The Tragedy of Safari 15 for Mac’s ‘Tabs’

As someone who is usually receptive to UI changes, the Safari 15 interface really honestly terrible. I have been beta testing the Orion browser for a while, but after Safari 15 I’m serious considering making it my daily driver. It looks virtually identical to Safari 14 with its much more sane tab design. Apple needs to fix this; you can’t have the single most important app on the system having such a flawed UX.

You know Apple's messed up when John Gruber starts sounding like John Siracusa.

I hadn't seen the new design until now. Even as a person that generally enjoys UI changes in software... Those screenshots had me cursing in my mother tongue out loud.

Wow, he articulated my thoughts on Safari perfectly. A lot of poor UX decisions. Especially the fav icon close button reveal on hover!

Wait, how is his blog taking the whole screen on his mac? Does he zoom on his own blog? Does he uses a 700px wide screen?

> The Safari 15 tab design is a blatant violation of Steve Jobs’s oft-cited “Design is how it works” axiom.

This indeed appears to be the case. But I can not imagine that this would last for long and the next Safari update will not fix this.

> Tabs that look like real-world tabs aren’t just a decorative style. They’re a visual metaphor. My brain likes visual metaphors. It craves them.

As the preeminent Apple commentator at the time, Gruber said nothing when iOS 7 dumped rich visual metaphors for a barren flatness.

So waxing poetic now about one minor change in one app is just comical.

Realistically, this specific change, from tabs to buttons, is not that big of a deal.

He's simply delusional if he thinks the tabs before Safari 15 looked like tabs, or that the active tab was unambiguous.

Apple is just polishing a turd, how much damage could it have done?

"It's what the network wants, why bother to complain..."

Same with Firefox these days.

I for one really like the new design. It makes a lot more sense than having tabs separately, the only three complaints I have are

- There’s no vertical/tree style option

- There’s an ever so slight delay opening the address bar sometimes (seen in the highlighting animation which itself is quirky)

- The reload button is hard to find

Maybe a bonus, but I have yet to find out what anything in the sidebar is good for.

> [Safari is] the single most-used app on the platform.

No, that would be Google Chrome.

I still haven't seen anyone mentioned it, but I thought It was the Safari 15 design was about turning Web into more Apps like.

I think ( I can no longer find a source for it ) that was how Microsoft originally envision something like that in Vista with XAML, Silverlight and turning all Web into Tabs of Apps?

This feels the same. And of course Web Site and Web Apps are fundamentally two different things which has different paradigm. So they are at odds.

Apple has always state that Apps on iOS that could be a simple WebSite should remain a website. This goes back to their current App Store problems, it make lots of sense on iPhone, I feel on macOS they are taking a lot away from their Mac users. Because browser are used very differently on Smartphone and PC. We have lots of Data showing despite more e-commerce purchase are happening on Mobile, the surfing of items still happens more often on PC with browsers.

Anyway, there are lots of things happening in the past few years showing how Apple is different without an "editor" in change. Giving me a whole new appreciation of Editors in many other industry.