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Compact Safari Tab Bar Returns in macOS Tahoe 26.4 and iPadOS 26.4

JulianL said:
I agree. I’m about to switch from a Windows PC to a Mac (a MacBook Pro). I’ve watched a lot of YouTube videos about MacOS to prepare myself and I think that the thing that’s going to bug me most is the lack of proper vertical tabs in Safari.

I always prefer to use built in apps if they are good enough and IMO Microsoft Edge does vertical tabs really well. Like you say, Safari’s sidebar is almost there, but as well as the issue you highlight (not being able to hide the horizontal tab bar) as far as I can tell it also doesn’t have the feature that Edge has where the sidebar (vertical tab bar) can be set to icon only so it only takes up a tiny bit of space on the left of the browser window but when you move the mouse pointer over it, it expands so that you can see the first part of the URLs for each tab. That setup works perfectly for me because I can mostly tell what the open tabs are just from the favicons visible when the sidebar is collapsed but when I mouse over to it to actually switch to a different tab I can see the actual URL to be sure I am switching to the tab I want. I really wish that Safari would implement that feature for its sidebar.
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so happy to hear this is coming back! I forgot it was removed, if I’m being honest, but I also dislike the design of the regular tab bar on Tahoe and iPadOS 26. Does anyone know why it was removed?

mansplains said:
While I can understand tab hoarding, I gag and recoil when it’s with horizontal tabs. No wonder you don’t know where you left off, when all you have are hundreds of tiny slices or favicons to navigate.
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This is why I use tab groups, personally.
 
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You love to see it. I requested this to Apple but doubted they would listen. Glad to be wrong, I’m gonna switch right back. Might even install the beta just to get it earlier.
 
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It's back! The only way to fly in Safari. Guess I can ignore the ongoing classic display tab bug in 26.
 
Great, now fix the mess that is bookmarks, favourites, tab group favourites, profiles, iCloud tabs etc. I finally tried to get around using these features (because Arc is really good in this respect) but it’s crazy how confusing this is in Safari.
 
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macrlz9 said:
Good! Giving two options to choose from is great. Now it's time to simply view options on iPhone. Offering three view options is unnecessary. The bottom tab bar was introduced 5 years ago and isn't going anywhere.
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I would only argue that a vertical tab bar would probably delight a lot of people. I’m not one of them, I love the compact tab bar, but it seems to be a growing thing.
 
Rank Sarpac said:
I would only argue that a vertical tab bar would probably delight a lot of people. I’m not one of them, I love the compact tab bar, but it seems to be a growing thing.
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Vertical tabs sounds interesting but I'm not sure that would work as well on iPhone. I use the sidebar on Mac and iPad.
 
Lol. When Compact tabs was introduced as the new default in a beta many years ago, people FREAKED out. Everyone allegedly hated it. Before public release, Apple reverted the default but kept Compact as an option. I've been using Compact since that first beta because I always loved it. Then suddenly it disappears this year, and people freak out AGAIN, that a secondary option everyone allegedly hated disappeared.

This is either a lesson in:
- People freak out over everything, or
- There are so many users that there are enough to create a user base for anything
 
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Great! This is one of the reasons why I haven’t updated to Tahoe! Good to know they’re bringing it back. Do we know if the same is true for iPadOS 26.4?
 
I just really wish it used the Liquid Glass UI similar to iOS's compact tab view.



 
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ttyRazor said:
What I actually want is true vertical tabs. The sidebar almost does it, except it doesn’t hide the horizontal tab bar when it’s open. I guess this might be close enough, but I’d rather just have the usual controls without the redundant tabs taking up precious vertical space
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I just tried the 26.4 beta Safari's Compact Tabs option. I didn’t try it the last time it was available. But it seems pointless: it just moves all the horizontally-aligned tabs into the URL field, which of course obscures the URL field, and arranges them horizontally in essentially the same manner as with the "Separate Tabs" option. It essentially turns the tabs into a URL field that has siblings.

The only advantage I see is that it frees up about 25-30 vertical pixels. That’s not minor on a 13-inch Macbook, but at the cost of destroying the URL field’s utility.

Why can’t Apple swallow their pride and show tabs similar to how it’s done in Chrome, which has a “Tabs” entry in the menu bar that lists the frontmost window’s tabs? Easy peasy. Safari's sidebar shows tabs in a similar list fashion, but it's a little clumsier approach.
 
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johnsawyercjs said:
It essentially turns the tabs into a URL field that has siblings.

The only advantage I see is that it frees up about 25-30 vertical pixels.
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Precisely.

johnsawyercjs said:
That’s not minor on a 13-inch Macbook,
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It's not minor on a 16" MacBook Pro either depending on what you're doing. If you need to work with multiple browser windows open at once ever pixel counts. Losing compact tabs affected me quite a lot in some work flows. Obviously one adjusts but it will be nice to have them back.

johnsawyercjs said:
but at the cost of destroying the URL field’s utility.
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I don't really see how it has that effect. Not for myself at least.

Really though there's no harm in it existing for those of us who enjoy it, no one else has to use it.
 
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Charlie Bonesx said:
I don't really see how it has that effect. Not for myself at least.
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I guess I prefer a full-sized URL field instead of the truncated view of URLs displayed in Compact Tabs. Sometimes it's interesting to ponder a full or nearly full URL, without having to scroll through it to see all of it. That may be an old habit acquired from having used web browsers since the first ones were released in the mid-1990s.
 
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Oberhorst said:
You love to see it. I requested this to Apple but doubted they would listen. Glad to be wrong, I’m gonna switch right back. Might even install the beta just to get it earlier.
Click to expand...

It is great that it’s back, it’s the option I will almost certainly use when moving from Windows to Mac in a couple of months time, but another part of me is disappointed at what I see as Apple’s bare minimum response here.

I’ve seen plenty of comments over the years including a few on this thread wishing that people using the sidebar for vertical tabs had the option to turn off horizontal tab display completely.

Apple clearly tasked a developer to work on the bit of the code base related to horizontal tabs and the address bar in order to reintroduce compact tabs. That would seem to me to have been the perfect opportunity, while those bits of the code were being worked on, to have added a third option that hides the horizontal tab bar (as is now done when switching to compact mode) but doesn't change the address bar mode from the default to the one that shows compact tabs. That would have given those people who want to manage their tabs entirely from the sidebar and not have any horizontal tabs at all exactly what they want for very little extra development effort.

Maybe Apple will do that at some point in the future but the fact it wasn’t done at the same time as this change makes me less optimistic that it will ever happen. I suppose that perhaps Apple isn't 100% happy with the functionality of the sidebar yet and might perhaps give an option to completely hide horizontal tabs to coincide with a more comprehensive overhaul of how tabs, tab groups, iCloud tabs etc are handled. I live in hope.
 
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Finally! It was so silly to remove the compact tabs in Safari in the first place. I can now hardly wait for macOS 26.4!…
 
Must have been the feedback I sent a couple weeks ago after I updated my iPad saying the compact tab bar was the last good innovative UI feature they came up with and that I will never be upgrading from Sequoia.
 
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