Hacker News Reader

Comment by beezischillin | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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

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 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.

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?

iCloud Keychain and Syncing with iPhone.

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.

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.

And SMS code filling

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.

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.

Because it syncs bookmarks and passwords through iCloud.

Because it inflicts the least cruelty upon my hardware.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com