesn't honour my Locations ( we use a proxy at work, but I don't use one at home) annoys me). I've tried various other browsers at various other points, but they've never been enough to make me want to give up Safari. But now might be the time. Here's my list of things I don't like about Safari 4:

  1. The reload button is moved! Why? This is still tripping me up.
  2. The new "loading" graphic in the address bar takes up space that could be used by an address, and doesn't actually give me any progress information. Progress information is useful in figuring out whether this particular site is down, or if there's a problem with my network.
  3. The tabs (which I'm glad are no longer in the title bar as they were in the Safari 4 beta) are a bit hard to see. They just run together, so they don't feel like tabs anymore. The current tab doesn't look very different than the inactive tabs.
  4. I miss the little X on each tab. I know it's there if I mouseover it, but I rarely close tabs via mouse. I mostly do it via cmd-W, so the lack of X combined with the lack of visual distinction for the tabs means I'm somewhat distrustful when I hit cmd-W to close a tab.
  5. The topsites page is quite ugly. I tried to use it, and put in the effort to customise it with the sites that I visit the most often, but gave up on it within a few days.
  6. When I'm entering a URL, the top site listed on the drop-down isn't accurate. It's okay if the top hit is, say, www.microsoft.com. But I never go to that website. When I start typing www.microsoft.com, it's always followed by /mac. When I start typing www.microsoft.com, it just gives me the top-level domain, not the /mac that I want to go to. It sometimes, but not always, shows up in the history below that.
  7. When I'm entering a URL, the history list is totally useless. It doesn't seem to be the most recent sites I've been to, nor is it the sites that I've visited the most often. For example, if I enter "www." right now, the history shows UPS (which I know I last visited on Wednesday to track a package), Macy's (last weekend), and American Express (Thursday). I've been to other sites that start with www since then, and I've definitely visited sites that start with www more often than those ones. Each of those are sites that I visit very infrequently on this computer.
  8. When you have more than one tab open, the loading spinner is on the tab itself. When you switch to that tab, the spinner moves from the tab to the address bar. On a slow-loading site, this is annoying because I'm watching the spinner to see if it's finally done, and sometimes I'll switch back to the tab before it's done loading to see how much of it is there. I've been faked out a couple of times because the site was partially downloaded and I didn't notice it wasn't complete because the loading indicator had moved.