This is Technology Bytes, Episode 73 for July 28th, 2024.
Technology Bytes is a microcast where I share brief bytes on interesting technology.
Enjoy, and here we go.
This week I’m going backwards to talk about a subject that I spoke on not in the too far distant past, and that is tab groups.
In the past week or so, I’ve had the opportunity to use tab groups in Safari, which I’ve spoken of, but I’ve also had the opportunity to use them in Chrome.
There’s quite a difference, and I thought I’d talk about that a little bit, which is why I want to cover it again.
So, a little background.
At my work we have all the tools that we use for what we do are built in the web.
So, just a browser, logging into a website, and we really have two tools that we use.
One we call our portal, one we call our sales tool.
Both are very crucial to doing my job.
I need them both.
I need to have access to both.
I spoke in the past about moving to the beta and everything seeming to work, and then all of a sudden Safari won’t connect to my sales tool, and I can’t figure out why.
I don’t understand it, and so every other browser that I use works except for Safari.
Now Safari will connect to the portal, and I’ve spoken to our tech guys about it.
They are not sure what’s happening.
They really don’t support Macs, so I have much of this to do on my own if I want to use it.
And so that’s why I’m covering it again, because I had to move to Chrome, because Chrome will open both of the tools that I use at work.
It works on my iPad.
It works on both of my Macs that I use at work.
And the reason I didn’t go to Firefox is because I ran that for a minute, and in the previous podcast I talked about.
I don’t know if it’s Firefox, but when I installed it, my hard drive space disappeared.
I don’t know if it’s a beta problem or a Firefox problem, but I chose to use Chrome because that’s really what our tech team at work uses as the test for the tools that they make.
So to put it briefly, the implementation of tab groups on Chrome is terrible.
And I know that if anyone listened to this podcast, and I’m not sure anyone really does, that I would probably get quite a bit of feedback that says that’s not true, because more people use Chrome than use Safari.
Even in the Apple ecosystem, I think that might be true.
But let me give you a couple things that happen.
Well, the first being, and it’s really difficult, is that I use my iPad in motion.
And so when I have tab groups in Safari, they follow me.
When I pick up my iPad from the office and move to the manufacturing environment, those tab groups go with me.
And in Chrome on iPad, that does not happen.
It seems to be a choice they’ve made.
And if I’m wrong, I’d like to hear about it, but all the research I did says that that doesn’t work.
And then the other thing that happens is I use two Macs at work instead of buying a second screen, because it allows me to do computer work on one without worrying about the load on the second one.
And with Universal Control, I use all three of my devices.
I use a MacBook Air, my iMac, and my iPad, all with one keyboard and mouse.
It’s a really cool setup, my opinion, but it works very well for me.
And when I’m in Chrome and I’m on my iMac and I start working with quite a number of tabs, the MacBook Air opens Chrome to the front-facing window as if I’m working on it on that computer.
And I don’t want that to happen.
I need the information that’s on my MacBook Air to stay there, not to be covered by Chrome.
And so I end up having to mouse over to the MacBook Air, bring the other window to the forefront, and then go back to my iMac and start doing my work where I can look back and forth.
And I have to do that a number of times because Chrome won’t leave it alone.
And then the other thing that Chrome does is a continual refresh, and I don’t get that.
It’s very frustrating.
Everything I’ve read says they’re doing it to manage memory, but it just makes using Chrome on the iPad and on both my Macs almost impossible.
Now, I realize I probably could do some research and try to fix that, but I don’t really want to use Chrome.
I want to use Safari.
And so this is what happened this week.
So this week, developer beta 4 came out.
And every time a new developer beta comes out, the first thing I do after it’s installed is see if my sales tool website will work on Safari on any of my devices.
And once I installed developer beta 4, the sites all worked on my iPad.
And that was really nice.
And for a couple days, that’s what I did.
But they did not work on my Macs.
And so much to the chagrin of many, if anyone was even interested, I chose to reset my Macs to factory default, relog in with my Apple ID, both my iMac and my MacBook Air, so that I could use Safari.
I knew that would work because I’ve done it before.
And so now I have Safari working on all three devices, with tab groups working exactly as I want them to, nothing taking over except what I want to see.
So for the number of weeks that I had to use Chrome, having Safari available again was just so nice.
All the tabs synced so well between all my devices.
And I know that’s because I’m using an all-Apple environment.
But everything was so nice.
And then two days into it, my iPad decided not to open that tool, sales tool website any longer.
I still don’t get it.
And so I tried.
I did a quick network reset settings.
I did a couple other things.
Nothing seemed to work.
And so since I had reset my computers, I decided, OK, I’ll reset my iPad, log into it again as if it’s a brand-new iPad.
All of that becomes a little less painful because of iCloud.
And when I signed in with my Apple ID, my iPad’s back to what it was fairly quickly.
And for the last two days of this week, everything was golden.
Now I have the weekend to contend with.
I’ve done a couple things on my iPad, disconnected from our work VPN, made sure none of the sites that I use at work are loaded.
In fact, I used an Apple tab group.
I use that more often at home.
So I have that going.
And now it’s a matter of seeing how long it lasts and if I am going to have to go back to Chrome or not.
It has been such a great week, minus the time taken to reset devices, to have Safari working again.
And I really hope that it works from this point forward.
If it doesn’t work, then maybe developer beta 5 because that should be out in a couple weeks.
But I’m keeping my fingers crossed.
I really need Safari to work.
It makes my work environment so much better.
The tab groups work so great in that environment.
They do exactly what I want them to do, exactly what Apple describes they will do.
They sync between each other.
I don’t lose information.
I don’t have to worry about Safari taking over a screen that I’m not looking at at the moment.
It just works.
And I am super excited every time I go to work and Safari is working on all three of my devices because that’s when I know I will be my most productive.
So here’s to hoping I don’t have to go back to Chrome.
I don’t really like Chrome anyway.
I’m a Safari guy, which is maybe weird, but I really like how it works.
And we’ll see as time goes if maybe the betas calm things down and I get to stay in the environment that I love to work in.
Well, that is all I have for today.
I hope you enjoyed this little rant and coverage.
If you have comments, suggestions, or questions, you can send them to technologybytes at merrickfamily.com.
As always, I want to thank you for listening to the Technology Bytes microcast, and I look forward to the next time we are together taking another bite of technology.
