I got myself an Apple PowerBook G4 early last year which was my first ever Mac. Having been a Windows user almost my entire life (with a tad of Linux here and there), I never thought it would change my web-browsing experience forever. Just like Windows XP has Internet Explorer as their default web browser, Mac OS X has [1] Safari (since v10.3). Initial impressions were fairly inconclusive, as I was so used to Internet Explorer. Over time however, I grew more and more accustomed to it, especially with the inclusion of ‘tabbed browsing’.

Tabbed browsing enables users to view multiple Web sites in a single browser window, instead of taking up several windows. Each site or page is separated by a simple tab. Mozilla had this functionality since version 0.9.5. I was never really a fan of tabbed browsing, I felt that Mozilla was already hogging a lot of resources and would slow everything down.

Safari brought my faith back into the world of ‘tabs’ and now I can’t browse the internet without it. It’s only logical that I have Firefox installed to extend this functionality across my Windows and Linux machines.

I do have one MAJOR complaint about Safari’s tabs; a huge one.

How many Mac users out there have ever come across this problem:

You visit your favourite website, found an interesting link and open it in another tab, found another interesting link and open it in yet another tab, as you would normally do. Oh and you just remembered that you had to reply to that important email on your web-mail, so you open another tab for this and start composing your message. You’re also reading some hints for that game you just bought, so you have another tab opened for that. You just remembered that you need to prepare something special for dinner tonight, so you open another tab to look for that exotic recipe. You now must have about fifteen tabs opened. The recipe you came across didn’t seem interesting and you decided to close that window down, so you click on the red close box on the top left hand corner.

WHOOOOOSSHHHHHH!!!

The entire Safari window closes down. All your multiple tabs are gone.

You thought to yourself, “Hang on. It wasn’t suppose to do that.”

Then you scream and scream in anger and frustration, hoping that your tabs will re-appear again somehow. But they don’t. You try to remember what each tab contained, but you can’t. And then you slap your forehead, and you cry.

Sounds familiar?

Want to avoid it from ever happening again?

Get [2] Taboo.

With Taboo installed, an attempt at closing down a browser window with multiple tabs will result in a warning message, giving you a second chance to revoke your stupidity. You’ll get a similar warning when you try to quit Safari by mistake i.e. pressing Command+Q.

You’ll never again experience the pain of losing multiple tabs. Other web browsers like Firefox already have this tab-closing-prevention-safeguard already built-in for a while. However, I happen to like Safari better than Firefox, so I’m glad to be able to bring this feature into Safari.

Oh yes, and another thing; it’s free.