macOS Monterey and iPadOS 15.1 Release Candidates Limit Safari Color Tab Bar Option to Compact View

[Janichsan]

The new design is so much better than the old for many reasons. People just can’t handle change. If only they’d stop listening to loud minorities and have some courage, they could actually innovate again.

Making interface elements stand out less and muddying the separation between content and interface is neither courageous nor innovative, it's just bad design.

 

[thewhitehart]

I wonder if there will be a separate option on Monterey and iPad for website tinting when scrolling like on the iPhone despite the colored tab bar being removed in standard view.

 

[Doodah7]

I wonder will Apple edit out the five minutes of pure hyperbole surrounding their Safari redesign in the WWDC presentation?

"Changes? What changes to Safari? No idea what you are talking about?...".

 

[Heat_Fan89]

I’ve gotten used to the compact tab bar with Safari on the iPad and I like it. However when I opened several tabs I didn’t notice any colors with the show color in tab bar enabled or disabled.

 

[coso]

I love the new compact bar design and colouring. It was so easy to adapt after just a few days. I really don't understand all the fuss. Every year is the same. People are just hard to adjust to change. They always prefer the old version of something. Weird. I love change

 

[Bustycat]

The new design for tabs suits ‘Compact’ well as the current tab is expanded much wider for showing an address bar. To me, it is way easier to distinguish which tab is the current one with ‘Compact’ rather than ‘Separate’ right now.

 

[randomthoughts]

The new design is so much better than the old for many reasons. People just can’t handle change. If only they’d stop listening to loud minorities and have some courage, they could actually innovate again.

Innovation is introducing the iPhone, or adding Rosetta to Mac OS X to transition from Mac OS 9 or features like Expose. True innovation seems magical. The color of tabs in Safari isn’t innovation. It was a usability experiment and it failed with the majority of people that tried it.

 

[falkon-engine]

Apple has sure been pressing that “undo” button lately.

Undo the butterfly keyboard, undo the Touch Bar, undo safari tabbing, undo the decision to only have TB ports. Undo the high end $1700 MacBook Pro price, undo RAM and storage upgradability, undo Intel inside.

 

[dbrose]

Damn, I kind of liked the colour tab bar with the standard tab layout. I wonder what the purpose of limiting that toggle is to the compact layout? If you don’t like it, toggle it off?

How do I get the compact layout? I liked the colour tab bar as well.

#update: Found it?

 

[Seanm87]

This will confuse a lot of casual people like my Dad who doesn't follow tech news.

Why it changes and then changes back again. Its a bit embarrassing for Apple.

 

[msackey]

I actually really like the new design of Safari for both the iOS and macOS platforms.

There is 1 thing (or a set of related things) that I would say should change and that is how iCloud tabs are accessed.

So, the new Safari distinguishes whether an iCloud tab is created as a group of tabs or if it is singularly standing out in the “Starting Page” portion. If the tab is singularly standing out, it will appear in the Starting Page under the name of the device.

However, if the iCloud tab is in a group of tabs, then you’ll access this from the Sidebar and it doesn’t distinguish which device the group of tabs was initially created.

Well, these two sets of things are oddly distinguish. I kinda do get why iCloud group of tabs doesn’t distinguish what device first created them because I guess the idea is it doesn’t matter.

But for the singularly standing out items (sorry for lack of better word) that shows up in “Starting Page”, why put them there? Why not put them in the sidebar where the iCloud tabs are also located?

I find that a bit bizarre….

EDIT:
Or how about this, instead of putting the singularly standing out tabs per device in the Starting Page, just put the device as a tab in the Sidebar and each singularly standing out tab can go under the device that it is associated with.

This way, we don’t have to go to 2 different places to access what are essentially the same category of stuff: iCloud tabs.

 

[ErikGrim]

This will confuse a lot of casual people like my Dad who doesn't follow tech news.

Why it changes and then changes back again. Its a bit embarrassing for Apple.

If it had been limited to just the beta period for Monterey no one would have noticed. It was disastrous to let this release to Big Sur users in advance. I'm sure there were pressing security updates involved, but this whole UI disaster should never have gone out to the general public in that state.

 

[VictorTango777]

There are too many variables which can affect the readability of the browser window elements:
Light vs Dark mode
Websites which change their color based on Light or Dark system setting
Wallpaper tinting in System Preferences
Tab coloring enabled or not

In addition to no longer being able to count on a consistent window appearance regardless of the content, all these visual bleed through effects open the door to blaming end users for opening the "wrong" webpage in Safari when coloring issues occur.