The updated Safari has had a baffling UI update. It does not make any sense at all, on THE most important application that's shipped with the operating system.
It's those kind of UI ideas that look great on a mockup, but do not work in reality with real data and real users, those that open 35 tabs—behaviour encouraged by macOS windowing system by the way—and now all of those are crammed into a ludicrously small space that's constantly moving around.
I don't know what Apple were thinking there. Let's not call it UX, this is designers changing for change's sake at the expense of user experience. I'm struggling to see how is it justifiable in any way.
I think their hoping tab groups will reduce the 35 tab situation, but it’s too hard to organise when in information gathering mode. I hope they put a preference option to go back to the current interface. I’ll be filing a bug report.
It’s hard to judge something that’s constantly changing, to make a final decision anyway. They exploit our good nature and milk the benefit of the doubt with military precision, leaving us confused, powerless and hooked on the update system of their products and services.
What? I'm saying there's a ton of people opening a lot of tabs, nowhere in my comment I was disparaging towards them. Please don't make assumptions. I'm just saying their use case has been ruined by this update, a use case that is seldom represented in neat and oversimplified designer mockups.
> However I think, but don’t have data to confirm it, that they should be catered for and that “those that open 35 tabs” are a vocal minority.
This is the first time I’ve ever even considered the possibility that someone is capable of using a browser with only one or a few tabs open at a time. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure they exist, but having a million tabs open is so ingrained in how I consume information on the internet I suppose I kind of forgot it’s possible to do it any other way.
It makes me wonder if I’ve ever had only one tab or window open at a time? Maybe in the 90s? I don’t remember AOL having “tabs” the way browsers do now but I think you could have multiple windows open.
I don't know what they were thinking either. It's a horrid change. Can't see the tabs any more, the URL is no style hidden now, and the URL bar is now jumping around like crazy.
What if I don't want to lose my spot in the page by scrolling to the top[1]? This is a straight up UI regression. Just because there are workarounds doesn't mean it's not shit.
Edit:
[1] For example if I want to load new comments in a
HN thread I'm reading.
Yeah, to me much of this sounds great. No menu bar? Great, I never use it. Keyboard shortcuts make it unnecessary. No reload button? Great, one less thing I don’t use cluttering up the UI.
I understand that less experienced users may find this confusing though. Although saying that i think anyone can learn Cmd-R and Cmd-W, and would be better off for it.
I agree with the article on the tab/address bar merge being bad though.
Then why not remove ALL the buttons. Stick them in a hamburger menu. And present everyone with a list of keys they must memorize during OS first boot?
This is how far UX discussion has fallen since the early 00s. We went from talking about affordances, discoverability, and "principle of least surprise" to fashion. "I like it to look clean. Less chrome, and let the users eat shortcut keys, hamburger menus, and gestures."
Your comment doesn't reply to anything in mine. I haven't written anything about hamburger menus, things looking lean, chrome or gestures.
The only thing my comment was about is the practice of imagining non-computer-expert people to be mindless zombies who don't know basic stuff. Cmd+C, Cmd+V, and Cmd+R are one of the most popular shortcuts in computers, known by people who aren't computer experts. Just because something is done with the keyboard, doesn't mean it's some l33t knowledge exclusive to "power users". But computer professionals often talk about "casual users" as stupid, probably to feel better about themselves, because they know all that oh-so-advanced-hard stuff.
So yes, just like a "copy" button would be a waste of space, when Cmd+C is so widespread, a "refresh" button is similar in that regard.
Apple would be the last company to optimize for power users.
Can you name any non-niche casual website that requires you to refresh the current page?
Unfortunately, I can’t recall one, and it seems to me that refreshing a page in 2021 has become a niche feature reserved for IT guys who know how HTTP works.
I’ve considered switching to Safari on my Mac because I had heard that it has stellar performance. However, with no support for uBlock Origin because of their incomplete implementation of the extensions API, and now these UI changes, it looks like I’ll stick with Firefox.
I still plan to stay with my Mac because of the ecosystem. I’m one of the few who seems to actually like Windows 10. There are warts in Microsoft’s software, just as there are in Apple’s. But I like having my iPhone integrated with my Mac. The only option on Windows is Android phone integration. I’m trying to remove myself from Google’s ecosystem, though.
Ad blockers on Safari are apparently unable to block YouTube ads, due to API limitations.
I wish Firefox wouldn't excessively drain the battery on macOS, and Chrome wouldn't excessively drain personal data to Google, and Brave wouldn't excessively violate the trust of its users.
As of today, there's not a single browser on macOS that I don't strongly dislike. Looks like Safari won't improve soon.
Is it free? I'm looking at the Mac download now and it says that it's a 14-day trial with a monthly subscription afterwards, and I'm not entirely happy with relying on a subscription-based service.
It is not. But you can buy a cheap lifetime family account for Adguard on stacksocial for $20/$29. (not affiliated, but extremely happy user, been using it for years)
Adguard is NOT free. Beyond that, it is the worst plague of the modern computing age - subscription.
An ad blocker has access to extremely invasive data and Adblock wants me to pay them a subscription so they can get my PII and associate it with my browsing?
It is also not Open Source so I can't rely on the hope that someone smarter than me would have caught its dirty tricks.
I use Safari for a tiny subset of my browsing due to this gaping hole...
The new tab/address bar thing could be the reason I switch back away from Safari after using it as my main browser for a few years due to its energy efficiency compared to Firefox and Chrome.
What UI designer thought taking away more space for the tab bar was a good idea? Does that person even use a web browser?
Do you honestly think this is a one-person job? While you might question the outcome of product development, assuming that a multi-billion R&D budget accounts for 1 designer is just unhelpful.
Even just the WebKit commits with Apple engineering contacts is enough to build a whole company around...
One person had the initial idea; the hive mind doesn't make radical changes like this on its own.
A lot of times, you can end up with amazing new ideas that way, but sometimes a change based on ego / "that person is just so brilliant" is just bad. The tab bar thing is going to be Touch Bar 2.0, I think.
The question is, how long is Apple going to push it? I was hopeful the Touch Bar would die with M1 Macs...
I'm sure there is one (administratively) responsible person in the end, but I haven't every had a large-scale design lean on just 1 person or have very low-quantity lynchpins.
I doubt Apple's inner workings are simplistic in such a way that one person with some sort of clout pushed this with no further thought.
At the end of the day this is just speculation but purely negative speculation is just some form of populism/FUD and makes everything worse.
I'm not arguing this change as good or bad, but the pattern of one or two key people deciding something and others getting on board to implement it is common.
They are. They are optimizing for end users not developers. This UI change must be driving people who keep many tabs open nuts (I am not one of these people, I like a tidy environment with only a few tabs open that support my current activity).
Maybe Apple has decided to nudge users in the direction of Marie Kondo; if a tab does not spark joy get rid of it.
For me, whenever I switch tasks or activities, I usually quit out of safari and restart it. I like to concentrate on a single activity and not flit around trying to do many things at once. Maybe Apple is trying to healthier use of devices, as in providing Screen Time usage reports.
This is really interesting because it might be the reason I switch to Safari after using Firefox for years. All I really want is proper site isolation after this.
I’ve said this before on HN, but as a reminder the following are all verifiable facts: there is no dedicated macOS team anymore, Apple market iPads as a superior alternative to a laptop, and macOS as a percentage of revenue has over a long period dwindled in favour of iOS (with a few minor blips along the way).
A reasonable conclusion is that macOS isn’t apple’s priority. Meanwhile with WSL and Terminal Microsoft is pushing hard at developers. apt get is a better system than home brew and always has been. Vote with your wallets.
The fact that they have invested what must be an astronomical sum in moving Macs over to their own CPU architecture suggests otherwise. It’s probably more fair to say their vision for MacOS doesn’t align with what everyone would like?
Personally I’m very happy with MacOS and think Big Sur is a great iteration, I really like the look and feel, and the attention to detail to UI that I find lacking in alternatives. But that’s the beauty of choice, not everyone has to agree!
You’re probably right, but that won’t happen until we can do all the things we care about on whatever the “one true platform” I don’t think. I believe Apple will always support “power users”, if just because they need to support developers, and their large audience of creatives using their machines.
The MacPorts project has existed for 7 years longer than Homebrew, and is a much more sane experience similar to FreeBSD ports. In fact, Jordan Hubbard, the co-founder of FreeBSD and the original author of FreeBSD ports, was involved in the MacPorts project (along with other Apple employees).
I’m always baffled that Homebrew is seen as the standard macOS package manager. MacPorts has existed for many more years. It behaves more similarly to package managers on other operating systems without weird symlink tricks. It doesn’t send analytics to Google. It has over 25,000 active ports (Homebrew doesn’t seem to publish its formulae count but SO threads seem to indicate something in the region of 4,000). To each their own, but I highly recommend anyone reading this to give MacPorts a try.
Second vote for Macports. It's awesome, and filed some bugs during the Big Sur beta, they all got triaged and processed really fast with new package releases only days later.
Macports is great and better than homebrew. But it’s an add on, with no (official) support from Apple. Apt is first party, WSL is first party. Debian and Microsoft won’t make breaking changes intentionally that impact those systems. This happens regularly with homebrew and Apple. (Macports having a more independent universe in /opt and being less vulnerable to breakage is partly why I prefer it. Although it still takes a dependency on Xcode cli tools last I looked.)
I tried MacPorts back in the day and royally screwed up my computer and couldn’t figure out how to fix it. Iirc, homebrew symlinking prevents what happened to me.
However, I’ve learned a lot since that time, so perhaps macports would work just fine for me now.
Linked article refers to the changes in Safari as "thoughtless UI", which is a fairly common argument used against changes that people don't like. Against Apple, Microsoft, WinAmp, Reddit, etc.
But let's be fair and note that there quite certainly a lot of very proud, considerate, intentional designers and developers who are behind this change. People who probably put thousands (millions?) multiples of "thought" in considering the changes, versus someone saying "Whoa...this is different and I don't like different." The whine about site colors bleeding into the chrome seem particularly subjective, yet they're presented as if they're objective truths.
I use a macOS beta 15 device beside a 14 device, all day every day. At first install it was jarring, but then I became acclimated to it and it's fine. Tab groups are fantastic. I appreciate the aesthetics of chrome bleed, but that's just my subjective opinion. My only complaint about the browser is that it's crash-prone right now.
> People who probably put thousands (millions?) multiples of "thought" in considering the changes
Thoughts maybe, but did they ask users what they wanted? Did they run usability studies to verify that these changes make sense? I can't imagine that they did. Certain UI changes in macOS, Windows, etc. are so obviously bad (and are eventually changed) that no matter how much they thought about it, they didn't care to check what users thought.
Every user thinks they're the aggregate "users", though. That their personal opinion and take is universal.
For instance the address bar on here is a canonical truth and is the linchpin of the experience. See how every time a browser touches it (e.g. Chrome truncating the address) is met with mobs of the angry. Many users -- including even "power" users -- seldom interact with the address bar. Nor is it verification of anything much. It simply isn't that important anymore.
Another comment mentions that the reload button is two clicks away, which is a fair point but that everyone who actually uses reload (generally developers -- zero web apps should ever require the user to hit reload) use a keyboard shortcut.
Eh.
"Certain UI changes in macOS, Windows, etc. are so obviously bad (and are eventually changed)"
True. At the same time, every UI change of anything ever has yielded a firestorm of criticism and pushback. And more times than not the new design was better and people acclimate to it and eventually prefer it. I judge nothing on initial reception.
> Many users -- including even "power" users -- seldom interact with the address bar. Nor is it verification of anything much. It simply isn't that important anymore.
I interact with the address bar every time I go to page or site. It is my single most interfaces with the browser after the sites themselves.
And that it isn’t much use for verification is exactly the reason why people advocate that it should display all information!
One of the clearest examples of this for me is having the address bar at the bottom on mobile devices. There is pretty much no disadvantage to placing it there yet whenever a browser does that, people get inevitably angry. I hope Apple sticks with it and the other iOS browsers like Brave adopt it.
Was this an optional setting? Was it suddenly turned on with the option to turn it off buried in a settings menu than normal users are scared of?
I actually didn't know iOS had this, I only know about FireFox on Android and it asked me if I wanted to opt in before thrusting it upon me. That's a good way to make major UI changes.
> Every user thinks they're the aggregate "users", though. That their personal opinion and take is universal.
Because it is. Ultimately, your comfort is the only thing that matters when you're using a computer (particularly Macs). If something doesn't operate in the way that you want it to, why is that not a valid argument for replacing it?
It's not a valid argument that everyone should bend to your whim, it's possible a valid argument that (a) there should be a load of config options and/or (b) you should be able to edit the source code to make it work how you want.
This is Apple we're talking about, the last time they asked users about something is when they failed to litigate Corellium for virtualizing their software.
Someone's casual opinion about "readability" is not objective. It is the very definition of subjective. I mean, if you've been on HN at all you've seen massive debates about fonts, colors, contrast, and so on, where people have profoundly different opinions about readability.
Run a study and then talk. Otherwise it's just subjective observations.
Further, we're talking about page theme spreading to the chrome of the browser. It makes the chrome less important than the page contents. It seems they're putting "readability" focus exactly where it should be.
Off topic. By the way I think you meant ‘throw away’ not ‘tosser’ which is British slang insult meaning masturbator. It’s basically interchangeable with ‘wanker’.
Have they? The base of your argument is a classic appeal to authority. They're "very proud, considerate, intentional" designers so they must be right and everybody else wrong.
Where's the data? Aren't unhappy users valid enough data to demonstrate a downgrade in user experience?
> They're "very proud, considerate, intentional" designers so they must be right and everybody else wrong.
Contriving a straw man to argue a position does no good.
I specifically took issue with claims that it's thoughtless. That in no way says it's right or wrong [1], but I'm extraordinarily certain that a lot of people thought long about every detail of this, they probably argued and different people had different takes, and we can see the results of that process. Trying to casually dismiss all of that as thoughtless is gross.
> Aren't unhappy users valid enough data to demonstrate a downgrade in user experience?
Unhappy users aren't proof of much at all but that people really dislike change, and that you can't please all of the people all of the time. The eventual net result is an entirely different thing.
And again, the net might be positive and it might be negative. I've made zero assessment of that. I happen to be a pretty malleable user and I just flow with whatever, adapting to whatever various platforms demand I use.
[1] Although notions of right and wrong depend upon the inputs to your assessment. e.g. often we'll some users feel that a certain function or trait is a first class, primary element, while it isn't to others. What is right for one can be wrong for another. Seldom is it universal. Every design of any complexity is wrong for some subset of users.
Nothing is thoughtless, if we're being pedantic assholes about the situation who only care about protecting Apple from mean words.
For the sake of conversation though, yeah, I'd argue that Safari is the most thoughtless among the mainstream browsers. Compared to Firefox, Edge, Chrome and even Brave or Vivaldi, Safari is a less compatible, less up-to-date, less secure and less cared-about experience.
It has been running for centuries. It’s called typography. Its rules are not arbitrary and legibility is the most important one.
No need for scare quotes around readability. It’s a science.
There’s a latitude of contrast ratio between which human eyes can comfortably withstand and discern tones. It varies across individuals, of course, but not as much as you might think. No human sees ultraviolet, for example. And even if you have 20/20 eyesight, you need to design for a much wider spectrum of the Bell curve if you care at all about accessibility.
You might be interested in checking the history and methods behind CIE 1931. Also, “The Elements of Typographic Style” is a deep but fascinating book.
It’s not off the cuff. It uses the site’s background as it’s own and has to guesstimate what color the letters on top must have in order to remain legible.
Compare the job of this algorithm, having to deal with a crazy amount of possible color combo, to that of an experienced UX designer making just a dark and light theme, both thoroughly tested, and you can begin to grasp the trouble they’ve put themselves into.
I can’t quite understand if you agree with me or not, but there’s a way to avoid falling into the trap of endlessly delving into a philosophical discussion on the existence of an objective truth: test thousands of eyeballs. If lots of people find it hard to read, it’s garbage.
And this been done. There’s a minimum contrast that works for comfortable reading for most people. That’s not controversial, or at least, it shouldn’t be.
It's fairly common because it's commonly true; people don't like the changes for good reasons. Actual innovations in design are fine, but too often changes to user interfaces are arbitrary or are a response to the latest fad or some bright idea marketing or management cooked up.
There is a strong argument for user interface stability. People don't just learn user interfaces, they seep into people's unconscious and muscle memory. It can take a while to learn the idiosyncrasies of a user interface and making changes should have a string justification.
It should be noted that people who are paid to design user interfaces are not paid to use them. Their incentives are to create and tinker. This is a disincentive to do what is often needed: nothing or very slow change.
I think the role of the aesthetic of a product is a bit under appreciated. If Safari was exactly as functional but still looked like Netscape navigator, it would negatively impact people’s opinion of the browser.
It’s just like the idea that you first eat with your eyes. For example, eggs with yellow yolks and orange yolks taste the same in blinded tests, but when people can see the eggs they usually go for the orange ones. Periodic UI design updates are needed so that people don’t associate a dated GUI with a dated product.
This. I work on a website where a new ui was rolled out every 2 years? Why? We (the developers) finally figured out it was because it gave the business people work to do that was more interesting than what they were really supposed to be doing. They got to go to all these catered meetings with 3rd party design consultants. They got to report to their higher ups that they were doing all this very important work. And every 2 years they could roll out the new ui to great fanfare while patting each other on the backs. It had absolutely nothing to do with improving the experience for our customers.
The worst part was, often functionality that was well loved was scraped because there wasn’t time to work it into this redesign. It turned out they would do that on purpose so people would complain so they could go to their higher ups with complaints in hand to justify budget money for a new round of ui design work. Rinse repeat.
> We (the developers) finally figured out it was because it gave the business people work to do that was more interesting than what they were really supposed to be doing.
Did you get them to confirm this hypothesis? Or did you just figure it out by deduction and projection?
This is an honest question. I work on both sides - dev and design, and so am privy of the driving forces behind the projects.
Sometimes they could include personal agendas but are almost never limited to those.
And I have had cases where I had to ask questions in confidence to uncover the political forces.
Have you had the opportunity to ask such questions and confirm your suspicions?
There came a time where the site was moved to a different department. We, the dev team, went along with the site. Before we left we asked the business person we got along with best about our suspicions and she confirmed every one of them.
Yes, I read the article. And I completely disagree with a lot of the claims made in it. Claiming that these changes are "thoughtless" is grossly unprofessional foolishness to pejoratively stomp one's feet to "get their way". It's embarrassing.
You can disagree with the changes. You can make arguments (understand that other people also have arguments -- for instance on the importance of the address bar, or how a browser should work with 35 tabs, which fwiw they all are trash at that level), but if you need to demand that anyone with a different opinion is "thoughtless", you have no position at all.
I have no affiliation with the author, but he's provided reasoning as to why he thinks the design doesn't work for him. You can window-dress the wording, but that's essentially what the article is about.
What are your reasons for 'trashing' the importance of the address bar and the need for 35 tabs?
the clear separation between trusted outer chrome and untrusted content, so that content cannot fake chrome to malevolent ends (e.g faking a dialog, a SSL lock icon, a URL...)
FWIW, while watching my mom use her MacBook I've noticed that sometimes she can't tell the difference between a website with a back button and the browser's own back button. For less tech savvy users, the delineation isn't always clear. Especially if the browser's chrome changes frequently
“People who probably put thousands (millions?) multiples of "thought" in considering the changes”
In my experience it’s usually one person’s vision behind major design changes (good or bad). It may be “discussed” so long as the discussion doesn’t deviate from boss’s vision (or you’re not a fit for the project).
One I've learned from grim experience is that most of the time, 1 person with a strong vision and the willingness to fight for it is better than 10 or more people just kinda doing their own thing in their own sandbox. Sure, the former might turn out bad. The latter is almost guaranteed to.
This is kinda like the argument between an authoritative government and a democratic one, the former works great until it doesn't. When it works, the former is more efficient and can get things done much more quickly but when things go wrong it can go horribly more wrong as well because the checks and balances aren't there.
I think it's a matter of stakes. In UI design, while the risk to the business will vary case by case it's almost never as costly as the risk in governing. Committees just aren't great at moving fast, and in UI design moving slow might be more expensive than moving in the wrong direction and learning something.
Reminds me of how almost any corporate logo redesign works. Company makes a new logo, everyone is outraged by how awful and horrible it is, then we get used to it.
The Discord logo redesign was one of those logos that elicited a very odd amount of outrage for what it was. Multiple video essays were made about just how terrible the logo is [0].
It's really not a bad logo at all. It's a minor change. But once you get used to something, any change seems to be perceived as a threat. After a few months, I bet most people will get used to the new Safari UI and forget what they were even mad out.
And the new one appeals to a different market - personally I thought the old one was pretty ugly, especially with how it would shatter into a ton of spinning fragments when it was loading. It said "hello this is a safe space for Gamerz", and I am very much not a Gamerz.
Now it doesn't say that. And now I'm less inactive on the various discord chats I've been invited to. Most of which are not really full of Gamerz anyway - but staring at that very Gamerz logo for a few seconds every time I opened the thing made me not want to open it.
I don't think the logo is bad myself, it is a tiny change overall.
However, it's worth noting it was shown alongside wordmark, and the font used by that wordmark (a modified version of Ginto Nord Black) is... not great, in particular I think the letter "i" looks somewhat off in relation to other characters in word "Discord" - I don't know what's wrong with it, I'm not a typographer.
That said, because the wordmark is not seen often (pretty much the main page and the page announcing new logo), in practice it's fine. After logging in to Discord there is no real reason to go back to the main page.
Also, out of curiosity, I checked the videos you linked to, pretty much all consider the logo to be fine, but they all criticize the font or the letter "i" specifically (even the video called "discord's new logo is alright").
UI changes are only good if they improve usability. By far most UI changes these days are only done for the sake of looking different and "fresh", UI design has become purely fashion driven. Where's the scientific research and white papers going along with the Safari UI changes which clearly justify point by point why every single change makes sense, all backed by user studies? All I usually see is "emotional bullshit", not rational facts when UI designers talk about their work.
This used to be different during the 80's and 90's and I'm convinced that this change (turning UI design from science/engineering into fashion) is why we are deep in a UX crisis.
S/UI/clothing; your argument suggests the move to add color to fabric doesn’t make sense because it is simply fashion and has aught to do with the interface presented by a shirt. I think the parent comment nails it on subjectivity; the form of a thing is as much a part as its function. The luxury goods industry attests as much.
A functional tool can still look nice, but the function is still more important than the looks, otherwise it's just useless bling (the fashion industry is the perfect example though, they need to sell new stuff each year without actually changing anything important, all they can really do is change pointless details).
It's removing all buttoned and zippered pants from your store one year and replacing them with spandex one year, then coming back in 5 years and removing all spandex in favor of buttons and zippers.
i generally decide my own clothing. and... if I choose UI X... I would like to keep using it. At some point, I have to adopt someone else's ideas of 'good UI' in order to keep using a computer for 'every day' stuff. At some point, my online banking forces an upgrade, and that means 'new UI', whether I like it or not. I can keep wearing 70s flares and still go in and use a local bank if I chose to.
exactly. just fucking flipping the "contrast, on" switch buried in accessibility is not a panacea, and it is no substitute for a regular high-contrast UI on beeauty grounds alone! God forbid third-party apps even utilizing a native API for it.
> Where's the scientific research and white papers going along with the Safari UI changes which clearly justify point by point why every single change makes sense, all backed by user studies?
Are you being hyperbolic, or is this your actual position? That’s a ridiculously high bar that most organizations could not muster (and there’s no way Apple would release that stuff publicly anyway).
“Emotional bullshit” is so needlessly negative. We’re not machines — we have emotions! If a UI designer can change an interface to please me a little more, that’s a good thing.
I'm dead serious. Almost every piece of software (and hardware) in a computer is driven by incremental improvements backed by research. Operating system kernels, file systems, databases, 3D-APIs, etc... there are tons of publications, white papers, discussions, all happening in public how those components are improved over the decades. There are dead ends from time to time, but those fail, and those failures are also discussed, analyzed and eventually replaced with better solutions.
Why are user interfaces special in this regard? Where's the research, where are the white papers which clearly demonstrate what the advantages and disadvantages of specific user interface philosophies are?
As a UX designer & executive for 30 years, I’ll respond.
I agree that UX/UI is sometimes swayed more by fashion than empirical goals in service of the user. E.g., Jony Ive’s sad obsession with flat (featureless) design in iOS 7 is something we are still paying a price for.
However, the majority of UX research these days goes into things that are explicitly not in service of the user. Facebook doesn’t want you to be happy, they want you to keep using their product. Pay-to-play games don’t want you to have a good life, they want to squeeze micro-transactions from you at every opportunity.
Creating and propagating these manipulative dark patterns is a huge amount of leading-edge UX these days. It works. We know how to manipulate people towards goals that are antithetical to their well-being. The tech industry as a whole makes billions of dollars a day doing exactly this thing.
So yes, the research exists. UX continues to get much better. Just not in service of goals that you (or I, frankly) embrace.
This isn’t the fault of UX as a discipline or UX designers generally. Just like a coder intentionally optimizing a ratio of negative to positive stories to keep you fearful and scrolling, UX designers are driven by the same constraints — the product direction of their parent organizations.
Should UX designers individually, or as a discipline, rise up in revolt? Exactly as much, or as little, as programmers should. We’re all in the same boat. We can choose to serve the manipulators or not. Trouble is, there’s a fuckton of money in this manipulation, and you don’t have to spend much time here on HN to see how motivating that is, and the extent to which individuals will hold their noses and do what they’re told, as long as they’re motivated richly enough.
Ah shit is Ive really to blame for iOS 7? The OS and increasingly MacOS feels so dreary, lacking contrast, etc ever since. Animations also never recovered imo
It’s an awful shame, really. The man’s very talented, but he needed an editor. For years Steve Jobs was that editor, and he was brilliant at it. It was the two of them together that made Apple’s industrial design so damn good.
I agree about animations. I remember reading (probably here :D) a story from an Apple mobile engineer. He was on an elevator and Steve Jobs got in afterwards, and asked his notorious, “What are you working on?” The engineer opened the app on his phone to show Steve, who looked at it for one floor. He said, “Not enough texture,” and handed it back.
That, specifically, is the voice that Ive needed to do truly great work.
As others point out, the discipline is called Human-Computer Interaction and has a rich history. The best example in the field might be work on Fitts’ Law, such as https://www.yorku.ca/mack/hhci2018.html
For more practical examples of how websites can be redesigned through science, though, see https://www.nngroup.com/ and other resources online regarding scientific study of UI, user experience (UX), etc.
As parent is an actual user, I guess they'll be able to tell if the UI pleases them.
Edit:
> UX used to be driven by researchers like Bruce Tognazzini and Jakob Nielsen, who absolutely did studies with actual users to drive their designs.
Large [UI driven] companies still do this or hire agencies to do so (of which there are far more nowadays given the field is more mature). The fact that UX researchers haven't much visibility outside of UX -- Nielsen started blogging relentlessly at a point in time where there wasn't really anyone else doing that, and it was hoovered up by a wider audience that needed that knowledge. That doesn't mean in any way that he's unique, or that companies who can afford UX teams don't do this. Nielsen and Tognazzini -- they were popularisers, good at producing easily digestible writing for a general audience
I think very generally speaking, you have a point. But there are genuinely changes which make things worse.
For example, in Firefox 89 the contrast between the active tab and the inactive tab is so low that they are not distinguishable when the viewing angle to the screen or the lighting isn't perfect - looks fancy, but is not even acceptable by their accessibility standards.
On top of that they removed the blue bar that - as a crutch - indicated the active tab ?
I don't understand being this invested in such an obiously bad design decision - contrast is just neccessary.
All that being said, I found a bug report from 19 years ago, when Firefox was still called Phoenix, that complained about almost the exact same issue (sans the blue bar), and it got fixed.
I don't think "UX crisis" is neccessarily too strong a word.
A simple question. Why change something that already works for everyone? To solve which problem exactly?
I understand redesigning UIs when that redesign affords you some new capabilities for new features you want to add. I don't, however, understand redesigns that just move things around without adding anything new.
Android 12 is the prime example of this right now. Android 11, which I currently have on my phone, works fine. Its UI is well thought out. It's mature enough. The best thing you could do to it is leave it alone. But then someone at Google wanted a promotion, which meant redesigning an existing product, and now everything is opaque and has huge paddings for no good reason. And when they say "material you is customizable", I really hope it's so customizable I could just make it look like it did before they released this mess.
I have the opposite question: why do people let themselves get upset over UI changes? Why don’t people seem to take pride in their ability to adapt to change?
Change is inevitable. Even if we stipulate that change sometimes happens for bad reasons, like someone wanting a promotion, it’s not like bad reasons are suddenly going to disappear. People are still going to want promotions a year from now, or 10 years from now.
So designs are going to change. Why not take the approach of “let’s see how I can adapt to this”?
If changes are going to actively hamper use, why wouldn't people get worked up? This very article is a prime example of bad design affecting usability. Same with what I've seen of Android 12. Huge quick shortcut buttons that take up half the screen in the notification shade. 2 toggles where now I have 5. This is terrible. "live with it"? No
> why do people let themselves get upset over UI changes?
Because a UI is a tool I use to get something done. I don't like when the thing I've been using intuitively gets changed so I have to learn to use it again. It's a tool. It's not an art piece.
> Why don’t people seem to take pride in their ability to adapt to change?
Because this adaptation doesn't make their lives any better. It's change for the sake of change. It's like weather, except weather isn't quite controllable, but these changes are deliberately introduced by other people to mess with you for no good reason.
> Change is inevitable.
Progress is inevitable. Moving things around isn't progress. Progress implies adding something.
> Even if we stipulate that change sometimes happens for bad reasons, like someone wanting a promotion
The incentive structure in most IT companies is wildly wrong, I'll say that. No one at Google got promoted for maintaining an existing product because afaik promotion requires completing a "big project". So the easiest "big project" is a UI redesign. The second easiest is apparently an instant messaging app.
> Why not take the approach of “let’s see how I can adapt to this”?
Let's see. I adapted to this by avoiding installing any major updates unless absolutely necessary. Security patches are fine tho.
RE google; I can't remember who here stated otherwise but I believe that promotion policy (unspoken or otherwise) is no longer in effect and the rot has... presumably a different antecedent if we accept the premise anyways
A couple of reasons. First of all, the UI is just a means to an end. If it changes just for the sake of re-arranging, then people have to put in more effort to accomplish the same thing they were doing before. Sure, most people will eventually adapt. But, still feels like a waste of time when the updates offer no real increase to functionality, and sometimes seem to reduce it.
Secondly, the complaints come because, for many of us, our computers and phones feel like an extension of our offices and homes. We're staring at these screens for the majority of waking hours. The UI is basically part of the furniture. Many people would feel resentful if their chairs, couches, and doorknobs were changed without permission every year as part of some update. They're going to have similar feelings about the electronic portions of their spaces.
> So designs are going to change. Why not take the approach of “let’s see how I can adapt to this”?
Because there's huge costs for everyone involved...?
"let’s see how I can adapt to this”... Across how many devices? If a school lab updates, but I don't... I know have to learn something new when it's probably not necessary. If I update, and the school lab didn't... will my stuff be compatible? If I send a document to 'version Y', will I still be able to use it in my own local previous 'version X'?
If I'm a business, how do I support X changes across multiple customer bases? And for how long? I have support people to train to answer every stupid question from people who can't find ABC menu item any more because it's now rendered as 'abc' in a different menu area.
In MANY cases, there are compounded, massive costs to seemingly small/trivial/design changes.
> Why not take the approach of “let’s see how I can adapt to this”?
Our computers (and phones) are not fashion. They are tools, they are commoditized.
Let's change everything every two years: you screws and screwdrivers, controls in your car (with everyting going touchscreen, that's exactly what we'll soon get), buttons in your elevators, plane controls, heart monitors...
See, how stupid "let's wait and adapt to this" sounds?
Yes, it’s basically NeXT and is 100% a Jobs thing. The parent is correct that it’s had major ux issues since day 1 though. Interestingly they also mixed in terrible OS 9 ux (cough Finder, cough .DS_STORE).
Apple has always been like that with the exception of the Apple IIe.
Lately things have been taking even more of a nose dive though. Have you ever used Apple Music? There is no excuse for that product to be as bad as it is. It’s probably the worst mainstream consumer app in the market.
> Linked article refers to the changes in Safari as "thoughtless UI", which is a fairly common argument used against changes that people don't like. Against Apple, Microsoft, WinAmp, Reddit, etc. [...] someone saying "Whoa...this is different and I don't like different."
Back in the 90s Microsoft did put some research effort into Windows 95 and i do not really remember much of a blowback to the new UI despite being radically different from Windows 3.1. There were a lot of people complaining for the higher system requirements, how Win95 felt slower and even how "infantilized" DOS by forcing a GUI on them, but as far as the Windows UI itself goes pretty much everyone agreed was a big improvement to the point that other UIs started copying it to a functional level (ie. not just the window theme). There were even projects that recreated it on Windows 3.1 (Calmira).
To this day a lot of people consider Windows 95 to be one of the best and most well thought UIs.
(and honestly even though i think that overall Win2K is peak Windows, i do believe that ever since Win98 Microsoft started taking a form-over-function approach - see the toolbar buttons losing their relief and becoming shapeless elements indistinguishable from any other icon despite having different interaction with the user)
Sure, some reactions in UI changes tend to be "i do not like different" but that doesn't make all reactions so. And even then, do not dismiss the pure "i do not like different" reactions either: people spent time and energy to learn the UI they use, unless a change is a radical improvement (e.g. Win3.1 -> Win95) they are very justified to be pissed off at how the designers of the new UI wasted all that effort and nullified their knowledge for marginal gain (assuming there is any at all... or even worse, becoming harder to use like many overpadded mobile-first UIs look on desktops).
(the same applies to changes programmers often dislike too, like languages, APIs, frameworks, etc - for many users UI changes are the equivalent of Python2 to Python3, except as users are often powerless to do anything about UI changes, they happen way more often)
Multiple people putting several hours of though behind a feature is what we call design by committee. It doesn't matter how much time was spent if the committee is not capable of finding a unified direction to the proposed changes.
This one is a particularly bad idea. Regular people don't always understand the difference between the browser and the contents of a web page. This blurs that line even more for people who already have trouble seeing it in the first place.
There is zero reason to eliminate the tab bar and combine it with the address bar. It's idiotic and there should at least be an option to undo it.
I have accidentally close more tabs than ever before - and that's with me actively being aware of it and trying to be careful. It's a HORRIBLE user design.
Um, you don't need to waste copious amounts of dollars on designers and developers to know that it is a terrible idea to mix the address bar with the tabs.
It's a mess, and the vertical space you save is nominal compare to the increased frustration you will create for users when they have a tougher time being able to read their URL (something that's already an issue for everyone) and relegating the tabs to about half the horizontal space they could have had.
This is utterly pointless. It's not about being an old person resistant to change, it's about "fixing" something that was not broken and not even doing a lateral move, but totally regressing the utility it served.
Way too late to edit this, but please note that I erroneously referred to macOS 14 and 15...not sure how I didn't notice that before, but it should be macOS 11(.4?) and 12. My mind was thinking of iOS 14 and 15.
Alas, don't want anyone perpetuating that mistake. Cheers!
I love Apple and Safari and frequently provide bug reports to WebKit but I also absolutely hate the new safari and hope they reconsider it. I don’t mind change that is for the better and simply requires time to change muscle memory but this requires that and the end result is more clicks to do things, fewer static targets and the supposive benefits aren’t benefits for me at least. I find it most awful on iOS. The WebKit team is great and have to assume this direction to make the chrome of the app even smaller came from higher up. Hopefully more public backlash when the public betas come out so apple can rethink it. At the end of the day it’s still better than the alternatives for my use cases but hate that for me it’s a worse experience for something I use more than any other app.
This weird user interface décisions also completely negate all that talk about speed. On iOS you now have to tap through a submenu with animations to do anything. (Share, Private Mode, Reading list…) the tab groups are useless as they are also hidden behind more taps (on Mac having multiple windows makes way more sense anyways, maybe let people name those or somehow see them grouped in the current open pages view on the bottom). Every action now feels slower, because even if the page loads 10ms faster than in another browser, any useful interaction will end up in hundreds of milliseconds of animations.
I found that to just change the animations to fade instead of scale/pan. The duration is unaffected, it just makes it flatter and uglier. I wonder how fast things would feel if you could disable all animations, Windows XP style.
Reduce motion is an accessibility option made to… reduce motion. Changing the animation from swipe to crossfade accomplishes that quite neatly. It keeps everything in place as it switches.
I use it because moving the entire display can give me motion sickness. It’s doing exactly what it should do.
On Google Chrome since tabs are on their own row at the top of the window and maintain their size and position you can fling your mouse to the top of the screen easily hit them. On Safari since the address bar expands from the active tab, the size and position of the tabs are drastically changing. This makes selecting a tab more difficult. Additionally, since the size the address bar is wider the distance your mouse has to travel to select the neighbouring tab increases.
In the end this leads to more effort and bad ergonomics. I would love it if they just had the tabs on one row and address bar one row, until then I will stick with chrome on the desktop.
What happens with background images or gradients and the page bleed effect? Does Safari add additional padding to the top of the page to start top aligned background images from outside the viewport?
Consistency is the most important principle of good user interfaces. At first glance, changing the color of the same interface controls when switching pages seems like it would be very jarring.
Is there a way to downgrade to an earlier safari version? I'm about to get a new macbook, and I'm not particularly looking forward to having to deal with these UI changes ...
> Two things any user, no matter their tech-savviness, has needed in a browser. A wide Address bar to see exactly where they are, which webpage it’s loaded, the whole URL
This is clearly wrong and brings the judgement of the author into question.
People care that they are on "Facebook", "Google", "Youtube". They are not remembering that a stupid cat video belongs to URL: ?v=X2KsttcwC04
99% of HN users want to see the full URL, myself included.
However, we only care because we know what a URL is, and what the different components mean.
The average user doesn't understand the intricacies of URLs, nor should they have to. Parsing URLs unambiguously is hard even for programmers, and has been the source of numerous security vulnerabilities.
I think there should always be an option to show the full URL bar, but I can't really argue for it being the default behavior anymore.
I actually like this change. I’ve been using software for more than 25 years so I’ve lived the evolution of UI a bit and sometimes we feel that it’s a regression. But after a period of transition every time I liked the product more.
« The familiar is comfortable; change is upsetting ».
I can’t imagine being stuck with a Windows XP style for ever I can’t even believe having used it so many years and looking back it’s a disaster but back then people loved it and complained on every single update.
Why do browser updates keep fucking with the basic interface design? None of these changes are ever necessary.
If designers need to justify their jobs, fine. They should design the interface layout with modular components that can be entirely customized by the user.
IMO no user should ever be forced to use designs that are the product of meaningless fads in the design world.
From what I understand, the question is similar to “why do developers keep inventing new frameworks and new programming languages?”
Maybe developers are justifying their jobs. Maybe younger developers are excited about ditching the old crufty frameworks and languages, and exploring something new. Maybe every 10 years they reinvent the old wheels, and older developers are grumpy that the change was not needed in the first place.
Creating new browsers doesn't bother me at all. I think the appropriate analogy is something closer to changing the spelling of a language's keywords arbitrarily. Change for the sake of change, which is easy enough to adjust to, but introduces a transition period that costs time, for no good reason.
The backward compatibility effects aren't quite as bad in the browser context... except when the plugin API is affected.
Right: every profession does stupid stuff I am sure, and developers certainly waste a lot of time throwing away good code to start over again; but I think today we are talking about designers?
Browsers like this exist, but require configuration you're probably not willing to set up. If that's the case, then perhaps it's safe to say that most people just don't care enough.
Toolbars in mac apps tend to be really good about this. I didn't realize (coming from Windows) that many apps (Notes, Safari, Mail, Finder, others) are using the built-in toolbar system, which gives you a very large degree of customization. That experience seems to be the default, and even third-party apps like Fork often use it.
I have to admit I don't hate the Safari image he's picking on, but it's not great. It's a big shrug.
This line is gold though:
"Going through Big Sur’s user interface with a fine-tooth comb reveals arbitrary design decisions that prioritise looks over function, and therefore reflect an un-learning of tried-and-true user interface and usability mechanics that used to make for a seamless, thoughtful, enjoyable Mac experience."
Cross out "Mac" at the end and it applies even more to Windows than to the Mac. This lack of unified conceptual design, combined with a mindless ape-ing of mobile interfaces on larger machines with large screens and keyboards, describes the whole UI regression trend of the past 10-15 years. We went from thought-out utilitarian UIs with consistency to... a shitpile of random design choices made in isolation. Windows is by far the worst offender here, but Mac has been moving in the wrong direction too for a while.
A desktop is not a phone any more than a tractor is a car. Yes desktops and phones have similar chips in them, but their role and use case in the larger ecosystem is very different.
Desktop/laptop isn't dead either. There are many more PC machines today than there were in the 1990s at the height of the original "PC era." There are just even more phones and tablets (and IoT devices, and voice assistants, and smart cars, and...), and globally the PC's percentage of the market has declined quite a bit. In absolute terms the ecosystem is larger than ever and these machines are used to create virtually everything in our world.
New Safari design really reminds me Internet Explorer 9 and 10. It also had tabs right to the address bar. Back then I was amazed with the idea, but looking at window icons taking massive horizontal space I became disappointed. Still tried to use it though, but it quickly became clear that there just not enough horizontal space with 720p monitor to fit more than 2 tabs while still understand what is open.
I don’t really care about the address bar being small, but I dislike that you can’t open too many tabs at a time. IMO you should be able to see at least the favicon even when you have 15+ tabs open.
Am I the only person who likes this change? Normally, I’d have 4-5 tabs that I keep switching between fairly often and then 20-xx most of the time useless, de facto bookmarks. I use a keyboard shortcut with fuzzy find to pick the right one.
Reclaiming the address bar space to cram more tabs on the screen is a marginal gain, at least in my case.
I like this change as well. I don't use tabs at all, I use pinch to show all tabs and switch more often than having to align my mouse along the top of the screen to switch to a tab after reading the text. It's similar to the KonMari method for laying out your things.
I’ve not tried 15 yet, but I really like the idea of named groups of tabs. I have groups of stuff in windows for things that I’m researching and i hate having to open and look at every minimised window to see if that is the group of tabs I’m looking for as it’s often hard to tell from whatever tab url I left that window at before i minimised to the dock.
Workona works for uses cases like you, the only time that gets annoying is when you are using firefox containers. So I appreciate the new UI (didn't tried it yet) but seems that somehow fits my current workflow.
I like it as well, for the same reason: I usually only have 2 to 4 browser tabs open and the new display works very well for users like me. I usually focus on some task or activity, and like to keep my working environment tidy. I have worked with many people who keep a huge number of tabs and perhaps browser windows open - that would bug me, but each to their own…
So, I didn’t like the new interface at first, but now I really like it. On my M1 MacBook Pro I really like the ability to run a few iPadOS apps, and the watch/phone/iPad/laptop handoff experience is also very good. I am very happy with the beta OS releases from last week.
What I find most interesting in this discussion is that it implicitly hinges on how each of us organises and browses information. For example, some people are good at recalling stuff that they have seen before, so bookmarks and search will work well for them.
At the same time, other people can handle a lot of information but only as long as it is readily present in front of them. Hide that information away and it is as if it never existed. Tools that depend on their ability to recall information will fail them. Tools that give them the ability to keep that information available and visible will make them shine.
It seems to me as if some OP/commenters fail to realise that not everyone uses browsers the same way, in turn making assumptions that things make no sense on that basis, e.g tabs as history va tabs as actively used documents, vertical tabs saving space when fullscreen-ish but not with side by side windows, or having multiple windows each with a few tabs vs a single window with hundreds, single display vs multihead, browser as quasi-OS vs browser as web browser (!) with OS as OS and native apps, laptop vs desktop, or anything in between or beyond that I could not think of right now.
Personally I'm glad Safari isn't yet another Chrome-like UI. I did not upgrade to the beta, but it seems to me the choices made would make sense for the way I use a browser on a laptop or desktop.
It just feels like another flamewar, which I can safely ignore while I continue enjoying my daily driver browser.
I'll have to give it more time but so far I like the change.
Typically I have dozens of tabs open, so at first blush it might seem that the redesign wouldn't work for me at all, and that would be true if I didn't adjust my tab habits.
What I've done is swept those dozens of tabs into a handful of purpose-oriented tab groups. I don't really need all of those tabs open at all times, all I really needed is somewhere to put them that's more ephemeral and has less management overhead than bookmarks. As a result, most groups only have a few tabs open and pose no problem with the new UI.
Theoretically, this approach may also have the benefit of improving focus. Because online message boards and the like live in my "general" tab group, when I'm switched to my "programming" tab group I'm soft-locked out of those sites by way of reduced accessibility, making it harder to drift off of my current task when googling for documentation, etc.
I’ve started to shift to this workflow too. There is content that I use once a week yet the tabs don’t always stay the same so the tab group paradigm is much better than committing everything to bookmarks and having to keep them updated.
I'm with you. Here's what it comes down to: I use an internet browser maximized, usually. All monitors are wider than they are tall. Thus, vertical screen real estate is at a higher premium than horizontal real estate. Thus, control/chrome elements of the operating system, browser, etc should minimize vertical pixel usage in favor of horizontal usage in order to allow content to assume as many pixels as possible. E.g, move the operating system application/task bar from the default bottom of the screen to the left or right, integrate the address bar and tabs into the same vertical pixels, etc.
The reality is, I've never seen anyone stay productive with more than 5 or 6 tabs, not to mention battery and CPU utilization issues. The brain can only multitask so much, and none of the browsers are good at managing more than, say, a dozen tabs, so why not reclaim some vertical real estate and drop that number to six or so? If you really need the extra tab space (or, to see the full web address at all times, which is even more strange), I think that should be behind a Preferences option. Safari's design makes sense to me.
Of course, Safari probably wont make it configurable, but I hope we see this design trend also happen in Firefox, and while I won't opt for it, lets make it opt-out.
I really like the new design on my 11inch MacBook. I don't use the tab bar, I use expose for tabs by pinching my fingers and there's a great view there to switch tabs.
373 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 278 ms ] threadIt's those kind of UI ideas that look great on a mockup, but do not work in reality with real data and real users, those that open 35 tabs—behaviour encouraged by macOS windowing system by the way—and now all of those are crammed into a ludicrously small space that's constantly moving around.
I don't know what Apple were thinking there. Let's not call it UX, this is designers changing for change's sake at the expense of user experience. I'm struggling to see how is it justifiable in any way.
That is close to stating that those that open fewer than 35 tabs aren’t real users and, further between the lines, that those people can be ignored.
However I think, but don’t have data to confirm it, that they should be catered for and that “those that open 35 tabs” are a vocal minority.
This is the first time I’ve ever even considered the possibility that someone is capable of using a browser with only one or a few tabs open at a time. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure they exist, but having a million tabs open is so ingrained in how I consume information on the internet I suppose I kind of forgot it’s possible to do it any other way.
It makes me wonder if I’ve ever had only one tab or window open at a time? Maybe in the 90s? I don’t remember AOL having “tabs” the way browsers do now but I think you could have multiple windows open.
I’m terrified of the next redesign of spaces.
Edit:
[1] For example if I want to load new comments in a HN thread I'm reading.
I don’t even remember when was the last time I clicked the reload button. I just press command + R.
I understand that less experienced users may find this confusing though. Although saying that i think anyone can learn Cmd-R and Cmd-W, and would be better off for it.
I agree with the article on the tab/address bar merge being bad though.
This is how far UX discussion has fallen since the early 00s. We went from talking about affordances, discoverability, and "principle of least surprise" to fashion. "I like it to look clean. Less chrome, and let the users eat shortcut keys, hamburger menus, and gestures."
The only thing my comment was about is the practice of imagining non-computer-expert people to be mindless zombies who don't know basic stuff. Cmd+C, Cmd+V, and Cmd+R are one of the most popular shortcuts in computers, known by people who aren't computer experts. Just because something is done with the keyboard, doesn't mean it's some l33t knowledge exclusive to "power users". But computer professionals often talk about "casual users" as stupid, probably to feel better about themselves, because they know all that oh-so-advanced-hard stuff.
So yes, just like a "copy" button would be a waste of space, when Cmd+C is so widespread, a "refresh" button is similar in that regard.
Apple would be the last company to optimize for power users.
Unfortunately, I can’t recall one, and it seems to me that refreshing a page in 2021 has become a niche feature reserved for IT guys who know how HTTP works.
I still plan to stay with my Mac because of the ecosystem. I’m one of the few who seems to actually like Windows 10. There are warts in Microsoft’s software, just as there are in Apple’s. But I like having my iPhone integrated with my Mac. The only option on Windows is Android phone integration. I’m trying to remove myself from Google’s ecosystem, though.
I wish Firefox wouldn't excessively drain the battery on macOS, and Chrome wouldn't excessively drain personal data to Google, and Brave wouldn't excessively violate the trust of its users.
As of today, there's not a single browser on macOS that I don't strongly dislike. Looks like Safari won't improve soon.
If it's in fact an API limitation, why bother trying yet another blocker? After your reply, I did a quick search for Adguard and found this:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Adguard/comments/nahkk4/adguard_not...
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/adguard-for-safari/id144014725...
An ad blocker has access to extremely invasive data and Adblock wants me to pay them a subscription so they can get my PII and associate it with my browsing?
It is also not Open Source so I can't rely on the hope that someone smarter than me would have caught its dirty tricks.
I use Safari for a tiny subset of my browsing due to this gaping hole...
https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdGuardForSafari
What UI designer thought taking away more space for the tab bar was a good idea? Does that person even use a web browser?
Even just the WebKit commits with Apple engineering contacts is enough to build a whole company around...
A lot of times, you can end up with amazing new ideas that way, but sometimes a change based on ego / "that person is just so brilliant" is just bad. The tab bar thing is going to be Touch Bar 2.0, I think.
The question is, how long is Apple going to push it? I was hopeful the Touch Bar would die with M1 Macs...
I doubt Apple's inner workings are simplistic in such a way that one person with some sort of clout pushed this with no further thought.
At the end of the day this is just speculation but purely negative speculation is just some form of populism/FUD and makes everything worse.
Maybe Apple has decided to nudge users in the direction of Marie Kondo; if a tab does not spark joy get rid of it.
For me, whenever I switch tasks or activities, I usually quit out of safari and restart it. I like to concentrate on a single activity and not flit around trying to do many things at once. Maybe Apple is trying to healthier use of devices, as in providing Screen Time usage reports.
For the highly-organized, I hear there is a "tab group" concept, for additional joy. Not sure how that "plays" with multiple windows.
I'm thinking of going with Vivaldi if I do, and Firefox secondarily.
A reasonable conclusion is that macOS isn’t apple’s priority. Meanwhile with WSL and Terminal Microsoft is pushing hard at developers. apt get is a better system than home brew and always has been. Vote with your wallets.
Personally I’m very happy with MacOS and think Big Sur is a great iteration, I really like the look and feel, and the attention to detail to UI that I find lacking in alternatives. But that’s the beauty of choice, not everyone has to agree!
I’m always baffled that Homebrew is seen as the standard macOS package manager. MacPorts has existed for many more years. It behaves more similarly to package managers on other operating systems without weird symlink tricks. It doesn’t send analytics to Google. It has over 25,000 active ports (Homebrew doesn’t seem to publish its formulae count but SO threads seem to indicate something in the region of 4,000). To each their own, but I highly recommend anyone reading this to give MacPorts a try.
However, I’ve learned a lot since that time, so perhaps macports would work just fine for me now.
Because the UI changes they have made there (new Start menu, centred task icons) make the OS look very similar to the so called abandoned macOS.
windows 11 feels like KDE made by a random tasteless trainee
they don't even support tabs on things like File Explorer, you have to swallow that useless and ugly Ribbon interface
and their taskbar-dock-wanabee is miles behind the mac's dock
and let's not talk about the top menu bar, mac os system tray is far more useful and customizable than the one on windows
and let's not talk about the notification center
and many more details that make the difference
windows still carry multiple generations of UIs, even on Windows 11
But let's be fair and note that there quite certainly a lot of very proud, considerate, intentional designers and developers who are behind this change. People who probably put thousands (millions?) multiples of "thought" in considering the changes, versus someone saying "Whoa...this is different and I don't like different." The whine about site colors bleeding into the chrome seem particularly subjective, yet they're presented as if they're objective truths.
I use a macOS beta 15 device beside a 14 device, all day every day. At first install it was jarring, but then I became acclimated to it and it's fine. Tab groups are fantastic. I appreciate the aesthetics of chrome bleed, but that's just my subjective opinion. My only complaint about the browser is that it's crash-prone right now.
Thoughts maybe, but did they ask users what they wanted? Did they run usability studies to verify that these changes make sense? I can't imagine that they did. Certain UI changes in macOS, Windows, etc. are so obviously bad (and are eventually changed) that no matter how much they thought about it, they didn't care to check what users thought.
For instance the address bar on here is a canonical truth and is the linchpin of the experience. See how every time a browser touches it (e.g. Chrome truncating the address) is met with mobs of the angry. Many users -- including even "power" users -- seldom interact with the address bar. Nor is it verification of anything much. It simply isn't that important anymore.
Another comment mentions that the reload button is two clicks away, which is a fair point but that everyone who actually uses reload (generally developers -- zero web apps should ever require the user to hit reload) use a keyboard shortcut.
Eh.
"Certain UI changes in macOS, Windows, etc. are so obviously bad (and are eventually changed)"
True. At the same time, every UI change of anything ever has yielded a firestorm of criticism and pushback. And more times than not the new design was better and people acclimate to it and eventually prefer it. I judge nothing on initial reception.
I interact with the address bar every time I go to page or site. It is my single most interfaces with the browser after the sites themselves.
And that it isn’t much use for verification is exactly the reason why people advocate that it should display all information!
Edit: point proven
I actually didn't know iOS had this, I only know about FireFox on Android and it asked me if I wanted to opt in before thrusting it upon me. That's a good way to make major UI changes.
Because it is. Ultimately, your comfort is the only thing that matters when you're using a computer (particularly Macs). If something doesn't operate in the way that you want it to, why is that not a valid argument for replacing it?
This is Apple we're talking about, the last time they asked users about something is when they failed to litigate Corellium for virtualizing their software.
Readability is objective. It can be measured. They keep bending themselves backwards to get out of a problem they inflicted upon themselves.
A web browser should be readable first.
Run a study and then talk. Otherwise it's just subjective observations.
Further, we're talking about page theme spreading to the chrome of the browser. It makes the chrome less important than the page contents. It seems they're putting "readability" focus exactly where it should be.
Have they? The base of your argument is a classic appeal to authority. They're "very proud, considerate, intentional" designers so they must be right and everybody else wrong.
Where's the data? Aren't unhappy users valid enough data to demonstrate a downgrade in user experience?
Contriving a straw man to argue a position does no good.
I specifically took issue with claims that it's thoughtless. That in no way says it's right or wrong [1], but I'm extraordinarily certain that a lot of people thought long about every detail of this, they probably argued and different people had different takes, and we can see the results of that process. Trying to casually dismiss all of that as thoughtless is gross.
> Aren't unhappy users valid enough data to demonstrate a downgrade in user experience?
Unhappy users aren't proof of much at all but that people really dislike change, and that you can't please all of the people all of the time. The eventual net result is an entirely different thing.
And again, the net might be positive and it might be negative. I've made zero assessment of that. I happen to be a pretty malleable user and I just flow with whatever, adapting to whatever various platforms demand I use.
[1] Although notions of right and wrong depend upon the inputs to your assessment. e.g. often we'll some users feel that a certain function or trait is a first class, primary element, while it isn't to others. What is right for one can be wrong for another. Seldom is it universal. Every design of any complexity is wrong for some subset of users.
For the sake of conversation though, yeah, I'd argue that Safari is the most thoughtless among the mainstream browsers. Compared to Firefox, Edge, Chrome and even Brave or Vivaldi, Safari is a less compatible, less up-to-date, less secure and less cared-about experience.
It has been running for centuries. It’s called typography. Its rules are not arbitrary and legibility is the most important one.
No need for scare quotes around readability. It’s a science.
There’s a latitude of contrast ratio between which human eyes can comfortably withstand and discern tones. It varies across individuals, of course, but not as much as you might think. No human sees ultraviolet, for example. And even if you have 20/20 eyesight, you need to design for a much wider spectrum of the Bell curve if you care at all about accessibility.
You might be interested in checking the history and methods behind CIE 1931. Also, “The Elements of Typographic Style” is a deep but fascinating book.
Compare the job of this algorithm, having to deal with a crazy amount of possible color combo, to that of an experienced UX designer making just a dark and light theme, both thoroughly tested, and you can begin to grasp the trouble they’ve put themselves into.
Your opinion is objective. Opinions you don't like are subjective.
Sorry but this is how I read it. In my late years, there's little I fear more than such authoritarian claims.
Not everyone sees things the same way. And I mean that in the most literal sense possible
And this been done. There’s a minimum contrast that works for comfortable reading for most people. That’s not controversial, or at least, it shouldn’t be.
There is a strong argument for user interface stability. People don't just learn user interfaces, they seep into people's unconscious and muscle memory. It can take a while to learn the idiosyncrasies of a user interface and making changes should have a string justification.
It should be noted that people who are paid to design user interfaces are not paid to use them. Their incentives are to create and tinker. This is a disincentive to do what is often needed: nothing or very slow change.
It’s just like the idea that you first eat with your eyes. For example, eggs with yellow yolks and orange yolks taste the same in blinded tests, but when people can see the eggs they usually go for the orange ones. Periodic UI design updates are needed so that people don’t associate a dated GUI with a dated product.
The worst part was, often functionality that was well loved was scraped because there wasn’t time to work it into this redesign. It turned out they would do that on purpose so people would complain so they could go to their higher ups with complaints in hand to justify budget money for a new round of ui design work. Rinse repeat.
Did you get them to confirm this hypothesis? Or did you just figure it out by deduction and projection?
This is an honest question. I work on both sides - dev and design, and so am privy of the driving forces behind the projects.
Sometimes they could include personal agendas but are almost never limited to those.
And I have had cases where I had to ask questions in confidence to uncover the political forces.
Have you had the opportunity to ask such questions and confirm your suspicions?
You can disagree with the changes. You can make arguments (understand that other people also have arguments -- for instance on the importance of the address bar, or how a browser should work with 35 tabs, which fwiw they all are trash at that level), but if you need to demand that anyone with a different opinion is "thoughtless", you have no position at all.
What are your reasons for 'trashing' the importance of the address bar and the need for 35 tabs?
It had far more affordances and consideration than even modern Mac OS, and it showed by (lack of) this commentary against it.
In my experience it’s usually one person’s vision behind major design changes (good or bad). It may be “discussed” so long as the discussion doesn’t deviate from boss’s vision (or you’re not a fit for the project).
The Discord logo redesign was one of those logos that elicited a very odd amount of outrage for what it was. Multiple video essays were made about just how terrible the logo is [0].
It's really not a bad logo at all. It's a minor change. But once you get used to something, any change seems to be perceived as a threat. After a few months, I bet most people will get used to the new Safari UI and forget what they were even mad out.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=discord+new+log...
Now it doesn't say that. And now I'm less inactive on the various discord chats I've been invited to. Most of which are not really full of Gamerz anyway - but staring at that very Gamerz logo for a few seconds every time I opened the thing made me not want to open it.
It's currently a light purple circle with a white blob in the middle, I often can't find it
However, it's worth noting it was shown alongside wordmark, and the font used by that wordmark (a modified version of Ginto Nord Black) is... not great, in particular I think the letter "i" looks somewhat off in relation to other characters in word "Discord" - I don't know what's wrong with it, I'm not a typographer.
That said, because the wordmark is not seen often (pretty much the main page and the page announcing new logo), in practice it's fine. After logging in to Discord there is no real reason to go back to the main page.
Also, out of curiosity, I checked the videos you linked to, pretty much all consider the logo to be fine, but they all criticize the font or the letter "i" specifically (even the video called "discord's new logo is alright").
This used to be different during the 80's and 90's and I'm convinced that this change (turning UI design from science/engineering into fashion) is why we are deep in a UX crisis.
Good design is a balance of many factors.
This is true only if usability is all you care about.
In the real world people like things with good aesthetics, and like beautiful things, and it’s important for Apple to make things that users like.
If looks didn’t matter every user interface and website would be plain and high-contrast.
Are you being hyperbolic, or is this your actual position? That’s a ridiculously high bar that most organizations could not muster (and there’s no way Apple would release that stuff publicly anyway).
“Emotional bullshit” is so needlessly negative. We’re not machines — we have emotions! If a UI designer can change an interface to please me a little more, that’s a good thing.
Why are user interfaces special in this regard? Where's the research, where are the white papers which clearly demonstrate what the advantages and disadvantages of specific user interface philosophies are?
Could you please point to the research in support of this statement? Specifically, the "almost every" part?
> Where's the research
Do a web search for "human-computer interaction research."
I agree that UX/UI is sometimes swayed more by fashion than empirical goals in service of the user. E.g., Jony Ive’s sad obsession with flat (featureless) design in iOS 7 is something we are still paying a price for.
However, the majority of UX research these days goes into things that are explicitly not in service of the user. Facebook doesn’t want you to be happy, they want you to keep using their product. Pay-to-play games don’t want you to have a good life, they want to squeeze micro-transactions from you at every opportunity.
Creating and propagating these manipulative dark patterns is a huge amount of leading-edge UX these days. It works. We know how to manipulate people towards goals that are antithetical to their well-being. The tech industry as a whole makes billions of dollars a day doing exactly this thing.
So yes, the research exists. UX continues to get much better. Just not in service of goals that you (or I, frankly) embrace.
This isn’t the fault of UX as a discipline or UX designers generally. Just like a coder intentionally optimizing a ratio of negative to positive stories to keep you fearful and scrolling, UX designers are driven by the same constraints — the product direction of their parent organizations.
Should UX designers individually, or as a discipline, rise up in revolt? Exactly as much, or as little, as programmers should. We’re all in the same boat. We can choose to serve the manipulators or not. Trouble is, there’s a fuckton of money in this manipulation, and you don’t have to spend much time here on HN to see how motivating that is, and the extent to which individuals will hold their noses and do what they’re told, as long as they’re motivated richly enough.
https://www.dezeen.com/2013/06/10/new-apple-ios-software-fla...
It’s an awful shame, really. The man’s very talented, but he needed an editor. For years Steve Jobs was that editor, and he was brilliant at it. It was the two of them together that made Apple’s industrial design so damn good.
I agree about animations. I remember reading (probably here :D) a story from an Apple mobile engineer. He was on an elevator and Steve Jobs got in afterwards, and asked his notorious, “What are you working on?” The engineer opened the app on his phone to show Steve, who looked at it for one floor. He said, “Not enough texture,” and handed it back.
That, specifically, is the voice that Ive needed to do truly great work.
For more practical examples of how websites can be redesigned through science, though, see https://www.nngroup.com/ and other resources online regarding scientific study of UI, user experience (UX), etc.
> If a UI designer can change an interface to please me a little more, that’s a good thing.
Without observing actual users, how do you know if you are pleasing them, or just pleasing yourself?
Edit:
> UX used to be driven by researchers like Bruce Tognazzini and Jakob Nielsen, who absolutely did studies with actual users to drive their designs.
Large [UI driven] companies still do this or hire agencies to do so (of which there are far more nowadays given the field is more mature). The fact that UX researchers haven't much visibility outside of UX -- Nielsen started blogging relentlessly at a point in time where there wasn't really anyone else doing that, and it was hoovered up by a wider audience that needed that knowledge. That doesn't mean in any way that he's unique, or that companies who can afford UX teams don't do this. Nielsen and Tognazzini -- they were popularisers, good at producing easily digestible writing for a general audience
I think the problem is everyone on here hates it when stuff they use changes and that’s all.
For example, in Firefox 89 the contrast between the active tab and the inactive tab is so low that they are not distinguishable when the viewing angle to the screen or the lighting isn't perfect - looks fancy, but is not even acceptable by their accessibility standards. On top of that they removed the blue bar that - as a crutch - indicated the active tab ?
I don't understand being this invested in such an obiously bad design decision - contrast is just neccessary.
All that being said, I found a bug report from 19 years ago, when Firefox was still called Phoenix, that complained about almost the exact same issue (sans the blue bar), and it got fixed.
I don't think "UX crisis" is neccessarily too strong a word.
I understand redesigning UIs when that redesign affords you some new capabilities for new features you want to add. I don't, however, understand redesigns that just move things around without adding anything new.
Android 12 is the prime example of this right now. Android 11, which I currently have on my phone, works fine. Its UI is well thought out. It's mature enough. The best thing you could do to it is leave it alone. But then someone at Google wanted a promotion, which meant redesigning an existing product, and now everything is opaque and has huge paddings for no good reason. And when they say "material you is customizable", I really hope it's so customizable I could just make it look like it did before they released this mess.
Change is inevitable. Even if we stipulate that change sometimes happens for bad reasons, like someone wanting a promotion, it’s not like bad reasons are suddenly going to disappear. People are still going to want promotions a year from now, or 10 years from now.
So designs are going to change. Why not take the approach of “let’s see how I can adapt to this”?
Because a UI is a tool I use to get something done. I don't like when the thing I've been using intuitively gets changed so I have to learn to use it again. It's a tool. It's not an art piece.
> Why don’t people seem to take pride in their ability to adapt to change?
Because this adaptation doesn't make their lives any better. It's change for the sake of change. It's like weather, except weather isn't quite controllable, but these changes are deliberately introduced by other people to mess with you for no good reason.
> Change is inevitable.
Progress is inevitable. Moving things around isn't progress. Progress implies adding something.
> Even if we stipulate that change sometimes happens for bad reasons, like someone wanting a promotion
The incentive structure in most IT companies is wildly wrong, I'll say that. No one at Google got promoted for maintaining an existing product because afaik promotion requires completing a "big project". So the easiest "big project" is a UI redesign. The second easiest is apparently an instant messaging app.
> Why not take the approach of “let’s see how I can adapt to this”?
Let's see. I adapted to this by avoiding installing any major updates unless absolutely necessary. Security patches are fine tho.
Secondly, the complaints come because, for many of us, our computers and phones feel like an extension of our offices and homes. We're staring at these screens for the majority of waking hours. The UI is basically part of the furniture. Many people would feel resentful if their chairs, couches, and doorknobs were changed without permission every year as part of some update. They're going to have similar feelings about the electronic portions of their spaces.
Because there's huge costs for everyone involved...?
"let’s see how I can adapt to this”... Across how many devices? If a school lab updates, but I don't... I know have to learn something new when it's probably not necessary. If I update, and the school lab didn't... will my stuff be compatible? If I send a document to 'version Y', will I still be able to use it in my own local previous 'version X'?
If I'm a business, how do I support X changes across multiple customer bases? And for how long? I have support people to train to answer every stupid question from people who can't find ABC menu item any more because it's now rendered as 'abc' in a different menu area.
In MANY cases, there are compounded, massive costs to seemingly small/trivial/design changes.
Our computers (and phones) are not fashion. They are tools, they are commoditized.
Let's change everything every two years: you screws and screwdrivers, controls in your car (with everyting going touchscreen, that's exactly what we'll soon get), buttons in your elevators, plane controls, heart monitors...
See, how stupid "let's wait and adapt to this" sounds?
Early Mac OS X had exactly these criticisms leveled at it, for years.
Also https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brushed_metal_(interface)
Lately things have been taking even more of a nose dive though. Have you ever used Apple Music? There is no excuse for that product to be as bad as it is. It’s probably the worst mainstream consumer app in the market.
Back in the 90s Microsoft did put some research effort into Windows 95 and i do not really remember much of a blowback to the new UI despite being radically different from Windows 3.1. There were a lot of people complaining for the higher system requirements, how Win95 felt slower and even how "infantilized" DOS by forcing a GUI on them, but as far as the Windows UI itself goes pretty much everyone agreed was a big improvement to the point that other UIs started copying it to a functional level (ie. not just the window theme). There were even projects that recreated it on Windows 3.1 (Calmira).
To this day a lot of people consider Windows 95 to be one of the best and most well thought UIs.
(and honestly even though i think that overall Win2K is peak Windows, i do believe that ever since Win98 Microsoft started taking a form-over-function approach - see the toolbar buttons losing their relief and becoming shapeless elements indistinguishable from any other icon despite having different interaction with the user)
Sure, some reactions in UI changes tend to be "i do not like different" but that doesn't make all reactions so. And even then, do not dismiss the pure "i do not like different" reactions either: people spent time and energy to learn the UI they use, unless a change is a radical improvement (e.g. Win3.1 -> Win95) they are very justified to be pissed off at how the designers of the new UI wasted all that effort and nullified their knowledge for marginal gain (assuming there is any at all... or even worse, becoming harder to use like many overpadded mobile-first UIs look on desktops).
(the same applies to changes programmers often dislike too, like languages, APIs, frameworks, etc - for many users UI changes are the equivalent of Python2 to Python3, except as users are often powerless to do anything about UI changes, they happen way more often)
Also, why does it matter how much time, money, brain power they spent on the changes? The only thing that matters is the outcome.
This one is a particularly bad idea. Regular people don't always understand the difference between the browser and the contents of a web page. This blurs that line even more for people who already have trouble seeing it in the first place.
I have accidentally close more tabs than ever before - and that's with me actively being aware of it and trying to be careful. It's a HORRIBLE user design.
It's a mess, and the vertical space you save is nominal compare to the increased frustration you will create for users when they have a tougher time being able to read their URL (something that's already an issue for everyone) and relegating the tabs to about half the horizontal space they could have had.
This is utterly pointless. It's not about being an old person resistant to change, it's about "fixing" something that was not broken and not even doing a lateral move, but totally regressing the utility it served.
Alas, don't want anyone perpetuating that mistake. Cheers!
There’s no way in iOS anymore to avoid all of the weird transition animations. Reduce motion hardly does anything at all anymore.
In fact, it’s even more jarring than with animations.
I use it because moving the entire display can give me motion sickness. It’s doing exactly what it should do.
On Google Chrome since tabs are on their own row at the top of the window and maintain their size and position you can fling your mouse to the top of the screen easily hit them. On Safari since the address bar expands from the active tab, the size and position of the tabs are drastically changing. This makes selecting a tab more difficult. Additionally, since the size the address bar is wider the distance your mouse has to travel to select the neighbouring tab increases.
In the end this leads to more effort and bad ergonomics. I would love it if they just had the tabs on one row and address bar one row, until then I will stick with chrome on the desktop.
We shouldn't neglect UI productivity just because there are shortcuts.
The nav bar currently feels a bit buggy but it isn’t released yet.
Consistency is the most important principle of good user interfaces. At first glance, changing the color of the same interface controls when switching pages seems like it would be very jarring.
This is clearly wrong and brings the judgement of the author into question.
People care that they are on "Facebook", "Google", "Youtube". They are not remembering that a stupid cat video belongs to URL: ?v=X2KsttcwC04
However, we only care because we know what a URL is, and what the different components mean.
The average user doesn't understand the intricacies of URLs, nor should they have to. Parsing URLs unambiguously is hard even for programmers, and has been the source of numerous security vulnerabilities.
I think there should always be an option to show the full URL bar, but I can't really argue for it being the default behavior anymore.
"A proper Tab bar, with as much horizontal space as possible, to be able to open a lot of tabs and read at least a small part of their titles."
Which suggests ignorance of vertical tabs.
I'm wondering if the author hasn't spent much time with the long tail of tech-savvy users. The emphasis added to "any" is unfortunate.
A fair chunk of Tridactyl users hide the address bar; I find I very rarely need to know that information.
Big Sur’s dialog boxes, menus, notifications are a mess. And now this Safari comical UI. Every single change has been for the worse.
Whoever is in charge of this, please, listen to feedback and change course. This is a disaster.
« The familiar is comfortable; change is upsetting ».
I can’t imagine being stuck with a Windows XP style for ever I can’t even believe having used it so many years and looking back it’s a disaster but back then people loved it and complained on every single update.
So nothing new here …
If designers need to justify their jobs, fine. They should design the interface layout with modular components that can be entirely customized by the user.
IMO no user should ever be forced to use designs that are the product of meaningless fads in the design world.
Maybe developers are justifying their jobs. Maybe younger developers are excited about ditching the old crufty frameworks and languages, and exploring something new. Maybe every 10 years they reinvent the old wheels, and older developers are grumpy that the change was not needed in the first place.
The backward compatibility effects aren't quite as bad in the browser context... except when the plugin API is affected.
You can see it in this article: https://9to5mac.com/2021/06/16/safari-in-macos-monterey-what... (image: https://9to5mac.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2021/06/how-s...)
Hopefully, they add back some of the missing customization options in a later release.
This line is gold though:
"Going through Big Sur’s user interface with a fine-tooth comb reveals arbitrary design decisions that prioritise looks over function, and therefore reflect an un-learning of tried-and-true user interface and usability mechanics that used to make for a seamless, thoughtful, enjoyable Mac experience."
Cross out "Mac" at the end and it applies even more to Windows than to the Mac. This lack of unified conceptual design, combined with a mindless ape-ing of mobile interfaces on larger machines with large screens and keyboards, describes the whole UI regression trend of the past 10-15 years. We went from thought-out utilitarian UIs with consistency to... a shitpile of random design choices made in isolation. Windows is by far the worst offender here, but Mac has been moving in the wrong direction too for a while.
A desktop is not a phone any more than a tractor is a car. Yes desktops and phones have similar chips in them, but their role and use case in the larger ecosystem is very different.
Desktop/laptop isn't dead either. There are many more PC machines today than there were in the 1990s at the height of the original "PC era." There are just even more phones and tablets (and IoT devices, and voice assistants, and smart cars, and...), and globally the PC's percentage of the market has declined quite a bit. In absolute terms the ecosystem is larger than ever and these machines are used to create virtually everything in our world.
The only thing really missing are disclosure triangles: https://imgur.com/a/6AkHI7d
A sidebar like that would serve tab-hoarders better than either the new or old tab bars, while coexisting with the new UI.
Now that’s gonna be annoying to design a webpage around.
Reclaiming the address bar space to cram more tabs on the screen is a marginal gain, at least in my case.
yes
So, I didn’t like the new interface at first, but now I really like it. On my M1 MacBook Pro I really like the ability to run a few iPadOS apps, and the watch/phone/iPad/laptop handoff experience is also very good. I am very happy with the beta OS releases from last week.
At the same time, other people can handle a lot of information but only as long as it is readily present in front of them. Hide that information away and it is as if it never existed. Tools that depend on their ability to recall information will fail them. Tools that give them the ability to keep that information available and visible will make them shine.
Personally I'm glad Safari isn't yet another Chrome-like UI. I did not upgrade to the beta, but it seems to me the choices made would make sense for the way I use a browser on a laptop or desktop.
It just feels like another flamewar, which I can safely ignore while I continue enjoying my daily driver browser.
Typically I have dozens of tabs open, so at first blush it might seem that the redesign wouldn't work for me at all, and that would be true if I didn't adjust my tab habits.
What I've done is swept those dozens of tabs into a handful of purpose-oriented tab groups. I don't really need all of those tabs open at all times, all I really needed is somewhere to put them that's more ephemeral and has less management overhead than bookmarks. As a result, most groups only have a few tabs open and pose no problem with the new UI.
Theoretically, this approach may also have the benefit of improving focus. Because online message boards and the like live in my "general" tab group, when I'm switched to my "programming" tab group I'm soft-locked out of those sites by way of reduced accessibility, making it harder to drift off of my current task when googling for documentation, etc.
There's so much empty space on the address bar, and vertical space is typically expensive real estate.
The reality is, I've never seen anyone stay productive with more than 5 or 6 tabs, not to mention battery and CPU utilization issues. The brain can only multitask so much, and none of the browsers are good at managing more than, say, a dozen tabs, so why not reclaim some vertical real estate and drop that number to six or so? If you really need the extra tab space (or, to see the full web address at all times, which is even more strange), I think that should be behind a Preferences option. Safari's design makes sense to me.
Of course, Safari probably wont make it configurable, but I hope we see this design trend also happen in Firefox, and while I won't opt for it, lets make it opt-out.