The utter user-interface butchery happening to Safari on the Mac is once again the work of people who put iOS first. People who by now think in iOS terms. People who view the venerable Mac OS user interface as an older person whose traits must be experimented upon, plastic surgery after plastic surgery, until this person looks younger. Unfortunately the effect is more like this person ends up looking… weird.
These people look at the Mac’s UI and (that’s the impression, at least) don’t really understand it. Its foundations come from a past that almost seems inscrutable to them. Usability cues and features are all wrinkles to them. iOS and iPadOS don’t have these strange wrinkles, they muse. We must hide them. We’ll make this spectacular facelift and we’ll hide them, one by one. Mac OS will look as young (and foolish, cough) as iOS!
I haven’t encountered a single person who likes the new Safari tab design on macOS.
I’ve found the growing level of incompatibility with pre-existing websites made my use of Safari to browse unworkable. The first thing I did with the recent iOS update was swap it out as the default browser and life while mobile browsing is now so much better. I’m cynical so I’m sure at some stage that will cost me somewhere in terms of OS integration, but so far I haven’t even noticed it missing and I’ve gain so much, or at least I’ve lost so many hassles!
Of course, I admit I’m a dinosaur, I nearly always use the website not the App, they want to give me an App for everything but I’m just not interested. I don’t want to install a single thing I don’t need 24×7.
It’s fine for Apple to deliver new, but you have to respect old, and they do not have a good history of that!
All browsers on iOS are Safari. The visuals are the only difference.
I suppose if you just consider WebKit rendering as the only measure of a browser, but there is more to browsers than just the rendering engine and a number of browsers now workaround Apple’s restrictions.
But I admit I’m not an expert in this area, I can only relate how various browsers work with certain websites I use and in my case the 3rd party browsers are better.
Browsers are their rendering engine. They have other flair around the engine, but the rendering engine is the browser.
Are they? The last I heard, it was a hard restriction.
I’m pretty sure the web devs are doing something dumb.
My guesses: user agent games, Safari tracking protections are blocking 3rd party cookies and messing with website functionality.
The second one bites me fairly regularly on desktop FF with security extensions.
Well maybe you are a dinosaur, but if so, welcome to my herd! I absolutely detest this app-centric ecosystem where, in order to use a website, they urge you to install an app that wraps the website in an app that renders the same website I could open directly with a normal web browser. And what’s more, I have no interest in using a vastly inferior mobile device with a small screen at any time that I could be using a real computer with a real open OS and a real keyboard and mouse, which these days during the pandemic is like 99% of the time.
Yes, the folly of an App centric focus is sorely exposed when your sitting at your WFH desk without a web interface. At least I don’t have to spend all day avoiding collisions with the mindless zombies roaming the corridors with their phone or table trance!
Phone or tablets with those little Apps, to quickly fix or diagnose a problem when I’m out at dinner or otherwise occupied they get a thumbs up as 100% useful. But do any serious work in any sort of volume and they are a piece of sh………………!
Apps did come first. I’m polar opposite. I’d rather have an app than use a browser because browsers are completely in efficient and lowest common denominator for this type of stuff. If a service doesn’t provide an app, I tend not to use it. Great example is Instagram. I use it on the phone, but the tablet app doesn’t exist, so I rarely use it on the iPad because the experience is so much less appealing. Another – my bank has an app, and a website. I have probably logged in to the website twice in the last 5 years, and that was only to download a PDF of my statement. I do all my banking in the app. Making a web site that does what an app can do is basically working against the nature of how the web was originally designed to work, and the fact it has been hacked in to working to a fashion is not a reason to endorse it.
Nobody likes change. Once a change is made, everyone’s bitching about it, then they get used to it, then they forget. Then there’s another change. Nobody likes change.
Now, not that I’m accusing anyone here of bias, and I’m not going to defend Apple, but saying “I haven’t encountered a single person who likes the new Safari tab design on macOS.” is either indicative of your specific echo-chamber, or however you phrased the question, since, unless you have friends who work in Apple, this is wholly based on the preview images. Meaning, none of this is based on actual experience with the new design. It might be as bad as you say. it might be worse, but it might be just an amazing new way of whatever. (or, more likely, it might just not be that important), but you don’t know since none of us have spent any amount of time with this. And besides, this is also indicative of another issue.
Tab usage is one of those things that apparently no two people are the same about. I like to have a few, but not to few. She has dozens of them opened. He constantly bookmark stuff and close and open these. Everyone is different. Whatever new design there is will better work to some, less to other, the same way the former design worked better to some, less to others. There is no right or wrong here. It’s design, there’s no right or wrong here. Everything that is now hailed as UI gospel brought down from the mountain was subject to the same slew of articles 10 years ago saying it’s a mess, it favors looks over function, it’s confusing, too mobile/desktop, etc. And now it’s the gold standard against which the new iteration is measured. Because it’s not really that important, once you get used to it.
Haha, yes. The cycle of life. XD
How much backlash do think the first air breathing fish got? XD
This is the thing isn’t it? Some tech journo wrote a clickbait, hot take of some screenshots (real?) in order to fill their quota. (Good for them; they got paid.) However, this isn’t shipping software. No one has used it, and the article is a waste of time and space.
Is it any dumber then tabs on top of the controls, like FF or Chrome? The reason given was “WeB SiteS are GonInG To ChanGE the BAR”, but that never happened. It’s now just a dumb decision everyone assumes is the way to do things.
Indeed.
Also after a certain number of tabs in a window, the UI becomes useless. The tabs get too small obscuring favicon and title. FF has a neat little drop down menu which will list the tabs in a window, which helps this.
I just caught an article somewhere saying this is pre-Beta. Like you say some journalist was just writing clickbait to fill column inches and earn their pay. Pre-Beta could be anything.
As a developer or even with other work I would never show pre-Beta anything to anyone unless they had been briefed and covered by none disclosure. The fact is people without a trained eye or in the loop can come to all manner of points of views which have nothing to do with project goals, design intent, work in progress, or some elements being purely experimental or placeholders. I have showed pre-Beta work to people in the past and the reaction has ranged from impressed through to being a complete idiot about things. I can tell you that last one is a quick and easy way to destroy trust and any chance of a working relationship especially after they were told and went “Yeah, yeah” to everything.
Given all the concern about vertical space supposedly driving these decisions, perhaps it’s time we go back to 4:3 or 5:4 displays, so we’ve relatively more of that precious vertical space to make use of…
> go back to 4:3 or 5:4 displays
Wasn’t one of the displays for a machine at XeroxPARC-of-yore that the whole macOS was based on shaped like a square? Or was it the original NeXT display?
I think the XeroxPARC stuff was built around portrait mode because it mimicked paper sizes.
https://crm.org/articles/xerox-parc-and-the-origins-of-gui
That looks like maybe a 16:10 in portrait mode?
Personally, whenever I can rotate the screen, I code in portrait/vertical mode, so much more convenient.
I’ve tried it with my 16:10 monitors, and it doesn’t work for me. At least not with vertical documents. A vertical 5:4 might be different.
5:4 displays were a nice size, but I do like widescreens and being able to display multiple documents side by side.
Laptop screens are starting to use 16:10 screens again. Apple never switched away from 16:10 by the way.
The better answer is probably to get rid of the mouse and all the UI to server the rodent. Of course, the web is horrible about this, so probably not going to happen.
Myself I think the cult of square screens is exactly that. A cult. All they do is focus on one single variable and forget all the other variables. They also forget other people have different needs for different reasons. There is no one single perfect form factor. The square screen cult is a whiney meme hoping through sheer persistence to get their way and by and large convert everyone to the one true way of the square screen cult.
I’ve seen this exact same thing play out with other domains who lament the demise of the one true way. They simply cannot get their minds around the difference between specialist and general. Yes, general purpose functions whether computers or admin departments can be one size fits all for abritrary economic reasons. Yes it is a pain but this is why proper mechanisms for diversity of solutions need to be developed. They often aren’t and take a long time to get started when they do but they can get there.
If you play widescreen videos to replicate the same viewing height on a square screen you need a massive square screen. Its size just ballons. That or you have to put up with a tiny video image, The same is true of double spread documents or having two tasks open at once.
Shifting to widescreen also brought productions costs right down. Suddenly you had a market where television and computer screens were interchangeable. The higher quality ones could go towards computers. The not so good ones in television screens.
My current desktop screen is 23″. Its vertical height is approimately the same as a 17″ screen which is more than the 15″ screen I used to have. That’s another two inches of vertical height and a near doubling of screen real estate so I can browse and watch a video at the same time. But but square screens! sorry but no. There can be an argument for square screens on laptops which will typically have a smaller screen real estate by default due to the formfactor but then there are people who want a bigger screen anyway. Mine is a 15″ widescreen. I’d like a 17″ but I’m not made of money. It spends most of its life plugged in to a 23″ desktop display so vertical height is a moot point.
For exactly the same vertical height my 23″ desktop display is I can fill the screen with a widescreen movie and watch it from the other side of the room. My old 20″ Trinitron had the same vertical height and a widescreen movie was barely watchable. The size of a square display needed to watch a widescreen movie at the same size as my 23″ desktop display would be so huge I would have difficulty looking over the top and it would dominate the room.
During the glory days of the square screen you could barely get a computer which had enough power to display a widescreen movie. Later MPEG2 acceleration helped. It was only later still a computer could display a 720p let alone a 1080p reolution video without a lot of CODEC optimsation. Now we have desktops and laptops which can play a 180p video without effort and up to 4K if you have the display to suit. Try playing a 4K widescreen video on a square screen era laptop. How many seconds would it take simply to render one frame?
I have no problem with people who want square screens because they give vertical height in a compact form factor but I disagree with the dogmatic singlemindedness where the square screen cult wants what it wants to the exclusion of everyone else who wants widescreen or even widescreen in portrait orientation. I presume they’re happy with paying more because wow those screens will be expensive.
I’m keeping a very wary eye on the 16:10 cult. I’m suspicious they are the square screen cult in disguise.
Autohide taskbar is a thing for people who absolutely crave a tidy screen and that extra 1cm of space. I do. This got me digging more. In Libreoffice you can dock the toolbar at the side. That’s another 1cm of screen height saved. It makes my eyes go wonky so I’m not using it but this may be an option for some. Some applications even have floating toolbars you drag off the main window. Others have hotkeys to toggle toolbars or fullscreen. Bingo. More free vertical height.
The default size of a command window on my system is 120×30 characters when I open a command window and that’s only a third of the size it could be. Back in the day the screen resolution for EGA was 640×350 which was 80×25 characters in colour? How much vertical height do the square screen cult want??? They already have three times what coders had back in the day and it is usually coders who are members of the square screen cult. I’m guessing most weren’t even born when EGA was a thing.
I don’t know about that. I’ve had several which I really like.
24″ 1920×1600 are really nice. 1920×1080 feels really cramped when switching between the two.
25″ 2K monitors are close. 16:10 would be better as they are slightly short, but better.
27″ 4k monitors are close. 16:10 would be better, but the size and resolution pretty much negate the advantage.
43″ 4k monitors curved with a flush bezel would be pretty close. I think they should be something like 8k to really fill the space though.
I don’t think squares work well for smaller monitors, but my 43″ could be square because at that size I’m not maximizing any windows. 27″ 4K and 43″ 4K are the first monitors where I haven’t missed the extra vertical pixels of 16:10 monitors.
The extra ~200 vertical pixels can be felt. Especially on smaller screens with lower resolutions.
If you want to be suspicious, be suspicious of the 16:9-stans. That group is dumb.
Oi. That’s fighting talk that is! lol. I’m fine with what I have but a 4K display would be nice. I don’t really need one but if and when I replace mine with a 27″ and 4K is cheaper it would make sense. I dropped around a friends house who had something like a 52″ widescreen television. It was amazing and a very cinematic experience. I was totally captured by it while he was busy plying me with wine and trying to take my dress off. Speaking of which I have a 1080p 15″ screen in the cupboard I need to fit to one of my laptops for travel. The smaller resolution is unusable by comparison when browsing.
it looks like they copied the windows taskbar
Personally I prefer to browse on my 2nd monitor in portrait view
Thankfully this utter shit it not just only happening on Windows… I was starting to wonder if I was going to convert to Mac. But definitively not.
I haven’t really looked into it but I would question the whole approach of the designers resonsible for interfaces. The whole point of code level interfaces and abstractions is to maintain functionality across eqiuvalent plaftorms. At the GUI level designers have a whole set of issues to consider from the default look and feel of different platforms which is one set of problems then through the set of rules on what makes good design and usability. I don’t know what the issues are with Mac OS or iOS because I don’t use either but my guess is the application designers are getting caught up in platform specifics and trying to make one platform fit the biases of another.
A desktop is not a smartphone nor a tablet. The form factor and human interface is different. Now I get Apple want to unify the interface, applications, and codebase across their entire product range. Probably 90%+ of the codebase and application logic can be unified. The problem is this roadcrash with the interface.
The interface->business logic->data tiering still applies. Apple seem to be trying to push a “generic dumbed down management report” kind of system with a “spreadsheet for nerds” system and the two are not working together as concepts or as a unified whole.
As for browsers they are a cross between an application and desktop enviroment in their own right. Below this every web designer has their own design and usability imperatives. My sense is Apple is pushing dogma but the world does not work like that.
The UI looks like the overriding design consideration was how to make Apple.com look better. FSM I hate Apple’s website.
> FSM
Which acronym? Flying Spaghetti Monster, or Finite State Machine?
Wait, are we SURE he’s talking about Safari? That sounds exactly like what I’ve been saying about Firefox since v89. Everybody is jumping on the two-thumbs interface, which just destroys the usefulness of a real mouse on a real monitor on a real OS.