Being a self-confessed software addict, I’m always first in line to check out the latest versions of Mac applications that I regularly use. Needless to say, when it’s a major update to my single most frequently used application we’re talking about, the excitement levels bounce to all time highs.

And so it was with great anticipation that I downloaded the Safari 4 public beta and started checking out the various new features. For the most part, it is a great update, with several bells and whistles, such as Cover Flow viewing of your history and bookmarks and a swanky pseudo-3D view of your most-frequented websites.

However, this version of Safari incorporates some user interface changes that seem like they’ve been put in place just for the sake of novelty. The blue inline progress indicator that Apple introduced with the first version of Safari has now been replaced by the circular OS X progress indicator and the Refresh button has been moved to the right and inside the address bar, mimicking Safari on the iPhone.

Perhaps most annoyingly, the tabs have now been moved to the top of the window, like Google Chrome, giving you a tiny little bit of extra horizontal real estate. This necessitated further changes: you can only move tabs around by grabbing the small triangular area on the top-right corner of each tab (which look nonsensically like window resize handles); click and dragging anywhere else moves the whole window.

If you’re not a fan of this new implementation, you need to do is launch the Terminal, type in the following command, and hit return:

Once that's done, quit Terminal and then quit and relaunch Safari. If all goes according to plan, you should now get the old tab bar back in Safari 4.

Safari 4 Hidden Preferences

Having a quick poke through the new Safari binary yields the following strings:

$ strings /Applications/Safari.app/Contents/MacOS/Safari | grep DebugSafari4
DebugSafari4TabBarIsOnTop
DebugSafari4IncludeToolbarRedesign
DebugSafari4IncludeFancyURLCompletionList
DebugSafari4IncludeGoogleSuggest
DebugSafari4LoadProgressStyle
DebugSafari4IncludeFlowViewInBookmarksView
DebugSafari4TopSitesZoomToPageAnimationDimsSnapshot
DebugSafari4IncludeTopSites

NB: Need to restart Safari after changing any of these.

DebugSafari4TabBarIsOnTop

This moves the tab bar back where you expect it to be:

DebugSafari4IncludeToolbarRedesign and DebugSafari4LoadProgressStyle

When both set to NO it restores the blue loading bar behind the URL. Also puts a page loading spinner in the tab itself, which looks odd with the new tabs.

DebugSafari4IncludeFancyURLCompletionList

Switches off the new URL autocomplete menu and goes back to the original one.

DebugSafari4IncludeGoogleSuggest

Turns off the new Google suggest menu.

DebugSafari4IncludeFlowViewInBookmarksView

Removes CoverFlow from the Bookmarks view entirely.

DebugSafari4TopSitesZoomToPageAnimationDimsSnapshot

Disables the dimming when you click on a Top Site and it scales the screenshot up to fill the screen.

DebugSafari4IncludeTopSites

Disables Top Sites feature completely.

Undoing changes

Just run the defaults command with the delete flag for the appropriate key you wish to delete.