Being a Chrome man, I generally don’t pay much attention to Safari, but I just noticed a really neat new feature in Safari 5.1 under the Lion Developer Preview 4: a new downloads manager.
In previous versions of Safari, running downloads popped up in a disembodied Downloads window that tends to get lost behind your open browser windows.
In Safari 5.1, though, the second a download starts, a little icon pops up next to the search bar. Clicking on this icon reveals a very iOS-like drop down window of past and current downloads. Clicking on a download opens it, while clicking the magnifying class locates it in Finder.
I really like this a lot… more than Chrome’s status bar implementation of downloads, definitely. Safari’s new downloads manager solves the problem of losing the Downloads Manager behind a bunch of open browser windows, but doesn’t make Chrome’s mistake of solving that problem by making downloads distracting UI hogs.
I’m not sure this is new, but what a great touch.
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
