Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
macOS Monterey Beta 3: Apple Redesigns Safari Tab Interface Following Complaints
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
You're not alone. I adjusted to the new UX quite easily in Safari TP and iPadOS DB. IMO The traditional tab arrangement is a mess. People just don't like change. At least we have a choice though.I feel like I’m the only person that liked the change! Oh well, not a big deal to me at the end of the day am I’m one to never really have more than 5 tabs open and close them as soon as I’m done. I mostly appreciated how the interface stayed thin with more than one tab open. Oh well, can’t please everyone!
edit: as others have pointed out, there’s a choice between the two styles! Happy day
What’s the difference other than looks? To me having them on the top is worse mainly because if you only have one tab open the tab bar is still there. Is Safari the tab bar only shows up with multiple tabs.
I feel like I’m the only person that liked the change! Oh well, not a big deal to me at the end of the day am I’m one to never really have more than 5 tabs open and close them as soon as I’m done. I mostly appreciated how the interface stayed thin with more than one tab open. Oh well, can’t please everyone!
edit: as others have pointed out, there’s a choice between the two styles! Happy day
I definitely liked the new design – I thought it was a bold choice and pros and cons, but I was "ready" for it. (No question that offering the option is the best choice of all, though; you don't have to feel bad for the rest.)
Can we now fix iOS and put the address bar back at the top?
I feel like I’m the only person that liked the change! Oh well, not a big deal to me at the end of the day am I’m one to never really have more than 5 tabs open and close them as soon as I’m done. I mostly appreciated how the interface stayed thin with more than one tab open. Oh well, can’t please everyone!
edit: as others have pointed out, there’s a choice between the two styles! Happy day
Honestly I liked the Safari tab change as well. I didn't get to use it yet visually it made sense, to me at least. I mean we're already clicking on volume icon on a tab to mute sound playing on THAT tab which without that feature was a pain to find what site sound was coming from.
Look at how small the buttons are. You can fit way more stuff when everything isn’t huge like Big Sur.
No thanks. Looks worse and it’s the any more functional. All that wasted space for the bottom bar is bad. The tab bar needs that extra space because of crowded tabs.
I also like how it Safari if you have one tab open the tab bar is not there. No need to waste space like chrome where there a big empty row of nothing if you have one tab open.
You mean how it always was? The only difference is they’re rounded now and not rectangles
Somebody at Apple lost a bet, and other developers nearby are saying, “see, I told you they would hate it.”
That’s not good design. Text is horizontal. The tab bar is a tiny amount of vertical space with a lot of functionality because you have so much horizontal space to fit that text. You would waste much more space with a permanent sidebar for tabs. And those tabs would display far less text than the horizontal bar. Because you wouldn’t have the entire horizontal window space for text.
You should include the complains if your title suggests that this is a reaction to beta feedback.
I did not try it but felt that the original design may have had issues with usability. It might become difficult to grab the window to move it, once the top is filled with tabs. Complex websites could visually clash with the overlaid tabs, since not all sites are as clean as the ones shown during the big splash. And so on.
So it would have been nice to learn more about the feedback (some I get by reading the comments here)
But it looked clean and very Apple. And to those who want the address bar back at the top: I always struggled with it up there. Happy it moves down (as it has been on Windows phones - blasphemy)
I did not try it but felt that the original design may have had issues with usability. It might become difficult to grab the window to move it, once the top is filled with tabs. Complex websites could visually clash with the overlaid tabs, since not all sites are as clean as the ones shown during the big splash. And so on.
So it would have been nice to learn more about the feedback (some I get by reading the comments here)
But it looked clean and very Apple. And to those who want the address bar back at the top: I always struggled with it up there. Happy it moves down (as it has been on Windows phones - blasphemy)
Works fine in Edge. https://www.howtogeek.com/697986/how-to-enable-and-use-vertical-tabs-in-microsoft-edge/
There is tons of space on both sides of most web pages to have very verbose tabs. On my computer this very web site has 3" of space wasted on each side of the content.
Make an option if some dont like it, thats fine with me.
Until apple put icons on the favorites tab bar I will keep using chrome anyway.
Why the hell don't they do it ?
A real mystery for me
(the favorites tab bar is for me everyone "web main menu", and having favicons and 2 or 3 letters really improves it)
Why the hell don't they do it ?
A real mystery for me
(the favorites tab bar is for me everyone "web main menu", and having favicons and 2 or 3 letters really improves it)
lol, the new tab setup is most definitely not how it always was. The main reason IMO it looks so awful is because the tabs are now above the bookmark bar. If the tabs were below the bookmark bar, how it always was, then maybe it wouldn't look so bone jarringly eww.
More awful, unintuitive design. Scary things happening over at Apple. I think they’ve rested on their laurels a little too long - stock prices have made them lazy. They’re #1 and they seemingly just don’t care about good design anymore. Why would they? Release anything and it gets eaten up and loved by consumers. It doesn’t matter if it’s trash.
I like it as well but can definitely see why other do not.I feel like I’m the only person that liked the change! Oh well, not a big deal to me at the end of the day as I’m one to never really have more than 5 tabs open and close them as soon as I’m done. I mostly appreciated how the interface stayed thin with more than one tab open. Oh well, can’t please everyone!
edit: as others have pointed out, there’s a choice between the two styles! Happy day
Hmm. I don't need this. I can read quite well, no need for icons to mess it up for me.
This is expected! After opening a lot of tabs, they automatically resize so you see more tabs at once. At smaller sizes, there isn’t enough space to simultaneously allow easy switching between tabs and showing a close button, so you’ll need to hold down the command key to close one.
You can also go to Safari > Preferences > Tabs, and uncheck “Automatically collapse tab titles into icons” so tabs don’t become as small, which allows the close button to be always available.
I like having a clean area at the top of a window where I know that I can drag it to move the window. With applications that fill the title bar with toolbar buttons, it is not always easy to move a window. Depending on the number of toolbar buttons and the size of the window, it's not easy to know if you are going to move the window or activate some button.
In older versions of Safari, once the tab bar fills up, it would display a ">>" button at the end of the tab bar. Clicking on this ">>" button would display a popup list of all tabs. This worked much faster and took up less space than the Tab Overview page. In current versions of Safari, once the tabs shrink to the minimum size and more tabs are added, the tab bar starts expanding beyond the current window width, requiring scrolling to see everything. But scrolling the tab bar requires using either a mouse scroll wheel or trackpad gesture. I don't think that requiring a scroll wheel or multitouch gesture to scroll through a list is a good idea.
Apple has also done the same thing with the Wi-Fi menu bar icon in Big Sur, where you click to expand the list of Wi-Fi networks and wonder why a network you expect to see is not there. Remember when popup menus had arrows at the top and bottom? Not only could you easily see that additional items are available, but moving the mouse over those arrows would cause the list to scroll. Now instead of having obvious visual cues to see if something will scroll, users are expected to frenetically flick their fingers and scroll wheels everywhere to see if something happens.
In older versions of Safari, once the tab bar fills up, it would display a ">>" button at the end of the tab bar. Clicking on this ">>" button would display a popup list of all tabs. This worked much faster and took up less space than the Tab Overview page. In current versions of Safari, once the tabs shrink to the minimum size and more tabs are added, the tab bar starts expanding beyond the current window width, requiring scrolling to see everything. But scrolling the tab bar requires using either a mouse scroll wheel or trackpad gesture. I don't think that requiring a scroll wheel or multitouch gesture to scroll through a list is a good idea.
Apple has also done the same thing with the Wi-Fi menu bar icon in Big Sur, where you click to expand the list of Wi-Fi networks and wonder why a network you expect to see is not there. Remember when popup menus had arrows at the top and bottom? Not only could you easily see that additional items are available, but moving the mouse over those arrows would cause the list to scroll. Now instead of having obvious visual cues to see if something will scroll, users are expected to frenetically flick their fingers and scroll wheels everywhere to see if something happens.