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Comment by reayn | Hacker News Reader

I personally think the reason was to further reduce the need to move your thumb from the bottom of the screen. The current iteration of safari is the only mobile browser I have ever used where I feel comfortable browsing and switching tabs with only one finger.

It's surprisingly well implemented, though some actions (such as accessing history or site settings) take a couple extra taps.

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What does it do better than Firefox Mobile? It has all settings, URL bar, and tabs at the bottom as well.

I've yet to try firefox mobile on my phone, I've had no reason to switch from safari (most of my browsing is on Brave on my laptop anyway), but I'll give it a shot.

Safari in iOS 15 also has extension support, and apps like Hyperweb[0] make the experience very pleasant.

I also love the icon :P

0. https://hyperweb.app

Probably doesn't have Firefox's infuriating tab manager that throws an idiotic "well golly you closed a tab!" popup over the next tab you intend to open.

Good point, I don’t browse a lot on mobile, but now that you say it, I’ve had that annoy me before ;)

They've fixed that on Nightly, for what it's worth. There is now padding at the bottom of the tab list. Also, undo-ing a closed tab puts it back where it was, not at the top of the list.

I bet they still have the New Tab button floating off by itself instead of in the navigation menu where it belongs.

That was annoying as fuck, but it seems to finally have gone away from the latest Android version. Now it pushes the tab list up and appears below it.

Chrome rolled out that update on mobile but for whatever reason they rolled it back.

It's a much better design choice imo when you get used to it.

The big challenge I have with this is that while the Safari bar is at the bottom, search within sites (say, Wikipedia) is still at the top. This ends up making it harder for me to redevelop muscle memory for searches/urls at the bottom

Position of address bar is an option you can change.

The thing is, I think having the address bar at the bottom makes a lot of sense on the phone.

I think the purpose is (at least in part) precisely to "split up your muscle memory", so you don't use the same pattern for different kinds of searches. With browser search at the bottom of the UI, it's better differentiated from the Web site's search input at the top of the page.

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