macOS Monterey Beta 3: Apple Redesigns Safari Tab Interface Following Complaints | Hacker News Reader

macOS Monterey Beta 3: Apple Redesigns Safari Tab Interface Following Complaints

macrumors.com

133 pointscpeterso101 comments

I might be alone with this but I really dislike Apple increasing the overall height / element margins on the top controls of Safari. They've been consistently doing it bit by bit with each new release and it constantly feels like I'm losing screen estate that could be filled with content to bits that are not and that I rarely interact with enough to justify it taking up so much space. I really liked the slim header part of Safari previously, especially switching from Windows and its set of browser design conventions.

I rarely if ever use the cursor to do anything with these controls because macOS has great gestures and it also has keyboard shortcuts to make the process feel a lot more result-oriented, rather than process-oriented with extra steps.

This is a symptom of flat design. When you remove texture, shadow, and borders, you have to rely more on margins to group and distinguish items.

That's actually pretty insightful (and more interesting than the usual "kids these days grrr" flavor this subject usually takes on)

I could see this being a "pick two" scenario:

1) Low visual noise

2) High visual legibility

3) High density

The industry used to pick 2 and 3, now they tend towards 1 and 2, but it may genuinely not be possible to have all three

True, but simple color contrast can work wonders. It’s not just a symptom of flat design — it’s a symptom of flat and pretty much all the same color design.

It might be a touch ugly, but as an example, if the main interface were black and the URL bar were white, you could nix all the texture/shadow/borders/margins you want and still be fine.

This is why I use the high contrast mode in MacOS. It ads nice solid black borders to all inputs. Originally I tried it out while fixing a bug, but now I can’t go back lest everything looks so monotonous and washed out.

Indeed. It’s a tradeoff. I’m not sure how I feel overall on flat design, I just hate the transparency in software everywhere sometimes.

True but I continue to think (hope) they plan to include a touch interface for, ahem, maciOS.

> I might be alone with this but I really dislike Apple increasing the overall height / element margins on the top controls of Safari. They've been consistently doing it bit by bit with each new release and it constantly feels like I'm losing screen estate...

I agree, but it seems like there's and (unwelcome to me) industry-wide trend towards less density and wasted screen real estate. At least Apple still ships 16:10 displays, unlike the 16:9 garbage that's ubiquitous nowadays.

I love the 3:2 displays on the Pixelbook and Microsoft Surface devices. So much better for productivity.

I thought about this a lot while considering my hardware purchases as I update to 4k displays. I think 16:9 is actually about the ideal ratio... for very high resolution and large displays. Based on my usage, I think something like a 43" 8k display would be just about ideal for me.

It's just about the right amount of space to have 3 windows open, one in the center and on each side. That's about how much content I want to have on screen at once, anyway; more quickly hits diminishing returns. You could go for a slightly larger monitor (this is personal preference), but too much larger will out the side windows at an uncomfortable angle relative to your keyboard and mouse, which can lead to neck issues.

You can approximate it with three vertically-orientated monitors, but the gaps between screens reduce layout flexibility and are not good for multimedia. So you'll end up pulling the center monitor forward and changing to landscape when you want to watch videos or play games. Also a triple monitor setup is just a lot more to set up and deal with -- cables, stands, desk space, etc.

I believe they've only increased the height once with the transition to Big Sur. And they reduced the height from Mavericks->Yosemite, so it's back to where it was during 10.1-10.9 days, just with one UI row + tabs instead of two + tabs.

Are you thinking about something else?

Yes! The Big Sur change, it annoyed me a lot. This new design also looks like it's continuing the trend.

Yes. Safari 13/14 had the larger Address Bar design change, but at least they kept the Tab Bar slim. The new "walked back" design is now a thicker / taller Tab Bar.

I really wish I could use Full Screen Safari with only the Tab Bar and not Address Bar. But this isn't an option, and Full Screen Safari has weird rendering bug and performance issues.

> But this isn't an option, and Full Screen Safari has weird rendering bug and performance issues.

FWIW I'm a big user of full screen (in most apps that support it) and haven't noticed those issues on either Intel or M1 MBAs.

I wish more apps in full screen mode would hide the UI like Safari does. Most of the time the top bars of icons are simply dead space because most of the time you aren't clicking up there -- and when you do you're only clicking one icon.

Same here, I love full-screen and Safari is especially lovely. I wish chromium browsers had the ability to show the UI only when I move the mouse up top or hit CMD+L. Unfortunately this isn’t the case we have to pick between all the UI or nothing at all.

Not alone at all. My main reason for not moving from Catalina to Big Sur is because they've done this height/margin increase across the board to controls in Big Sur (toolbars in Finder, menubar icons, etc). I spend 100% of my time on macOS using a 13 inch laptop monitor. I need all the space I can get for actual content.

It feels like they’ve been slowly moving towards a touch-friendly interface on MacOS. I’m not sure if they intend to have a desktop OS that truly supports a touch screen or if it’s more about slowly merging iOS and MacOS in general.

On top of that add websites that take up half of your screen with adds and other marketing or paywall crap.

Why do you use Safari then, the least extensible and customizable option for MacOS?

How extensible do I want a web browser to be? I have 1password and adguard but otherwise I'm not that interested in loading stuff in that can read all my browsing (e.g. grammar.ly...I just learnt to write instead). There's enough spyware as it is.

Safari is pretty fast and very good on battery life. I like that it has the same bookmark store and accessible tabs across devices.

And there isn't a lot of alternative. Firefox is slow. Chrome is a memory and performance pig; I run it only if I happen to use a google service for some reason and don't let it save any state.

That's a great question!

I switched to macOS around the time Yosemite came out and I didn't use it back then because it wasn't great but honestly it's improved a crazy amount to be a really nice daily driver as far as performance / battery use is concerned and it's integrated with iCloud which makes moving the browsing session onto mobile and back really convenient and also adds the keychain. On top of that the general browser experience with the way it implements gestures, etc. feels very cozy on the platform. So it's a case of compromises between good and bad.

I sometimes use Chrome (well, Brave), too. Very rarely Firefox, which I don't really like using for much outside of development and testing.

iCloud Keychain and Syncing with iPhone.

Those, plus battery life and noticeably more overall respect for system resources, here. FF and Chrom(e/ium) aren't even close. Which is too bad, because I'd like to have decent plugins again, but it's not worth the cost.

I'm a 1password user and apple has really allowed it to be a good first class, cross platform participant in login interactions on ios and macos. I disabled the apple-managed password and autofill options.

Yes, indeed. The keychain is kind of a big selling point. I'm planning to try and move onto BitWarden to keep my password management cross-platform and open source but it's not as well-integrated. It would be way better if it could sync the iCloud credentials instead of manually having to jump through hoops to get them in.

The Apple lock-in with my passwords makes me feel uneasy and probably way less likely to consider using other platforms as often for daily tasks.

And SMS code filling

Because it inflicts the least cruelty upon my hardware.

Because it syncs bookmarks and passwords through iCloud.

I've really had enough of the minimalist, whitespace-everywhere trend.

I've been turning off most notifications, because since the controls were hidden, they're basically useless noise that just hides useful controls.

I know many designer-types want to get rid of the URL bar, but either butch up and fucking do it, or leave it as a useful tool. Quit shrinking it, overloading use, making it jump around another otherwise trying to make people not want to use it.

Iphone screens waste a ton of real estate, and (at least to my eye), it isn't even pretty, it frequently just looks unfinished, like the designer gave up on the job.

And so on.

Apple has long since given up on proper design. Instead of working through the necessity of presenting numerous options to the user and coming up with a proper hierarchical design, Apple punts to disgraceful shit like peek-a-boo UI, undisclosed hotkey combinations that reveal mystery menus, or "gestures."

We were supposed to get a "total rewrite" of Finder years ago. What happened? And Spotlight is a clinic on shitty UI: WTF is the use of a search facility that doesn't show you WHERE it found things? How degenerated is design acumen (or even just basic sense) there that allows a design like this to not only make it out the door, but persist for a decade or more? Then again, Apple offered up a windowing GUI in which you couldn't resize windows from their edges... or even 3/4 of their corners... for 30 years.

But Windows is far, far worse today. At least Apple is stepping back from the idiotic "flat" design fad and reintroducing a bit of proper GUI. Microsoft is just lost and flailing in the weeds.

> Apple punts to disgraceful shit like peek-a-boo UI

Just had to teach a relative how to save images attached to an email into Photos with macOS Mail: move around the mouse cursor somewhere above the email body and below the headers towards the middle, and a magic menu will appear with a paper clip on the right that reveals "Export to Photos".

Why?

> At least Apple is stepping back from the idiotic "flat" design fad and reintroducing a bit of proper GUI.

Looking at the screenshots of Big Sur (my mac is too old to install it), I have mixed feelings. On the one hand, they're doing more skeuomorphism in some places, especially icons. But in some other places, buttons are losing borders for this godforsaken "clean" look. But I do hope that the departure of Johny Ive is going to help with them going back to a good design.

And it's very unfortunate that Apple doesn't have a visionary CEO any more. Tim Cook feels more concerned with investors than anything else.

I agree. I wasn't a fan of the extreme skeuomorphism that Scott Forstall introduced (iCal having stitched leather and ripped paper, for example), but overall the GUI was in a much better place then.

I bought a 2009 iMac with Snow Leopard on it and used it for the first time today, and found the process of finding, recognizing and clicking on buttons to be faster than in both Big Sur and even Catalina, despite me using Catalina daily. I don't have any data to substantiate this, but I think there's a good chance that interfaces with contrast, depth and well defined separation between elements are generally better suited to our eyes and brains.

> I think there's a good chance that interfaces with contrast, depth and well defined separation between elements are generally better suited to our eyes and brains.

Obviously. IRL everything has depth and many things have well-defined boundaries. Shadows are also a natural phenomenon that our brains have learned to interpret as a signal for depth.

In my own UIs, I still always use shadows and/or borders.

> And Spotlight is a clinic on shitty UI: WTF is the use of a search facility that doesn't show you WHERE it found things?

Holding the Command key shows you the location

Ive been using Spotlight since it came out and I had no idea that was possible

More “peak-a-boo UX”(TM).

And Command+Enter opens a Finder window highlighting the file.

FYI you can hold Command in spotlight to show the file/folder location

Or press ⌘↵ and open the file in Finder!

Ah, too bad, I've grown to quite like the previous beta! I don't tend to have a gazillion tabs open though.

I want my webpage to be as much page as possible, w/ as little chrome.

I think there's some danger in listening to internet outrage as your design process -- every big change generates a lot of dislike, but that doesn't mean it's actually a bad change, or that most people dislike it, or even that the people who hate it at first won't come to like it.

The previous design is apparently still the default. This new design is an option.

Opposite. The new design is the default according to the article, but the old one is available by unchecking a setting

oh, sweet!

There was outrage all across the Internet, not just HN.

I tried it out myself, and it was majorly disorienting. It was the sole reason I reverted from the public beta.

On the flip side, this new Safari design was the sole reason I even installed the beta.

You can reset compact mode from the View menu.

This thread is the perfect example of why you should mostly ignore internet “outrage”. Some people disappointed because they liked the new (previous) design. Others bemoaning aspects of the new (beta 3) design. Others who have never used either bitching based on a couple of screenshots. You can’t please…anyone.

When there are enough people, you'll see a plurality of every opinion.

That's why I'm hoping they'll stick to retaining the option—though knowing Apple, they'll probably axe that, too.

I personally prefer the compact design, but I also understand people being confused over it or just not liking it. Giving people the option serves both groups.

Why is there so much padding around each tab? I guess it makes for clear click targets. Honestly was a fan of the old initial design, though I do lean towards compromising for more screen space.

Your eyes deceive you. Prior MacOS versions have more overall padding (50pt) but it's put entirely within the tab itself. The new tabs have some margin between each tab and a much smaller padding within tabs, for overall what looks to be ~40pt.

The new design sacrifices the 'X' hover-over on the left side of each tab, presumably in favor of an 'X' that overlaps the tab title.

This happens every time a significant redesign moves visual edges around in a way that has better visual separation. It’s almost always more space efficient, but with better affordance for poor eyesight and/or poor pointer coordination.

An assumption, but it seems to me and many others that they’ve been slowly moving to make macOS more touch interface friendly.

I’m typically anti-touch screen on laptops as it drives the price up for a feature I personally almost never use, but there’s so many use cases particularly for a large portion of Apple’s user base working with digital media.

Aside: A Lenovo Yoga -like MacBook would be cool, although I do like the Touch Bar for quickly moving around in media I’m listening to in the background (but I don’t think that’s enough to justify it).

I have a theory that they’re not actually intending to make it more touch friendly but rather they are trying to unify the interfaces between MacOS and iPadOS for when iPadOS supersedes MacOS. Slowly boiling the frog, so you don’t notice when they move iPadOS to the desktop.

It’s almost this but less extreme. They’re trying to unify the interfaces because they want to return to offering one app platform that isn’t sharply split.

iOS started as an OS X variant with special consideration for touch, but forked Cocoa. The unification that’s happening now isn’t about bringing iOS to Macs, it’s about merging Cocoa-next back into upstream.

I could see that. The reason I think it could be more extreme is the AppStore. I don’t have stats to back this up, but I would assume they make far more money from the iOS/iPadOs AppStore than Mac AppStore. It never truly caught on with the Mac, likely due to the long history of loading your own apps. Apple would love nothing more than to break this cycle.

Management types seem to love poking at things.

I’m not entirely joking - most of the Surface and iPad users I see at work are management/project-management.

This is basically the side-effect of the rollback, and it really sucks. Now, they have to keep this wasteful design, and less tabs will _nicely_ fit into the bar. I don't think the initial design was great, but I like it more over this!

Maybe Apple designers tend to test on 32-inch Pro Display XDRs.

> Why is there so much padding around each tab?

Because it was designed by iOS people.

It would have been nice if the article contained screenshots of the current and the upcoming design so non-macOS users can get a impression of the changes.

Here's what tabs in Safari look like now:

https://media.welsh.cc/2jGRw1

And what the Monterey design was to start with:

https://media.welsh.cc/ghhD24

Worth noting that the tab bar in Monterey will adapt based on the site's `theme-color` meta tag.

I was really hoping for them to fix it but keep the toppy-tabs... Exactly this design but switch the url bar and the tab bar.

If you think about the logical hierarchy of controls on a browser it should be:

- global stuff (extensions, sidebar reveal button, etc...)

- tabs

- url, forward/back/reload buttons, etc..

If you're going to mix the global controls with url I still think the tabs should go on top (like real-world tabbed folders). Chrome gets this right and Safari should just copy them.

That's unfortunate. I liked the new design and it made sense for saving vertical space. Whatever happened to "think different"?

Some things just work well the way they are and don't need change.

I think the biggest issue for me was that you couldn’t consistently find your current tab in one single place - you could scroll away your active tab amongst the rest of them, hiding the address bar.

Same. I really liked the new approach, but from the screenshots I figured all tabs would stack from the left making their position more predictable. Instead the entire tab field starts at the center and moves to the left for each new tab making all tabs moving targets.

I believe you can still select the old (well new/old design) design.

The new design is still the default in Beta 3; the change is just the addition of the "Separate Tab Bar" option.

This was obvious from the start. The new design was beautiful but it was an accessibility nightmare.

This change looks pretty awful so I hope they just reach the Chrome v1 style and be done with it. Let's be honest, Chrome v1 was the peak of browser design and browsers are still trying and failing to improve it.

I dunno, I was never enamored with Chrome style tabs. They work ok, but they’re awkwardly tall (more so than needed for adequate hitbox size IMO), and visually they don’t fit in on anything but ChromeOS.

I haven’t heard any complaints about accessibility. Was it a usability nightmare? (Probably! I definitely winced looking at screenshots imagining all the moving targets.)

One example: You can't close other tabs directly once they've shrunk - you need to bring up a menu on the tab. If you do click on the left side of the tab (where the x would be), it'll expand and now your cursor is ... somewhere. Maybe over the x! Maybe over an extension icon! Maybe over another tab! Never mind, move the cursor to the x and oh no, you've missed it by a pixel and now you've activated the address box which also disables the x. Which means you now have to click somewhere else outside the address box and navigate back to the x for closing.

(On a system where you have the infinite Fitts width of the menu bar, it seems perversely insane to have these tiny shifting boxes that mess you around.)

Each tab is a checkbox (selected or not), an input field, a drag handle for the page and a drag handle for the window, depending on how fast you start dragging and in which direction. If you hover it it shows a set of buttons, but if it’s focused the buttons disappear entirely and can’t be dragged or closed at all.

They hid a few buttons in a tiny dropdown that appears on hover; They kept a completely useless clickable lock icon in the middle-ish of field so now there’s a little chance that, while trying to do any of the above, you’ll end up with a popup that you have to close instead.

Ironically enough I remember seeing the Chrome style tabs and thinking, hey, they really look like the NeXT tabs - cool!

But I could be wrong.

Note that the combined address/tab bar is the default, this separate bar redesign is now an option.

Other way around. Separate tab bar is now the default, combo bar is an option.

Arghh, they should have conviction and pushed this one through. The latest design wastes so much space.

I like the compact display, and was pleased to see that I could change Safari back to this mode from the View menu.

Best of both worlds: if you only have a few tabs open, use the compact display, otherwise give up some vertical space for non-compact mode.

Thank God they did this, as is it was going to have me switch to chrome lol

Personal computing won't be truly "personal" until we, the users (not $BIGCO's lead UX designer) get to decide how things look and behave on an individual level

There's a lot of value in NOT having to make those decisions. Most users don't want to think about how their computer or phone should work—they just want it to work out of the box. That requires sensible defaults and slowly introducing changes to adapt to evolving user behavior.

Agreed. My point is that in the current state of affairs, 3rd parties dictate how we use our computers. In an ideal world, users should have the option to customize behavior with relative low effort or cost.

The root problem is that software is incredibly expensive to build.

To point a change I hate, Chrome on mobile now displays tabs as thumbnails instead of stacked like index cards: https://9to5google.com/2019/09/19/chrome-android-tab-grid/ , a change I really dislike.

I really wonder how that's adapting to evolving user behavior...

I would argue that in order to prevent users from leaving your platform or from developing a reputation for being a stagnant platform (e.g. Internet Explorer/Edge, Windows, IBM) you need to be sensitive to new trends. Meaning you'll occasionally need to preemptively try new features before you can be sure they're a move in the right direction. Obviously, not everything you try will be a hit but the constant experimentation is key.

In the current state of affairs everyone gets what's best for the average user. Not what's best for each individual users.

Edit: actually, everyone gets what monetizes better, which frequently, but not always, is what works best for the avg user

I lived through the days of skinnable apps and I never want to go back there again.

One of Apple's core values is delegating very few choices to the end user. But the choices that are present are generally good.

There is such a thing as too many choices.

I agreed, but what if I don't like the way something works because it doesn't match my mental model or whatever? Why can't I change it? Or why is it prohibitively expensive to do it? The core issue is cost of course.

Agrees in 2003 KDE

You are welcome to build your own browser or computer or whatever! You can even modify an existing open source one.

Personal computing is dying and deciding how the UI looks is definitely one of the lesser issues on this

You can. It’s called Linux.

Free Software.

Add slight 3D bezels and throw up that flat crap to the trash.

Oh so this is where Firefox got their new tab design from!? Finally it makes sense, I kind of knew that this must be copied.

2030: Browsers tab bars take half of the vertical space of the screen

wow, that design looks surprisingly Firefox-like.

It is, the floating tab design

All of these issues would be gone if companies like Apple offered the reigns for users to modify their software as needed. I'm running firefox with a competent ad blocker, no tab bar on top, and a sidebar of tabs that appears when I hover the mouse. Sure, it took some finagling with config files, but this sort of stuff should be possible and accessible on a computer. I really wish Safari and Apple in general took a different approach. Firefox shouldn't be the only game in town.

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