Tell HN: Thanks Apple for placing Safari address bar at the bottom of the screen | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: Thanks Apple for placing Safari address bar at the bottom of the screen

16 pointsreimertz13 comments

I truly appreciate the UX of having the address bar closer to my fingers.

I’m not going to lie, it’s going to take some time to get used to.

But super excited about the impact this will have and how websites will start being more mindful of hamburger menus, CTAs etc. being reachable when holding the phone with one hand.

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You would have loved Windows phone (and a tablet running Windows 8.1). Everything was optimized so it was close to where your fingers naturally would be. You could easily use the phone using one hand (on the devices that has similar size as an iPhone 8).

I really loved the tiled interface of Windows Phone. Too bad it couldn't compete with Apple and Google but I enjoyed using it while it lasted.

Nice, Windows Phone UX wins come to the masses.

Hopefully it works better than Firefox Android, where websites get confused about where the bottom of the screen is (and sometimes place modal buttons out of reach) and even the browser's own hamburger menu shows things under the address bar.

Yeah I quickly put it back post-update, but can definitely see the point.

But it already auto-hides and I rarely enter random addresses by hand on mobile so I could almost do without it if it weren't for search.

Does anyone still have their Windows Phone device? It's been a couple of years since I've tested my website on one, but I suspect it would still work.

Brave Android has the toolbar at the bottom and it's crucial. The address bar is separate at the top but I never use it anyway.

Firefox and Chrome both had this feature first, Brave just inherited the feature as a consequence of being a fork of a better browser.

Even Apple's gimped browser APIs allowed you to do this long before Safari was updated to include it. Did you simply not care until Apple included it by default?

You expect the end user to hunt for APIs to do this? Of course we wait till it’s done by Apple

No, I just expect people to use better browsers. Safari's issues are documented far and wide[0] (as well as extended by a plethora of WebKit issues) so I really don't see why most people would want to use it over Firefox or Chrome. Both of those browsers have given you the option to choose it's location for years, so I don't see any cause for celebration when Apple really just sheared a Yak while blowing party streamers.

[0] https://caniuse.com/?compare=firefox+94,chrome+96,safari+15,...

>No, I just expect people to use better browsers. Safari's issues are documented far and wide[0] (as well as extended by a plethora of WebKit issues) so I really don't see why most people would want to use it over Firefox or Chrome. Both of those browsers have given you the option to choose it's location for years, so I don't see any cause for celebration when Apple really just sheared a Yak while blowing party streamers.

Because Safari works great for its users. That's the target: the end user, not the software developer.

Scroll to the bottom of this [0] site.

> Designed for developers.

Their words, not mine.

[0] https://www.apple.com/safari/

None of the issues noted on caniuse matters as far as "using a better browser" on iOS. All iOS browsers have to be built on the current version of webkit installed on iOS. So all the rendering engines are just skinned to different browsers with different sync/bookmark options included.

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