The Safari 4 Beta progress bar

If you downloaded and tried the Safari 4 Beta, you may be wondering what happened to the blue progress bar in the Safari address bar. You can make the Safari 4 Beta revert to the old blue indicator – but take a moment to learn more about the new progress indicator.

In addition to the missing blue progress bar, you’ll notice the Stop/Reload button is also missing from the Safari toolbar. And no, it’s not available under View → Customize Toolbar. The Safari 4 Beta has combined the functionality of these three items into a single indicator that changes based on the page status. It’s located at the far right of the address bar.

For example, while a page is loading, the icon is the spinning Progress Indicator . Hover the mouse cursor over the spinning Progress Indicator and the icon becomes the Stop Indicator . Once the page has completely loaded, the indicator icon becomes the Reload Indicator .

Still missing the familiar blue progress bar in the Safari 4 Beta address bar? Here is a Terminal trick to bring back old bluey.

Warning! Do not experiment with Terminal commands or instructions. If you don’t understand what a Terminal command does – then don’t use it. It is extremely easy to trash your system settings using Unix commands.

safari 4 blue progress bar

Close Safari and go to Applications → Utilities and open the Terminal application. Enter the two commands below into the Terminal window, pressing the Return key after each. Then close Terminal and restart Safari.

defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugSafari4IncludeToolbarRedesign -bool NO

defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugSafari4LoadProgressStyle -bool NO

Entering the same command but changing the “NO” to “YES” will restore the previous settings.

related safari 4 info

Want to learn more about the Apple Safari 4 Beta or Safari in general? Stop by the Apple Safari Homepage or Apple Safari DevCenter. And for some Safari tweaking, visit the Pimp My Safari website.