Browser thumbnails: Safari vs IE8

I am a self-confessed, diehard, long-time *nix freak and for a few years now a healthily cynical Apple fanboy. Under Gnome/KDE I use Firefox, on OSX I use Safari and at work under Windows I use Firefox as much as possible. Some applications at work are IE-only so I continue to use IE8 on a daily basis. Generally I am blindly anti-Redmond, but there is one feature that I feel has been better envisioned in IE8 than in Safari: the IE8 Quick Tabs as compared to Safari 4’s Top Sites. Admittedly, their functionality is quite different, but the visual representation is similar, with the usual eye-candy polish on the Safari side.

Now I will admit that I do not actually use either of these features, but if I did use IE8 as frequently and heavily as I use Safari, then I would find the thumbnails of open tabs much more useful than thumbnails of my favorite sites. My favorite sites already live on my bookmarks bar. They are: Gmail, Google Reader, Transmission Web Interface, Apple.com, Demonoid, and The Pirate Bay; although I usually type them into the address bar anyway despite having them millimeters away on the bookmarks bar. As for my bookmarks menu, I don’t actually use it. In the past I have built up pages of nested bookmark menus, but never really went back to them to find a previously bookmarked site. If the site was a one-off interesting page that I wanted to remember for the future, I would either never visit it again, or I would reach it through Google Search. If the site was really a great favorite, I would remember the address and re-type it in the address bar. Now I have replaced the latter (and some of the former) with Google Reader. The only other type of page that I visit falls into the category of research, for which I have yet to find the ultimate solution. At the moment my system involves PDFing useful pages and saving them locally in a categorized folder hierarchy which I access using Spotlight.

Clearly I have no use for the fancy thumbnail wall of my top half-dozen favorite sites, especially as it takes longer for me to recognize a thumbnail picture of the site than it does for me to read the name on the bookmarks bar. When I have several dozen tabs open, however, I can see how it would be useful to get a scrollable list of tab thumbnails rather than scrolling through the text and favicons on the tabs bar (or even worse, an awful Cover Flow style list).

Redmond: 1, Cupertino: 0

[Grand total: Redmond: 1, Cupertino: 5,134,561]


Edit: But then again when using the IE8 thumbnails, I have noticed that I'm not primarily looking at the thumbnails, but rather at the text caption at the top.