Using WebMate on a site like Digg is a joy, at least initially. Load the site, make sure the switch in the lower left is set to On, then start tapping links of interest. After you've built up a collection of tabs, tap the Next Tab button and start reading. Well, that's what should happen, but it's not what does happen.

When you create a new tab from of a link on the first page, WebMate doesn't actually load the linked site--not until you switch to that tab does it start loading the page. So instead of working in the background while you were clicking links, WebMate was merely noting the URL in preparation for loading. As you switch forward through your tabs, you wait for each page to load--why couldn't this have happened while you were viewing the first page?

What's even worse is that there's seemingly no caching at all--if you load a tab, switch to the next tab and wait for it to load, then hit the Previous Tab button, you'll wait for that page to load again in its entirety. Between the lack of pre-loading and no caching, you spend a lot of time waiting on WebMate. On a wireless network, it's not too bad...but on 3G or EDGE, the waiting is interminable.

Sure, it's no more of a wait than it is to load a similar set of pages in Safari, but the interface shows so much promise--if this worked as expected, WebMate would be the slickest tabbed browser implementation available, because it's the only one that lets you easily open links in background tabs. The program's description page states that a major update is coming soon, so perhaps changes are in the works to add pre-loading and caching. I'm looking forward to the update, in the hopes that it delivers on the promise seen in the first version of this browser.

Final thoughts