I am a fan of the Safari 4 beta, with the new space saving tab placement, the eye candy of Top Sites and the more useful history coverflow view. However I am completely at a loss as to why Apple have decided to remove such a well known button as the Stop/Refresh. Ok, so its not completely removed, but it’s been moved to the end of the address bar and its new style and location would make it almost invisible to your average user.

From a useability point of view, this is in my opinion an even worse decision than that of IE7/8 when it did a similar thing.

Placing buttons in your UI means you are expecting users to use them. It seems so inefficient to split up buttons and move them to opposite sides of the screen when they perform very related functions.

Now I am big fan of keyboard shortcuts, but thats not the issue here. I’m talking usability and keeping in line with the OSX mantra that simple & intuitive interfaces produce an 0rsm user experience for pros & n00bs alike. Most Mac apps allow you to “Customise Toolbar…” which is an excellent personalisation feature, however the stop/refresh is not even available as an optional customisation. At the very least I would have thought that the default toolbar would include a standard stop/refresh which you can then remove is you don’t use it. I will be very surprised if the eventual release of Safari 4 doesn’t offer this.