Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Safari 15 Extension for Mac Helps You Tell Which Tab Is Active

NightFox said:
I don't understand why it seems that this only became officially bad when John Gruber said it was?

It's not as if no one had noticed until the Daring Fireball article.
Click to expand...
I noticed, but didn't want to get distracted in the middle of doing something to figure out what my problem was. Gruber spelled it out very clearly.

Fortunately I realized I had 14.0.1 on another drive and copied it to current drive. Can't remove Safari 15, but was able to rename the old one to Safari 14 and put it in Applications folder. Probably not the latest version so not sure how to update it.
 
Last edited:
It’s sad that Apple’s UI/UX team is so bad now that you can’t even tell when an element is active. Like, what the actual hell is this? If a junior designer turned that in to me I’d virtually slap them on the back of the head and tell them to figure out what they’ve done wrong. Actually, now that I think about it, maybe that’s what’s happening here? But with public shaming.

MacRumors said:
Zhenyi also cautions that ActiveTab will not work reliably if you have so many tabs in a window that the tab bar becomes scrollable.
Click to expand...
Well that’s a hard no for me then. My browser session is non-scrollable for maybe the first five minutes and then it’s off to the races to see which happens first: Safari crashing or running out of 64GB of RAM (which also crashes Safari).
 
  • Like
Reactions: mw360 and SilverWalker
I beg to differ: The design is not controversial. Not among users, nor among designers.

It is simply bad:
Starting with the wrong visual hiearchy, that always places the active tab visually to the back, over the missing connection of content with the tab, over the total waste of space.

There is not a single positive thing to say about this.

It is total rubbish and a huge driver for adoption of Google Chrome.
 
  • Like
Reactions: mw360, Spectrum and gank41
This app has seen multiple quick updates from when this article first came out.

You can set opacity, custom colors, blend modes, etc. now among a few other features & refinements. I'm thinking it'll still receive updates for future improvements, too.

Even if Safari improves this to help make it more clear/consistent where this is less needed, this can still help serve as further emphasis to your own preference so it can still be nice to use.
 
What seems weird is that Chrome, Firefox, etc. have all taken to tabs on top which goes back to a past Safari design update that enough people pushed back on that they reverted back. I wonder if they went with the "Compact" tab layout since they didn't want to simply try tabs on top again (even though every browser now does what they were told to not do.) I wish they just went back to tabs on top (a-la all other browsers now) to help simplify the tab situation (and make it more consistent when being different doesn't really add any benefit.)

I'm not saying this active tab indicator is like that past design decision... it really could/should use a more noticeable and/or consistent active tab indicator compared to what it's doing now considering all of the various cases where the tab itself & its surroundings may be any given color (while sometimes flipping whether darker or lighter is active & then being rather muddy in-between.)

A rather simple solution for the active tab indicator would be to do what Firefox, Chrome, and others are now doing where the other tabs really don't have any shape given to them at all. So the only thing with a containing shape around it is the active tab (i.e. remove the rounded rectangle from the inactive tabs... fixes the issue and makes it consistent with other browsers). That makes it clear regardless of the colors being used.
 
Aaaaaand .... Thank you to the participant with the Nyan-Nyan rainbow apple icon! Switching to dark mode makes Safari tabs livable! Who woulda thunk it🍸😹
 
Safari 15 on Catalina does not have the new tab problems, that is, they're not rounded and not separated from the web page at all. And the favicons do not overlap the tab close X.

Not sure what my point is, except that I'm once again dreading upgrading my Mac's OS.
 
soaddk said:
Don't most people run dark mode? Well, I do and my safari looks fine. The active tab is lighter than the inactive ones, just as you'd expect.
Click to expand...
I don't know about "most people" but I have astigmatism and dark mode is completely unusable for me. Regardless of what "most people" do, the fact that the option for light mode exists means Apple should take care to make it usable.

That said… I'm beginning to have less problem with the new Safari design. I still think it's stupid, but I've adapted to it. It's not hard to tell which tab is active, even when there are only two, because the active one always shows the "close" X instead of the favicon. Which is also stupid, but at least I know that's what's happening now.
 
I’m just surprised the new design made it beyond the design mock-up stage. Usually there is some positive that comes with a design change, but I really can’t think of one with this change unless you love the aesthetic of it.

The other thing I do not get is that with iOS 7 Apple flattened the UI and pushed the content out to the edge of the screen. Since then they have added more affordances making it less flat (which I don’t mind) but they keep adding more padding so there are margins around the content. What good are bigger screens with thin bezels if the software is making its own “bezels” via margins?

The list view in the iOS 15 Notes app is a great example. I feel like the list is surrounded by a moat.
 
soaddk said:
Don't most people run dark mode? Well, I do and my safari looks fine. The active tab is lighter than the inactive ones, just as you'd expect.
Click to expand...
God no, the only person I know who does is a computer hermit, definitely not the norm. Regardless the design shouldn't be functional only part of the time.
 
Not gloating...but Safari 15 for macOS Catalina looks and works normally! 😆 Thankfully!

1633642439465.png
 
Biscotti said:
View attachment 1858419

Please, someone tell me which tab is active. Lol this is terrible UI design. Actually hilarious. Difference is BARELY noticeable.
Click to expand...
The problem is that 50% of people are guessing correctly and bunch of those folks then go on to think they're the smart ones, and the design is just fine. If people are debating which one 'should' be active, the design is a ****-up. It should be bleeding obvious to everyone at first glance. Just like it used to be.
 
  • Like
Reactions: SilverWalker and AppelGeenyus
----…We shouldn't be in the situation where we need workaround hacks like this in the first place. And maybe the developer needs income, but profits from charging for this might well not be where he should get it from; it would sit better with me if something like this were released as a community service and for free, or, better yet, even as open-source, although I'd be fine with the software or its web page having a subtle optional donation link somewhere regardless.
 
RandomDSdevel said:
----…We shouldn't be in the situation where we need workaround hacks like this in the first place. And maybe the developer needs income, but profits from charging for this might well not be where he should get it from; it would sit better with me if something like this were released as a community service and for free, or, better yet, even as open-source, although I'd be fine with the software or its web page having a subtle optional donation link somewhere regardless.
Click to expand...
Nah, the fact you have to pay $2 to tell which tab is active makes it all the more absurd and embarrassing for Apple, so I’m in favour. They need to be shamed for this nonsense before it spreads to other apps.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back