Safari in iOS 26: Everything New From Design to Privacy

[klasma]

Well said, 100% agree. Presumably the controls still collapse/disappear when you scroll down the same way they do now, though? So they shouldn’t obstruct any more content?

I’m sure they disappear then, similar to how they do now. What I meant was that there is little benefit in the new controls not filling the whole width anymore, and providing a glimpse of the content beneath them to the left and right and via transparency, because most of that content still remains obstructed. So you still have to make the controls disappear to really see that content.

And presumably there’ll be an option to reduce the transparency/increase contrast of “liquid glass” controls. It looks like a huge fail for readability/accessibility otherwise.

Yes, but presumably there won’t be an option to have them fill the whole width. Also, based on the current behavior of Reduce Transparency, the resulting opaque control background may provide less contrast than with the iOS 18 controls.

 

[macjaffa]

Does anyone actually keep the address bar at the bottom?

Most people. It’s the best place

 

[robd003]

I wish Apple would integrate Brave's ad blocking engine (https://github.com/brave/adblock-rust) into Safari.

 

[decksnap]

Yeah, let's not put a pro graphic file format as a graphics format in websites ever.

SEO rankings are largely based on page load time... which is impacted by file size and code. Respectfully, that would be insane to use raster files.... which only bloody AI/Photoshop etc. even read and open, and you want those in a web page?

SVG's are usually too big. Webp conversion is nearly lossess with transparency intact and 50%-90%% smaller file size.

Not sure what you’re saying here. Webp files, jpegs and pngs are all raster files.

 

[Parowdy]

I still don't love a lot of this

View attachment 2523887View attachment 2523886

It’s a developer beta, you’re not supposed to love or hate any of the design decisions, yet!
/s

 

[andreagrandi]

I'm sure they haven't added the only thing I care about: being able to customise the search engine (with a custom url, not form a drop down fix list) and that they haven't fixed yet the bug preventing people from saving a downloaded file directly on a mounted volume (please, prove me wrong!)

 

[tomekwsrod]

MS Edge is better.

 

[Sputman99]

SVG icons - is this the start of the any scale UI they were trying to do ? I always wondered what happened to that. SVG as a whole UI though - hmmm

 

[Nada Ting]

All these bells and whistles hide the fact that there's really very little new innovation or improvement to the system.

 

[Nehalem]

Does this SVG icon update mean the home page website icons will be correct, and not a block of colour and a letter? — Like with Gmail.

 

[Nehalem]

All these bells and whistles hide the fact that there's really very little new innovation or improvement to the system.

I’m hoping this means everyone is over on un****ing Siri.

 

[Astrohunter]

Whoever applied blur to top/bottom of any page in Safari should get fired

 

[Parowdy]

I think the menu scrolling gesture *in Safari is an interesting tell how different teams had a different focus in how the app is supposed to work and look with Liquid Glass.

 

[bluecoast]

The liquid glass design, transparencies, and blue-green hues remind me a lot of Windows Vista, which I was one of the few to appreciate (I can still never understand all the criticism it received; as far as I'm concerned, it was great, looked modern, and worked pretty well, maybe because I used it on a new, reasonably powerful computer).

You didn’t understand the criticism?

I had a job where I had a windows vista machine in the 00s.

I was copying some art assets from a network drive - honestly, nothing too heavy, just some web optimised psds and JPEG’s - and it told me that it was going to take 6 hours.

Trust me, the time estimate for what I was copying over, was bonkers.

And it only took a few minutes in the end.

 

[The Game 161]

Good that the option to change the bar is there…

 

[jole]

Good developments.

Any news on allowing tabs use more memory (and where needed, swap)? Largest limitation for iOS/iPadOS/visionOS WebKit is that the most demanding web apps just crash randomly due to the memory limits.

This is critically important now that Google is not investing in native applications outside iPhone (iPad apps are limited, visionOS apps do not exist); and increasingly awesome apps are built on web (hi Figma!).

 

[ipedro]

It's a cleaner look, but it may be frustrating if you often need to access features like the tab menu.

Just drag the address bar up to reveal open tabs or swipe it side to side to move through tabs.

 

[Westside guy]

I don't really see anything here that would pull me back from Firefox, but I'm glad Apple hasn't done a Microsoft and just punted on their browser.

 

[klasma]

Whoever applied blur to top/bottom of any page in Safari should get fired

I’m not sure I like it visually, but if it’s applied to scrollable views in general, it would be a useful indicator of scrollable content, since scrollbars aren’t visible by default. But I suspect it won’t be generally applied.

 

[ipedro]

SVG's are usually too big. Webp conversion is nearly lossess with transparency intact and 50%-90%% smaller file size.

Huh? SVG's are just coordinates and properties instructions. It's a text file that browsers use to reconstruct the vector drawing. Infinitely scalable at the same file size. Webp is a compressed raster file with each pixel detailed in the file. The larger the image, the larger the file.

 

[Westside guy]

Huh? SVG's are just coordinates and properties instructions. It's a text file that browsers use to reconstruct the vector drawing. Infinitely scalable at the same file size. Webp is a compressed raster file with each pixel detailed in the file. The larger the image, the larger the file.

It's been a few years since I've had to deal with this, but SVG has a mode - almost PDF-like - where an text-encoded actual image (like how MIME handles images in email) is stored in the file. These can be huge.

In my experience, this tends to happen when someone who doesn't understand how SVG is supposed to work uses an Adobe tool to do a quick-and-dirty conversion of another image format (e.g. JPEG, PNG) to SVG. I seem to recall it also happening when someone doesn't define things properly in InDesign, but honestly my memory is hazy since I'm not doing web stuff anymore.

(A PR co-worker of mine kept giving me these sorts of SVG images, and I kept having to re-explain how to generate them properly)

 

[ipedro]

It's been a few years since I've had to deal with this, but SVG has a mode - almost PDF-like - where an text-encoded actual image (like how MIME handles images in email) is stored in the file. These can be huge.

Obviously don't use a raster file inside of an SVG. That defeats the entire purpose. The point of Safari handling SVGs is for logos and button icons. If you're drawing your logos and icons as vector files — as you should so they're scalable and convertible to address contrast issues — then not only can they be used for this purpose, they can be written directly into HTML and load instantly without accessing external files.

 

[Westside guy]

Obviously don't use a raster file inside of an SVG. That defeats the entire purpose.

Well, yes, obviously - but that's beside the point. I was responding to your comment "Huh? SVG's are just coordinates and properties instructions" to explain why someone might think SVGs were large, such as the person to whom you originally responded - SVGs can include a large binary payload.

 

[d5aqoëp]

I despise when a link opens the app instead of the site yet Apple still gives you no option to control it.

This is like the worse thing ever. Hate this to the core. POS invention.

 

[rumourmonger]

Any word on extensions? Will those still have to be "apps"?