Safari 15 on Mac OS, a user interface mess
morrick.me
morrick.me
Makes me think of the complaints in video game text over the past few years and how it had become so small as to be nearly unreadable on normal TVs at normal viewing distances. The natural assumption here is that the game devs were doing all their work inches away from large fancy monitors not thinking of the so-called 10’ experience most people use to consume the content.
At least many console games now have text size sliders (with varying levels of usefulness).
https://kotaku.com/the-year-in-tiny-video-game-text-2019-184...
There are a vanishingly small number of games that actually do this properly - a scalable UI that has some good default assumption for the platform it is currently on. Of course games rarely make significantly more money because the text is perfectly sized vs the 1,000 other things that are competing to get done before the release date.
Like the "attract" screen when playing on a console which previews the game in a loop. (guess it came from arcade games, or maybe like DVD menu screens)
No need for that with a PC game - you're launching it manually, why add a "click to continue"?
I am amazed by those reaaaaallly wide displays - developers in the 1990's might have predicted 16:9, but 32:9??
Recently I've been playing Baldur's Gate (the Enhanced Edition), and while it does allow resizing the text size it becomes so large that it doesn't fit in many UI elements (most notable, the dialog box). I guess it's better than nothing, but with just a very small amount of effort it could have been much better.
Say about the web what you will, but the ability to resize almost any text is a great feature.
Also I think Windows actually manages all of this much better, where you can just set a text size in settings (I think? It's been years since I used Windows, so not sure).
If designers need to justify their jobs, fine. They should design the interface layout with modular components that can be entirely customized by the user.
IMO no user should ever be forced to use designs that are the product of meaningless fads in the design world.
Maybe developers are justifying their jobs. Maybe younger developers are excited about ditching the old crufty frameworks and languages, and exploring something new. Maybe every 10 years they reinvent the old wheels, and older developers are grumpy that the change was not needed in the first place.
The backward compatibility effects aren't quite as bad in the browser context... except when the plugin API is affected.
You can see it in this article: https://9to5mac.com/2021/06/16/safari-in-macos-monterey-what... (image: https://9to5mac.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2021/06/how-s...)
Hopefully, they add back some of the missing customization options in a later release.
Canonical had the right idea with Unity which not many people are willing to acknowledge
Unfortunately on Windows there's this annoying slide-out animation that slows you down. It happens even if you disable UI animation.
On top of that sometimes the bar doesn't show up at all when specific windows are maximized. Which means you need to press the start button to get it out.
At some point one figures "f this shit, just toggle off auto-hide".
I do autohide in macOS on laptops tho.
So I conclude that Apple's designers are in fact not attempting to maximize vertical space, or at least that to the extent they do care about this, they're willing to make absurd compromises in apps like Safari while not fixing the glaring issue with the overall UI.
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/98/MacOS_Montere...
Safari 15's design is so odd I'll have no idea what to make of it until I can actually test it out.
How I use tabs is probably nothing like how you use tabs or another random person uses them. I’m actually fascinated how people design their own workflows in this way. Anytime I see someone’s screen I end up with a ton of questions asking ‘why’.
I’m toying with the idea of adding an options page so that I could release it to the chrome store, but I hate UI work, so I haven’t gotten around to that yet.
Right now I am not at work, and I have three browser windows open and there are no scroll bars. I have managed to turn off tabs for the most part using Firefox userChrome.css and about:config. If I need another browser page, I'll open another browser window. When I have more than 4 or 5 browser windows I start stacking/offsetting the windows.
Unfortunately, "Tabs" are modes. http://www.nomodes.com/
Hey, whatever if we just made all the browser controls a modal or fullscreen context of it’s own?
So until the browser designers get a clue I will be stuck with Firefox and the Treestyle tabs plugin which is the least horrible solution for people that use a lot of tabs.
The implementations of vertical tabs I've liked best so far are OmniWeb's (perhaps one of the original vertical tab browsers), Edge's, and Firefox with Tab Center Redux and custom CSS to hide Firefox's frustrating mandatory sidebar header.
Granted, it seems that nobody at the Edge team thought of actually giving the vertical space used by the horizontal tab bar back once you flip to vertical tabs mode, but the feature itself is there.
I really loved that. All my tabs (with mini pictures of them) were on side, which made them easy to see and didn't take up vertical space.
(OmniWeb was a great browser in other ways).
I'm all for saving vertical space whenever possible. But this is a bad call.
I would be interested to see a version where the tabs and url bar roll up to one line if you have the space (few tabs, large monitor), but wrap to two if you don't (lots of tabs, small monitor).
And it was Safari 4, released in 2008!
Again, that’s an accelerator. That’s for advanced use. So you’re an advanced user, good on you. Things are not designed just for advanced users.
> I can understand why they pushed it a click away, maybe numbers/studies back this up
No studies would back up making an interface less discoverable, thus less intuitive for new users, and also increasing cognitive load by requiring users to remember where something is rather than it just being there. ‘…’ and hamburger menus have always been poor substitutes for well-designed navigation hierarchies.
Someone actually ran the new tabs against Jakob Nielsen’s usability heuristics, respected in the industry for 27 years: https://twitter.com/feetsnz/status/1403849426683138053
The results were not good.
There are no numbers on the planet that could justify lowering usability. Apple themselves gave a WWDC session on how minimalism != usability. Of course, they can have a minimalist interface; that should never come at the expense of usability. They don’t eat their own dog food.
> Anyway when we play games we never count clicks right?
What do games have to do with a web browser?
I would have used Full Screen Option if I could have Tab Bar showing instead of Address bar + Tab Bar. And Safari for some reason has strange GPU / CPU usage problem with full screen usage which hasn't been addressed for years.
May be instead of software design, hardware should have adopted to it. Microsoft Surface Laptop has a 3:2 Aspect Ratio. On the same MacBook Pro 13.3", that would have been an additional 120 pixel.
Another point worth mentioning, the Big Sur redesign actually have the Safari ( and macOS )Toolbar "thicker" as in taking more vertical space.
[1] I tend to hide the Dock Bar, without the Dock it is only 340 of vertical space.
Worse than that, high end PCs are going to ultrawide monitors. I'm on 3440x1440 right now, and 3840x1200/5120x1440 panels are dropping in price.
Of course, you almost never fullscreen a browser window on a monitor like that, but it is what the OS would default to.
Reclaiming the address bar space to cram more tabs on the screen is a marginal gain, at least in my case.
yes
So, I didn’t like the new interface at first, but now I really like it. On my M1 MacBook Pro I really like the ability to run a few iPadOS apps, and the watch/phone/iPad/laptop handoff experience is also very good. I am very happy with the beta OS releases from last week.
At the same time, other people can handle a lot of information but only as long as it is readily present in front of them. Hide that information away and it is as if it never existed. Tools that depend on their ability to recall information will fail them. Tools that give them the ability to keep that information available and visible will make them shine.
Personally I'm glad Safari isn't yet another Chrome-like UI. I did not upgrade to the beta, but it seems to me the choices made would make sense for the way I use a browser on a laptop or desktop.
It just feels like another flamewar, which I can safely ignore while I continue enjoying my daily driver browser.
Typically I have dozens of tabs open, so at first blush it might seem that the redesign wouldn't work for me at all, and that would be true if I didn't adjust my tab habits.
What I've done is swept those dozens of tabs into a handful of purpose-oriented tab groups. I don't really need all of those tabs open at all times, all I really needed is somewhere to put them that's more ephemeral and has less management overhead than bookmarks. As a result, most groups only have a few tabs open and pose no problem with the new UI.
Theoretically, this approach may also have the benefit of improving focus. Because online message boards and the like live in my "general" tab group, when I'm switched to my "programming" tab group I'm soft-locked out of those sites by way of reduced accessibility, making it harder to drift off of my current task when googling for documentation, etc.
There's so much empty space on the address bar, and vertical space is typically expensive real estate.
The reality is, I've never seen anyone stay productive with more than 5 or 6 tabs, not to mention battery and CPU utilization issues. The brain can only multitask so much, and none of the browsers are good at managing more than, say, a dozen tabs, so why not reclaim some vertical real estate and drop that number to six or so? If you really need the extra tab space (or, to see the full web address at all times, which is even more strange), I think that should be behind a Preferences option. Safari's design makes sense to me.
Of course, Safari probably wont make it configurable, but I hope we see this design trend also happen in Firefox, and while I won't opt for it, lets make it opt-out.
It's those kind of UI ideas that look great on a mockup, but do not work in reality with real data and real users, those that open 35 tabs—behaviour encouraged by macOS windowing system by the way—and now all of those are crammed into a ludicrously small space that's constantly moving around.
I don't know what Apple were thinking there. Let's not call it UX, this is designers changing for change's sake at the expense of user experience. I'm struggling to see how is it justifiable in any way.
That is close to stating that those that open fewer than 35 tabs aren’t real users and, further between the lines, that those people can be ignored.
However I think, but don’t have data to confirm it, that they should be catered for and that “those that open 35 tabs” are a vocal minority.
This is the first time I’ve ever even considered the possibility that someone is capable of using a browser with only one or a few tabs open at a time. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure they exist, but having a million tabs open is so ingrained in how I consume information on the internet I suppose I kind of forgot it’s possible to do it any other way.
It makes me wonder if I’ve ever had only one tab or window open at a time? Maybe in the 90s? I don’t remember AOL having “tabs” the way browsers do now but I think you could have multiple windows open.
I’m terrified of the next redesign of spaces.
There’s no way in iOS anymore to avoid all of the weird transition animations. Reduce motion hardly does anything at all anymore.
In fact, it’s even more jarring than with animations.
I use it because moving the entire display can give me motion sickness. It’s doing exactly what it should do.
With the menubar, toolbar, and the tabbar, 106px of my total 800px height display gets to display non-content information, much of which is clutter when I'm trying to focus on the webpage. It's a whopping 13.3%! Most of this comes from the thick toolbar that Big Sur has started.
But since Apple won't be changing that thick toolbar (as we all know), the 30px vertical height (which translates to 3.6%) that I get by hiding the toolbar is precious. So I appreciate the new Safari 15 design. Really, the only problem I'm finding is the refresh button, which I'm like 99% sure will come back with all of this fuzz, and the other functionality in that (...) button needed multiple mouse clicks in Safari 14 anyway. Like... disabling the ad blocker required a long-click on the refresh button, it's now more discoverable.
Shifting address bars... I can see how that might make people freak out; Personally I've had zero problems, so YMMV.
About tab management – I can't disagree more than the article. Creating group of tabs is very much useful, it's much more helpful than having a group of windows each with different topics and prevents idle windows eating memory and CPU when only one window gets used for a long time.
I have five tab groups, one about my school, two on my personal hobbies, one on generic development-related information (including HN) and one on my work, each with 10~20 tabs. I'm guessing the writer doesn't use tabs pervasively – that's fine. But I would like to point out that it is not rarely efficient nor overall unconvincing. Thanks Apple for that tab group feature, I'm seriously getting a ton of mileage over it.
But let's be fair and note that there quite certainly a lot of very proud, considerate, intentional designers and developers who are behind this change. People who probably put thousands (millions?) multiples of "thought" in considering the changes, versus someone saying "Whoa...this is different and I don't like different." The whine about site colors bleeding into the chrome seem particularly subjective, yet they're presented as if they're objective truths.
I use a macOS beta 15 device beside a 14 device, all day every day. At first install it was jarring, but then I became acclimated to it and it's fine. Tab groups are fantastic. I appreciate the aesthetics of chrome bleed, but that's just my subjective opinion. My only complaint about the browser is that it's crash-prone right now.
Thoughts maybe, but did they ask users what they wanted? Did they run usability studies to verify that these changes make sense? I can't imagine that they did. Certain UI changes in macOS, Windows, etc. are so obviously bad (and are eventually changed) that no matter how much they thought about it, they didn't care to check what users thought.
For instance the address bar on here is a canonical truth and is the linchpin of the experience. See how every time a browser touches it (e.g. Chrome truncating the address) is met with mobs of the angry. Many users -- including even "power" users -- seldom interact with the address bar. Nor is it verification of anything much. It simply isn't that important anymore.
Another comment mentions that the reload button is two clicks away, which is a fair point but that everyone who actually uses reload (generally developers -- zero web apps should ever require the user to hit reload) use a keyboard shortcut.
Eh.
"Certain UI changes in macOS, Windows, etc. are so obviously bad (and are eventually changed)"
True. At the same time, every UI change of anything ever has yielded a firestorm of criticism and pushback. And more times than not the new design was better and people acclimate to it and eventually prefer it. I judge nothing on initial reception.
I interact with the address bar every time I go to page or site. It is my single most interfaces with the browser after the sites themselves.
And that it isn’t much use for verification is exactly the reason why people advocate that it should display all information!
Edit: point proven
I actually didn't know iOS had this, I only know about FireFox on Android and it asked me if I wanted to opt in before thrusting it upon me. That's a good way to make major UI changes.
Because it is. Ultimately, your comfort is the only thing that matters when you're using a computer (particularly Macs). If something doesn't operate in the way that you want it to, why is that not a valid argument for replacing it?
This is Apple we're talking about, the last time they asked users about something is when they failed to litigate Corellium for virtualizing their software.
Readability is objective. It can be measured. They keep bending themselves backwards to get out of a problem they inflicted upon themselves.
A web browser should be readable first.
Run a study and then talk. Otherwise it's just subjective observations.
Further, we're talking about page theme spreading to the chrome of the browser. It makes the chrome less important than the page contents. It seems they're putting "readability" focus exactly where it should be.
Have they? The base of your argument is a classic appeal to authority. They're "very proud, considerate, intentional" designers so they must be right and everybody else wrong.
Where's the data? Aren't unhappy users valid enough data to demonstrate a downgrade in user experience?
Contriving a straw man to argue a position does no good.
I specifically took issue with claims that it's thoughtless. That in no way says it's right or wrong [1], but I'm extraordinarily certain that a lot of people thought long about every detail of this, they probably argued and different people had different takes, and we can see the results of that process. Trying to casually dismiss all of that as thoughtless is gross.
> Aren't unhappy users valid enough data to demonstrate a downgrade in user experience?
Unhappy users aren't proof of much at all but that people really dislike change, and that you can't please all of the people all of the time. The eventual net result is an entirely different thing.
And again, the net might be positive and it might be negative. I've made zero assessment of that. I happen to be a pretty malleable user and I just flow with whatever, adapting to whatever various platforms demand I use.
[1] Although notions of right and wrong depend upon the inputs to your assessment. e.g. often we'll some users feel that a certain function or trait is a first class, primary element, while it isn't to others. What is right for one can be wrong for another. Seldom is it universal. Every design of any complexity is wrong for some subset of users.
For the sake of conversation though, yeah, I'd argue that Safari is the most thoughtless among the mainstream browsers. Compared to Firefox, Edge, Chrome and even Brave or Vivaldi, Safari is a less compatible, less up-to-date, less secure and less cared-about experience.
It has been running for centuries. It’s called typography. Its rules are not arbitrary and legibility is the most important one.
No need for scare quotes around readability. It’s a science.
There’s a latitude of contrast ratio between which human eyes can comfortably withstand and discern tones. It varies across individuals, of course, but not as much as you might think. No human sees ultraviolet, for example. And even if you have 20/20 eyesight, you need to design for a much wider spectrum of the Bell curve if you care at all about accessibility.
You might be interested in checking the history and methods behind CIE 1931. Also, “The Elements of Typographic Style” is a deep but fascinating book.
Compare the job of this algorithm, having to deal with a crazy amount of possible color combo, to that of an experienced UX designer making just a dark and light theme, both thoroughly tested, and you can begin to grasp the trouble they’ve put themselves into.
Your opinion is objective. Opinions you don't like are subjective.
Sorry but this is how I read it. In my late years, there's little I fear more than such authoritarian claims.
Not everyone sees things the same way. And I mean that in the most literal sense possible
And this been done. There’s a minimum contrast that works for comfortable reading for most people. That’s not controversial, or at least, it shouldn’t be.
There is a strong argument for user interface stability. People don't just learn user interfaces, they seep into people's unconscious and muscle memory. It can take a while to learn the idiosyncrasies of a user interface and making changes should have a string justification.
It should be noted that people who are paid to design user interfaces are not paid to use them. Their incentives are to create and tinker. This is a disincentive to do what is often needed: nothing or very slow change.
It’s just like the idea that you first eat with your eyes. For example, eggs with yellow yolks and orange yolks taste the same in blinded tests, but when people can see the eggs they usually go for the orange ones. Periodic UI design updates are needed so that people don’t associate a dated GUI with a dated product.
The worst part was, often functionality that was well loved was scraped because there wasn’t time to work it into this redesign. It turned out they would do that on purpose so people would complain so they could go to their higher ups with complaints in hand to justify budget money for a new round of ui design work. Rinse repeat.
Did you get them to confirm this hypothesis? Or did you just figure it out by deduction and projection?
This is an honest question. I work on both sides - dev and design, and so am privy of the driving forces behind the projects.
Sometimes they could include personal agendas but are almost never limited to those.
And I have had cases where I had to ask questions in confidence to uncover the political forces.
Have you had the opportunity to ask such questions and confirm your suspicions?
It had far more affordances and consideration than even modern Mac OS, and it showed by (lack of) this commentary against it.
In my experience it’s usually one person’s vision behind major design changes (good or bad). It may be “discussed” so long as the discussion doesn’t deviate from boss’s vision (or you’re not a fit for the project).
The Discord logo redesign was one of those logos that elicited a very odd amount of outrage for what it was. Multiple video essays were made about just how terrible the logo is [0].
It's really not a bad logo at all. It's a minor change. But once you get used to something, any change seems to be perceived as a threat. After a few months, I bet most people will get used to the new Safari UI and forget what they were even mad out.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=discord+new+log...
Now it doesn't say that. And now I'm less inactive on the various discord chats I've been invited to. Most of which are not really full of Gamerz anyway - but staring at that very Gamerz logo for a few seconds every time I opened the thing made me not want to open it.
It's currently a light purple circle with a white blob in the middle, I often can't find it
However, it's worth noting it was shown alongside wordmark, and the font used by that wordmark (a modified version of Ginto Nord Black) is... not great, in particular I think the letter "i" looks somewhat off in relation to other characters in word "Discord" - I don't know what's wrong with it, I'm not a typographer.
That said, because the wordmark is not seen often (pretty much the main page and the page announcing new logo), in practice it's fine. After logging in to Discord there is no real reason to go back to the main page.
Also, out of curiosity, I checked the videos you linked to, pretty much all consider the logo to be fine, but they all criticize the font or the letter "i" specifically (even the video called "discord's new logo is alright").
This used to be different during the 80's and 90's and I'm convinced that this change (turning UI design from science/engineering into fashion) is why we are deep in a UX crisis.
Good design is a balance of many factors.
This is true only if usability is all you care about.
In the real world people like things with good aesthetics, and like beautiful things, and it’s important for Apple to make things that users like.
If looks didn’t matter every user interface and website would be plain and high-contrast.
Are you being hyperbolic, or is this your actual position? That’s a ridiculously high bar that most organizations could not muster (and there’s no way Apple would release that stuff publicly anyway).
“Emotional bullshit” is so needlessly negative. We’re not machines — we have emotions! If a UI designer can change an interface to please me a little more, that’s a good thing.
Why are user interfaces special in this regard? Where's the research, where are the white papers which clearly demonstrate what the advantages and disadvantages of specific user interface philosophies are?
Could you please point to the research in support of this statement? Specifically, the "almost every" part?
> Where's the research
Do a web search for "human-computer interaction research."
I agree that UX/UI is sometimes swayed more by fashion than empirical goals in service of the user. E.g., Jony Ive’s sad obsession with flat (featureless) design in iOS 7 is something we are still paying a price for.
However, the majority of UX research these days goes into things that are explicitly not in service of the user. Facebook doesn’t want you to be happy, they want you to keep using their product. Pay-to-play games don’t want you to have a good life, they want to squeeze micro-transactions from you at every opportunity.
Creating and propagating these manipulative dark patterns is a huge amount of leading-edge UX these days. It works. We know how to manipulate people towards goals that are antithetical to their well-being. The tech industry as a whole makes billions of dollars a day doing exactly this thing.
So yes, the research exists. UX continues to get much better. Just not in service of goals that you (or I, frankly) embrace.
This isn’t the fault of UX as a discipline or UX designers generally. Just like a coder intentionally optimizing a ratio of negative to positive stories to keep you fearful and scrolling, UX designers are driven by the same constraints — the product direction of their parent organizations.
Should UX designers individually, or as a discipline, rise up in revolt? Exactly as much, or as little, as programmers should. We’re all in the same boat. We can choose to serve the manipulators or not. Trouble is, there’s a fuckton of money in this manipulation, and you don’t have to spend much time here on HN to see how motivating that is, and the extent to which individuals will hold their noses and do what they’re told, as long as they’re motivated richly enough.
https://www.dezeen.com/2013/06/10/new-apple-ios-software-fla...
It’s an awful shame, really. The man’s very talented, but he needed an editor. For years Steve Jobs was that editor, and he was brilliant at it. It was the two of them together that made Apple’s industrial design so damn good.
I agree about animations. I remember reading (probably here :D) a story from an Apple mobile engineer. He was on an elevator and Steve Jobs got in afterwards, and asked his notorious, “What are you working on?” The engineer opened the app on his phone to show Steve, who looked at it for one floor. He said, “Not enough texture,” and handed it back.
That, specifically, is the voice that Ive needed to do truly great work.
For more practical examples of how websites can be redesigned through science, though, see https://www.nngroup.com/ and other resources online regarding scientific study of UI, user experience (UX), etc.
> If a UI designer can change an interface to please me a little more, that’s a good thing.
Without observing actual users, how do you know if you are pleasing them, or just pleasing yourself?
Edit:
> UX used to be driven by researchers like Bruce Tognazzini and Jakob Nielsen, who absolutely did studies with actual users to drive their designs.
Large [UI driven] companies still do this or hire agencies to do so (of which there are far more nowadays given the field is more mature). The fact that UX researchers haven't much visibility outside of UX -- Nielsen started blogging relentlessly at a point in time where there wasn't really anyone else doing that, and it was hoovered up by a wider audience that needed that knowledge. That doesn't mean in any way that he's unique, or that companies who can afford UX teams don't do this. Nielsen and Tognazzini -- they were popularisers, good at producing easily digestible writing for a general audience
I think the problem is everyone on here hates it when stuff they use changes and that’s all.
For example, in Firefox 89 the contrast between the active tab and the inactive tab is so low that they are not distinguishable when the viewing angle to the screen or the lighting isn't perfect - looks fancy, but is not even acceptable by their accessibility standards. On top of that they removed the blue bar that - as a crutch - indicated the active tab ?
I don't understand being this invested in such an obiously bad design decision - contrast is just neccessary.
All that being said, I found a bug report from 19 years ago, when Firefox was still called Phoenix, that complained about almost the exact same issue (sans the blue bar), and it got fixed.
I don't think "UX crisis" is neccessarily too strong a word.
I understand redesigning UIs when that redesign affords you some new capabilities for new features you want to add. I don't, however, understand redesigns that just move things around without adding anything new.
Android 12 is the prime example of this right now. Android 11, which I currently have on my phone, works fine. Its UI is well thought out. It's mature enough. The best thing you could do to it is leave it alone. But then someone at Google wanted a promotion, which meant redesigning an existing product, and now everything is opaque and has huge paddings for no good reason. And when they say "material you is customizable", I really hope it's so customizable I could just make it look like it did before they released this mess.
Change is inevitable. Even if we stipulate that change sometimes happens for bad reasons, like someone wanting a promotion, it’s not like bad reasons are suddenly going to disappear. People are still going to want promotions a year from now, or 10 years from now.
So designs are going to change. Why not take the approach of “let’s see how I can adapt to this”?
Because a UI is a tool I use to get something done. I don't like when the thing I've been using intuitively gets changed so I have to learn to use it again. It's a tool. It's not an art piece.
> Why don’t people seem to take pride in their ability to adapt to change?
Because this adaptation doesn't make their lives any better. It's change for the sake of change. It's like weather, except weather isn't quite controllable, but these changes are deliberately introduced by other people to mess with you for no good reason.
> Change is inevitable.
Progress is inevitable. Moving things around isn't progress. Progress implies adding something.
> Even if we stipulate that change sometimes happens for bad reasons, like someone wanting a promotion
The incentive structure in most IT companies is wildly wrong, I'll say that. No one at Google got promoted for maintaining an existing product because afaik promotion requires completing a "big project". So the easiest "big project" is a UI redesign. The second easiest is apparently an instant messaging app.
> Why not take the approach of “let’s see how I can adapt to this”?
Let's see. I adapted to this by avoiding installing any major updates unless absolutely necessary. Security patches are fine tho.
Secondly, the complaints come because, for many of us, our computers and phones feel like an extension of our offices and homes. We're staring at these screens for the majority of waking hours. The UI is basically part of the furniture. Many people would feel resentful if their chairs, couches, and doorknobs were changed without permission every year as part of some update. They're going to have similar feelings about the electronic portions of their spaces.
Because there's huge costs for everyone involved...?
"let’s see how I can adapt to this”... Across how many devices? If a school lab updates, but I don't... I know have to learn something new when it's probably not necessary. If I update, and the school lab didn't... will my stuff be compatible? If I send a document to 'version Y', will I still be able to use it in my own local previous 'version X'?
If I'm a business, how do I support X changes across multiple customer bases? And for how long? I have support people to train to answer every stupid question from people who can't find ABC menu item any more because it's now rendered as 'abc' in a different menu area.
In MANY cases, there are compounded, massive costs to seemingly small/trivial/design changes.
Our computers (and phones) are not fashion. They are tools, they are commoditized.
Let's change everything every two years: you screws and screwdrivers, controls in your car (with everyting going touchscreen, that's exactly what we'll soon get), buttons in your elevators, plane controls, heart monitors...
See, how stupid "let's wait and adapt to this" sounds?
Early Mac OS X had exactly these criticisms leveled at it, for years.
Also https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brushed_metal_(interface)
Lately things have been taking even more of a nose dive though. Have you ever used Apple Music? There is no excuse for that product to be as bad as it is. It’s probably the worst mainstream consumer app in the market.
Back in the 90s Microsoft did put some research effort into Windows 95 and i do not really remember much of a blowback to the new UI despite being radically different from Windows 3.1. There were a lot of people complaining for the higher system requirements, how Win95 felt slower and even how "infantilized" DOS by forcing a GUI on them, but as far as the Windows UI itself goes pretty much everyone agreed was a big improvement to the point that other UIs started copying it to a functional level (ie. not just the window theme). There were even projects that recreated it on Windows 3.1 (Calmira).
To this day a lot of people consider Windows 95 to be one of the best and most well thought UIs.
(and honestly even though i think that overall Win2K is peak Windows, i do believe that ever since Win98 Microsoft started taking a form-over-function approach - see the toolbar buttons losing their relief and becoming shapeless elements indistinguishable from any other icon despite having different interaction with the user)
Sure, some reactions in UI changes tend to be "i do not like different" but that doesn't make all reactions so. And even then, do not dismiss the pure "i do not like different" reactions either: people spent time and energy to learn the UI they use, unless a change is a radical improvement (e.g. Win3.1 -> Win95) they are very justified to be pissed off at how the designers of the new UI wasted all that effort and nullified their knowledge for marginal gain (assuming there is any at all... or even worse, becoming harder to use like many overpadded mobile-first UIs look on desktops).
(the same applies to changes programmers often dislike too, like languages, APIs, frameworks, etc - for many users UI changes are the equivalent of Python2 to Python3, except as users are often powerless to do anything about UI changes, they happen way more often)
Also, why does it matter how much time, money, brain power they spent on the changes? The only thing that matters is the outcome.
This one is a particularly bad idea. Regular people don't always understand the difference between the browser and the contents of a web page. This blurs that line even more for people who already have trouble seeing it in the first place.
I have accidentally close more tabs than ever before - and that's with me actively being aware of it and trying to be careful. It's a HORRIBLE user design.
It's a mess, and the vertical space you save is nominal compare to the increased frustration you will create for users when they have a tougher time being able to read their URL (something that's already an issue for everyone) and relegating the tabs to about half the horizontal space they could have had.
This is utterly pointless. It's not about being an old person resistant to change, it's about "fixing" something that was not broken and not even doing a lateral move, but totally regressing the utility it served.
Alas, don't want anyone perpetuating that mistake. Cheers!
Big Sur’s dialog boxes, menus, notifications are a mess. And now this Safari comical UI. Every single change has been for the worse.
Whoever is in charge of this, please, listen to feedback and change course. This is a disaster.
« The familiar is comfortable; change is upsetting ».
I can’t imagine being stuck with a Windows XP style for ever I can’t even believe having used it so many years and looking back it’s a disaster but back then people loved it and complained on every single update.
So nothing new here …
The two most questionable decisions I find in the latest Safari UX are:
- A focused tab goes from the title to the address: this means you cannot see the title of the page you are on, and that tabs change relative positions depending on focus. This is unfortunately a hard problem, because users/designers expect a signal that you are on the correct site to prevent phishing - adding a disclosure field for viewing/entering the address anchored to the left is insufficient.
- Tab Pinning is still not supported on ios/iPadOS, and since tab groups are synchronized they cannot be pinned. Pinning adds some really nice behaviors for curation, so the whole tab group feature feels less useful than it could be.
This line is gold though:
"Going through Big Sur’s user interface with a fine-tooth comb reveals arbitrary design decisions that prioritise looks over function, and therefore reflect an un-learning of tried-and-true user interface and usability mechanics that used to make for a seamless, thoughtful, enjoyable Mac experience."
Cross out "Mac" at the end and it applies even more to Windows than to the Mac. This lack of unified conceptual design, combined with a mindless ape-ing of mobile interfaces on larger machines with large screens and keyboards, describes the whole UI regression trend of the past 10-15 years. We went from thought-out utilitarian UIs with consistency to... a shitpile of random design choices made in isolation. Windows is by far the worst offender here, but Mac has been moving in the wrong direction too for a while.
A desktop is not a phone any more than a tractor is a car. Yes desktops and phones have similar chips in them, but their role and use case in the larger ecosystem is very different.
Desktop/laptop isn't dead either. There are many more PC machines today than there were in the 1990s at the height of the original "PC era." There are just even more phones and tablets (and IoT devices, and voice assistants, and smart cars, and...), and globally the PC's percentage of the market has declined quite a bit. In absolute terms the ecosystem is larger than ever and these machines are used to create virtually everything in our world.
> In other words, what a browser needs is horizontal breathing room, instead we have Apple doing things backwards
I disagree with this in general. Which I'm sure is the general opinion of browser developers. We often add extra whitespace to the horizontal margin to assist reading.
I think the issue is that we are so used to toolbars on the top of the window, we don't know how to squish it all in there.
Instead, take a clue from tree style tabs and put the tab bar on the left side instead. I'm sure designers with proper buy in from stake holders can make it look less horrible but stay usable.
In my limited experience with side-panel navigation UIs I believe I would find it hard to use with my vertical displays.
What UI designer thought taking away more space for the tab bar was a good idea? Does that person even use a web browser?
Even just the WebKit commits with Apple engineering contacts is enough to build a whole company around...
A lot of times, you can end up with amazing new ideas that way, but sometimes a change based on ego / "that person is just so brilliant" is just bad. The tab bar thing is going to be Touch Bar 2.0, I think.
The question is, how long is Apple going to push it? I was hopeful the Touch Bar would die with M1 Macs...
I doubt Apple's inner workings are simplistic in such a way that one person with some sort of clout pushed this with no further thought.
At the end of the day this is just speculation but purely negative speculation is just some form of populism/FUD and makes everything worse.
Maybe Apple has decided to nudge users in the direction of Marie Kondo; if a tab does not spark joy get rid of it.
For me, whenever I switch tasks or activities, I usually quit out of safari and restart it. I like to concentrate on a single activity and not flit around trying to do many things at once. Maybe Apple is trying to healthier use of devices, as in providing Screen Time usage reports.
For the highly-organized, I hear there is a "tab group" concept, for additional joy. Not sure how that "plays" with multiple windows.
I'm thinking of going with Vivaldi if I do, and Firefox secondarily.
This is clearly wrong and brings the judgement of the author into question.
People care that they are on "Facebook", "Google", "Youtube". They are not remembering that a stupid cat video belongs to URL: ?v=X2KsttcwC04
However, we only care because we know what a URL is, and what the different components mean.
The average user doesn't understand the intricacies of URLs, nor should they have to. Parsing URLs unambiguously is hard even for programmers, and has been the source of numerous security vulnerabilities.
I think there should always be an option to show the full URL bar, but I can't really argue for it being the default behavior anymore.
"A proper Tab bar, with as much horizontal space as possible, to be able to open a lot of tabs and read at least a small part of their titles."
Which suggests ignorance of vertical tabs.
I'm wondering if the author hasn't spent much time with the long tail of tech-savvy users. The emphasis added to "any" is unfortunate.
A fair chunk of Tridactyl users hide the address bar; I find I very rarely need to know that information.
- menu bar
- tab bar
- URL bar
- bookmarks bar
- scrolling site headers
- dock
Eliminating, combining, or hiding just some of these by default is a huge win for space savings. It's why people have been asking for a combined tab/URL bar for years.
The blended chrome does indeed make websites feel like they take more of your screen.
Overall this change is seriously tempting me to move from Firefox to Safari.
The only thing really missing are disclosure triangles: https://imgur.com/a/6AkHI7d
A sidebar like that would serve tab-hoarders better than either the new or old tab bars, while coexisting with the new UI.
Instead, the big FANG cos are happy to accept whatever their 'experienced' designer thinks is an exciting new look with some perfunctory review by the marketing dept.
IMHO the what's-old-is-new-again can't come soon enough when it comes to UI design!
The nav bar currently feels a bit buggy but it isn’t released yet.
For share being buried, I'd have to agree. It's the one thing I use most and we end up having to poke more at our screens to do so.
That said, it's no means perfect. Some features I want to see in Safari are: - multiple profiles (work, personal etc.) ideally integrated with this new Focus concept that the new OS introduces - grouping: create, manage and switch tab groups - bring back the single click share button
Edit:
[1] For example if I want to load new comments in a HN thread I'm reading.
Rationale behind the Safari 15 design https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2021/10029/
> Since very early in the evolution of the web browser, most of the browsers we've used have had a few fundamental thing in common. There's a very tall toolbar at the top with a slot for the URL that's on it's own line. And the website stays inside this space, this portal to the web, the viewport. Of course, as users, we've trained ourselves to put all of our focus on the website that we're using, but for years, the browser itself has maintained a strong visual presence. No matter how a website is designed to look and feel, the browser interface framed that design and dominated it. What if we could get rid of that frame and extend the design of the website to every edge of the window? Well, that's what we've done in Safari 15. This year we've reimagined the browsing experience as we know it. We're putting all the focus on the web content. The new Safari blends the tab bar into each website by changing its background color. The entire interface is on one line, and things naturally appear when needed. This makes your content feel more expansive. Each web page or web app takes over, extending to all four edges of the window. The browser interface yields to the content.
Of course, I hope they've used `<meta name="theme-color"...` instead of the background colour so pages with a white background and a black header don't end up with white chrome.
[1]: https://files.grid.in.th/z3ox7o.jpg
[2]: https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2021/10029/
Safari wouldn't apply the theme-color if it makes the UI inaccessible (it has a very few narrow range of color that it won't apply). Also, if the tag is not specified, Safari would not blend the website content into the tab bar.
defaults write -g NSWindowShouldDragOnGesture -bool true
On Google Chrome since tabs are on their own row at the top of the window and maintain their size and position you can fling your mouse to the top of the screen easily hit them. On Safari since the address bar expands from the active tab, the size and position of the tabs are drastically changing. This makes selecting a tab more difficult. Additionally, since the size the address bar is wider the distance your mouse has to travel to select the neighbouring tab increases.
In the end this leads to more effort and bad ergonomics. I would love it if they just had the tabs on one row and address bar one row, until then I will stick with chrome on the desktop.
We shouldn't neglect UI productivity just because there are shortcuts.
With the similar price of M1 iMac, I can buy a Windows with a much better GPU (for gaming, deep learning, mining, or whatever) and a 140+Hz monitor. With a high refresh rate monitor the UI is so silk smooth. Expect iOS level smoothness when scrolling web pages.
However there is something I still want a solution. Say the continuation of the current website (between Edge and iPhone). Password synchronization and Notes (the official iCloud web Notes is almost useless).
I still plan to stay with my Mac because of the ecosystem. I’m one of the few who seems to actually like Windows 10. There are warts in Microsoft’s software, just as there are in Apple’s. But I like having my iPhone integrated with my Mac. The only option on Windows is Android phone integration. I’m trying to remove myself from Google’s ecosystem, though.
I wish Firefox wouldn't excessively drain the battery on macOS, and Chrome wouldn't excessively drain personal data to Google, and Brave wouldn't excessively violate the trust of its users.
As of today, there's not a single browser on macOS that I don't strongly dislike. Looks like Safari won't improve soon.
If it's in fact an API limitation, why bother trying yet another blocker? After your reply, I did a quick search for Adguard and found this:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Adguard/comments/nahkk4/adguard_not...
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/adguard-for-safari/id144014725...
An ad blocker has access to extremely invasive data and Adblock wants me to pay them a subscription so they can get my PII and associate it with my browsing?
It is also not Open Source so I can't rely on the hope that someone smarter than me would have caught its dirty tricks.
I use Safari for a tiny subset of my browsing due to this gaping hole...
More vertical space is a win, especially with those wide screen displays that are getting more popular and lets be honest: Actions like reloading are best done by using keyboard shortcuts anyway, so having a more minimal UI is a win in my book.
The new feature, where Safari’s app chrome changes colour by taking the accent colour of the currently loaded website is just awesome and really brings the website you are currently visiting up one level closer.
If you're touching a standard browser's URL bar, you might touch a tab instead (and vice-versa). But if you put them on the same horizontal plane, this problem is solved.
And from a touch perspective, the URL bar has a ton of wasted space; you don't need more than the length of your average URL as a touch target, so all the horizontal space that comes after it is essentially unused.
I think this is yet another way in which Apple is preparing to make macOS touch-enabled.
Overall though I think the new look is fine, and the author is being a real disagreeable crank about the inevitable merging of iOS/macOS aesthetics.
Also known as: "The day I dump macOS for Windows." I feel it coming. One thing that's kept me from getting an M1 Mac is that I'd have to run Big Sur. Given that Apple is continuing in this dumb direction my 2015 MacBook Pro running Mojave might, indeed, be the last Mac I ever own.
It's too bad too. With the M1 macs they had finally fixed the keyboards.
Two groups is all I need: Work and Personal. Tabs not in these groups are temporay and are closed once I'm done.
I don’t recall the last time an update made anything better for me. But I’m a “power user” so I guess that means I should expect to re-learn basic navigation endlessly.
My computer is a tool. Please stop changing how I use it.
At some point, an update made the window controls disappear. I still haven't fixed it, but I like my toolbar being as small as possible to give me more vertical screen real estate. I don't mind this change to Safari tbh. A big draw of Macs is also the 16:10 aspect ratio.
1) the “unified color” in the menubar is terrible, really. You must disable the overlay tab/menubar coloring because this is the only big mess.
2) you have to make 2 taps in order to open the reading list, because you can’t “pin” it but when you open the sidebar you have to choose anytime if you want to see the RL or bookmarks. And this is a bit annoying. Workaround is to use a shortcut (like alt-R to open and close the RL and you can see it straight without two taps)
I’m working on Amna which tackles the too many tabs problem, and this is a huge generalization. I can have 22 tabs open just for single task. For example opening two HN articles in new tabs will bring the total to 3. Seeing what’s open all the time is overwhelming to most users. I’m a fan of the new tab groups and unlike chrome which puts a bunch of dots, Safari neatly sends tabs away to work with less clutter and a blank slate.
On the subject of optimal use of horizontal/vertical screen space:
Vivaldi's killer feature is native support for vertical tabs, which is a better solution both for large number of tabs and for being able to read their titles easily.
If memory serves me, it also supports a tab-tree, ie. each tab's children are indented under it, which is a really cool way to browse.
You with tree-style tabs you can see where everything came from, instead of just throwing it in a big pile.
I swear it was possible in the past to drag and drop all UI elements, including the tab bar, by right-clicking the chrome and dropping into edit mode, do you remember?
I love pretty much everything about it. It looks gorgeous. Tab Groups are incredible. The "address bar is in the tab" concept does take some getting used to and that's likely the area they'll tweak the most over the next few months. But overall, huge step forward in my book. Can't wait to get it on my iPad as well.
I have tech preview 125 from earlier and no software updates are available in system preferences.
So how do you have the new 126 UI changes on Big Sur already?
2. People whine
3. People adapt and forget, maybe even prefer it
Nothing new here.
If people continue to whine after more than a few months, there might be something worth investigating. Reddit comes to mind.
Now that’s gonna be annoying to design a webpage around.
This is why we need customizable UI. Everyone's laptop is different and everyone's preference is different. Firefox suffers from a similar issue. Of course more customizable UI isn't an easy task, but it would probably be good in the long run to develop a more customizable general-purpose GUI framework.
It doesn’t make sense to not expect experiments like these in an actively developed product.
Consistency is the most important principle of good user interfaces. At first glance, changing the color of the same interface controls when switching pages seems like it would be very jarring.
Open tabs are synced between devices via iCloud. In the tab icon view you can see tabs open on other devices listed. You can click to open one or ⌘ + Click to open them in new background tabs.
I usually can live with UI changes, but reading the reviews of Chrome on the Google store, and the Chrome subreddit, it seems I'm not alone in disliking this change.
I feel like that should definitely be a thing. The 13-inch MacBook Pros of today seem oddly space constrained compared to the non-Retina MacBook Air I used years ago. But maybe I’m wrong.
From good to bad :
- The tab grouping feature. I'm not sure I understand the complaining, as this is a purely optional feature that you don't have to use. Each new window you open will have it's own "group" that isn't shared anywhere, but you can, optionally, save tab groups that get synced across OSes. I find that to be very useful to make thematic groups and being able to switch from one to another easily on iPad, and having those groups opened on separate windows on mac.
- The sidebar is a bit clunky on iOS, for example if you want to browse your bookmarks through it, you'll have to go back to the root state of that tab (pressing back a few times) in order to be able to close it. Thankfully, that's not an issue on macOS ! Having multiple back buttons on screen though, I'm not certain that's a great design for novices, but you can argue it's more of a "power user" feature.
- Hiding the close button on a mouseover on the favicon on mac. Quite frankly this one was infuriating the first couple of days, but I did get over it. I do think it will be very jarring for most users though, and a very bad experience for not much reason. Even more puzzling is the fact that on iPad, since you can't mouseover, the close box is visible for the main tab, but not for the others, so closing a non selected tab is a two click process that brings back (or maybe reload) the tab, and that doesn't feel good.
- Hiding the reload button. As someone who don't always have my hands on the keyboard, I used that button fairly often on macOS. The touch target to the ... is also fairly small on iOS and I can't say I'm hitting it all the time. The menu that pops also has a peculiar design with some buttons being extra high, and a whole, massively scrollable list of features that are not in an order that particularly make sense to my usage. It's one of this case where you'd wish for some usage based learning as Microsoft tried to do years ago with Office.
- The Chrome tinting is something that kinda looks good sometimes, but gets visually jarring quickly. HN is a good example. I do like Orange, but that's just too much to my taste (that feature doesn't seem to be there on iPad). It can be disabled though in Preferences which is good.
- Moving around the location bar. That's the change I don't think I can get over, this has been terrible to use for me in practice. The fact that the bar changes width and location, I find visually and mentally jarring on mac. On iPad it's not much better, though at least you understand the premise there, it's about saving vertical space. Conceptually I can't get behind that one : they have voluntarily constrained their design to their smallest screen size, and did it mostly for cross OS consistency.
Right now you can revert the top bar using this gist on mac, and I thoroughly hope that Apple will consider making this optional, if only, under the guise of an accessibility preference : https://gist.github.com/zhuowei/8ad1dd478df0efeb67baf2088e5c...
A reasonable conclusion is that macOS isn’t apple’s priority. Meanwhile with WSL and Terminal Microsoft is pushing hard at developers. apt get is a better system than home brew and always has been. Vote with your wallets.
Personally I’m very happy with MacOS and think Big Sur is a great iteration, I really like the look and feel, and the attention to detail to UI that I find lacking in alternatives. But that’s the beauty of choice, not everyone has to agree!
I’m always baffled that Homebrew is seen as the standard macOS package manager. MacPorts has existed for many more years. It behaves more similarly to package managers on other operating systems without weird symlink tricks. It doesn’t send analytics to Google. It has over 25,000 active ports (Homebrew doesn’t seem to publish its formulae count but SO threads seem to indicate something in the region of 4,000). To each their own, but I highly recommend anyone reading this to give MacPorts a try.
However, I’ve learned a lot since that time, so perhaps macports would work just fine for me now.
Because the UI changes they have made there (new Start menu, centred task icons) make the OS look very similar to the so called abandoned macOS.
windows 11 feels like KDE made by a random tasteless trainee
they don't even support tabs on things like File Explorer, you have to swallow that useless and ugly Ribbon interface
and their taskbar-dock-wanabee is miles behind the mac's dock
and let's not talk about the top menu bar, mac os system tray is far more useful and customizable than the one on windows
and let's not talk about the notification center
and many more details that make the difference
windows still carry multiple generations of UIs, even on Windows 11
They keep trying to shoehorn all screen sizes and space savings into one layout, when the web itself does a wiser thing: it adapts and makes better use of space if available.
Foolish design is everywhere. Look at web trends. No underlined links, no clear button distinction, childish color schemes and rounded corners everywhere.
Apple UI/UX design is trend setter. They try to be cool and resonate with naive audiences. This is Design by Marketing.
This is the result of corporations hiring cheap millennial designers without proper design foundations, ready to serve and adapt to marketing concepts with compliance and enthusiasm. The burden of boomers expertise and professional code is no go for the future designed to serve boards of executives and shareholders.
This trend will continue rapidly, complexity will increase to the point where users will need AI to make choices and filter UX crap created by semi-pros for pennies. Yep.
This sounds needlessly derisive.
Flowery language and technical jargon don't actually have much substance on their own.
I personally like that Apple attempts to make websites feel more like applications by making the browser disappear.
Websites have evolved to becoming essentially applications that can run on any platform. And with WASM this is only getting better. This is a great thing!
Do applications have a permanent bookmarks bar, a reload button, a URL bar? No. It's all built into the OS. When you want to open an application, you search in the Dock or in Spotlight. When an application freezes, you force quit and reopen it. I can imagine how Apple in the future integrates the Safari URL bar into Spotlight search. On iOS this is at least partly possible already. Websites become more and more applications.
Now if they could provide a stable platform like they do for their applications versus the pain and edge cases Safari almost always introduces (especially the mobile implementations). I know its not a flashy thing but one WWDC it'd be great if they came out and said how many nearly decade old bugs have been addressed rather than a UI uplift - the cynic in me assumes a "redesigned" app is going to be less, not more stable.
I don’t even remember when was the last time I clicked the reload button. I just press command + R.
I understand that less experienced users may find this confusing though. Although saying that i think anyone can learn Cmd-R and Cmd-W, and would be better off for it.
I agree with the article on the tab/address bar merge being bad though.
This is how far UX discussion has fallen since the early 00s. We went from talking about affordances, discoverability, and "principle of least surprise" to fashion. "I like it to look clean. Less chrome, and let the users eat shortcut keys, hamburger menus, and gestures."
The only thing my comment was about is the practice of imagining non-computer-expert people to be mindless zombies who don't know basic stuff. Cmd+C, Cmd+V, and Cmd+R are one of the most popular shortcuts in computers, known by people who aren't computer experts. Just because something is done with the keyboard, doesn't mean it's some l33t knowledge exclusive to "power users". But computer professionals often talk about "casual users" as stupid, probably to feel better about themselves, because they know all that oh-so-advanced-hard stuff.
So yes, just like a "copy" button would be a waste of space, when Cmd+C is so widespread, a "refresh" button is similar in that regard.
Apple would be the last company to optimize for power users.
Unfortunately, I can’t recall one, and it seems to me that refreshing a page in 2021 has become a niche feature reserved for IT guys who know how HTTP works.