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Safari Desktops (Apple) Apple

The Tragedy of Safari 15 for Mac's 'Tabs' (daringfireball.net) 91

John Gruber shares thoughts on the new ways tabs feel and function on Safari for Mac: From a usability perspective, every single thing about Safari 15's tabs is a regression. Everything. It's a tab design that can only please users who do not use tabs heavily; whereas the old tab design scaled gracefully from "I only open a few tabs at a time" all the way to "I have hundreds of tabs open across multiple windows." That's a disgrace. The Safari team literally invented the standard for how tabs work on MacOS. The tabs that are now available in the Finder, Terminal, and optionally in all document-based Mac apps are derived from the design and implementation of Safari's tabs. Now, Apple has thrown away Safari's tab design -- a tab design that was not just best-of-platform, but arguably best-in-the-whole-damn-world -- and replaced it with a design that is both inferior in the abstract, and utterly inconsistent with the standard tabs across the rest of MacOS.

The skin-deep "looks cool, ship it" nature of Safari 15's tab design is like a fictional UI from a movie or TV show, like Westworld's foldable tablets or Tony Stark's systems from Iron Man, where looking cool is the entirety of the design spec. Something designed not by UI designers but by graphic designers, with no thought whatsoever to the affordances, consistencies, and visual hierarchies essential to actual usability. Just what looks cool. This new tab design shows a complete disregard for the familiarity users have with Safari's existing tab design. Apple never has been and should not be a company that avoids change at all cost. But proper change -- change that breaks users' habits and expectations -- is only justifiable when it's an improvement. Change for change's sake alone is masturbatory. That with Safari 15 it actually makes usability worse, solely for flamboyant cosmetic reasons, is downright perverse.
"Google could and should run ads targeting Safari users, with a simple welcoming message: Switch to Chrome, the Mac browser where tabs look like tabs."
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The Tragedy of Safari 15 for Mac's 'Tabs'

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  • I agree, pretty bad. (Score:5, Informative)

    by SuperKendall ( 25149 ) on Monday October 04, 2021 @04:24PM (#61861185)

    I already changed back IOS 15 Safari so it would have a normal url bar.

    I've left the Mac tab bars alone so far but I really can't say I like anything at all about the changes to it, and will revert pretty soon. Apart from the really bad inverted focus color they chose for when you have more than one tab, they just waste space up there as well with the rounded/separated tabs.

    They must have spent a very long time on the design for all this, I wonder how they thought people would like the more or find it more usable in any way? That's why I left them as they are, to try and find the grain of whatever improvement they thought they were offering.

    • Speaking as someone with 243 tabs open in my main window, and another 100+ in a secondary; I am glad that I can't get Safari 15 without updating the firmware on my old MacPro5,1.

      • Why?
        • The main tab is primarily ADHD. There are tabs in here I've been planning on getting to for 5-10 years, but never done it. Every now and then I can focus enough to prune down to 100ish, but I never finish.

          The secondary tab is music videos I want to buy on iTunes, but are not available. It's primarily Romanian Europop from MediaProMusic, which seems to prefer US views on their Youtube videos to actual sales. There's also a lot of cover artists who never get around to acquiring the rights and getting their so

          • Thanks for the reply, I feel for you. I may open up twenty or so tabs but if I get much more open I lose any context of what is open as the tabs get so small and seem to stretch on forever. I end up clicking the add to reading list button for those items I think I need to read. then for whatever reason, I never go and read. However, I do know they exist in the reading list.
      • by arglebargle_xiv ( 2212710 ) on Tuesday October 05, 2021 @01:19AM (#61862143)

        Speaking as someone with 243 tabs open in my main window, and another 100+ in a secondary;

        Hint: If you open an account and subscribe to Pornhub you don't need to keep individual tabs per video you want to watch but can just organise them via your account and stream them one after the other in the same tab.

        • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          Seriously though, tab management is apparently one of the hardest problems in computing. No-one has managed to come up with a UI that really works well for it.

          The old Firefox Panorama thing wasn't bad, basically you could organize tabs into groups and keep them as thumbnails on a kind of desktop type page. It was fairly flexible, you could adjust the visual size of the groups to see more or less detail, move them around etc. I used to use it but found the main issue was I ended up with too many groups. Then

    • I'm trying it out, but moving tabs to a group is a pain in the ass from the keyboard. It's like the designers never actually tried using it. I prefer the older "eat their own dog food" Apple. I would imagine there's some sort of clunky workaround, but I shouldn't need a workaround.

      • I'm trying it out, but moving tabs to a group is a pain in the ass from the keyboard.

        I think that probably one of the greatest improvements in delivered usability of new UIs would be if complete testing of keyboard only use was exercised frequently, as it is I fear any keyboard testing at all is an afterthought, and probably not very complete.

        Keyboard use of UI's has really fallen heavily by the wayside, it would be great if that were brought back into greater prominence - and Apple even has reason to do so

  • That's optimistic (Score:5, Insightful)

    by grasshoppa ( 657393 ) on Monday October 04, 2021 @04:26PM (#61861197) Homepage

    What makes you think Google isn't going to follow suit and implement the same stupid problem?

    If there's one thing you can count on from big companies, it's UIX regression. Seriously; can you name a single good UI change from MS, Apple or Google over the past couple years?

    • Re: (Score:1, Informative)

      That's why I only use the best browser ever made [seamonkey-project.org], with the same UI for over 25 years.

    • by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Monday October 04, 2021 @05:05PM (#61861301)

      Ribbon, Integrated search in start menu, getting rid of the archaic menu. You may not like it, but the hard data exists, it's easier and faster to use contextual based UI elements as well as grouping elements by use rather than in large lists.

      Mind you it's just not easy if you learnt where all the elements were previously and instead of learning to use the new interface simply ignore it and complain for years on the internet about how all modern UI design is crap.

      • That's one reason I just can't get used to Mac OS. Cramming everything into menu bars died out in the mid 90s, but apple still insists that everything must have menu bars. That, and I just can't do without forward and backward navigation buttons on mice. Apple finally copied the right mouse button, but they still haven't caught on to the other 3 commonly used mouse buttons.

        • by Nebulo ( 29412 ) on Monday October 04, 2021 @09:28PM (#61861763)

          Third-party mice do this quite handily on Mac OS.

          • Third-party mice do this quite handily on Mac OS.

            Yeah, but you need extra tools to make non-shitty (third party) scroll wheels not suck on macOS. Sure you can make things work on macOS, but it will usually cost you, and the stuff that works is never default.

            • Scroll wheels do not need extra software to work. (* facepalm *)
              You are jsut a stupid Mac hater.

              My mouse is a $5 bluetooth mouth. All buttons work right out of the box with no extra software at all.

              It is not even real bluetooth, it needs a dongle. And even that works out of the box.

              • Scroll wheels do not need extra software to work. (* facepalm *)

                They do on macs..
                  But yes macs can generally be classified as one continuous facepalm.

                • They do on macs..
                  No they don't. And never did.

                  No idea why people who have no Mac try to correct a guy sitting with a mouse in front of his mac with a scroll wheel.

                  WTF: just open system preferences and go to "mouse" - and check yourself.

                  • Yeah, now turn off wheel acceleration.. You could two years ago, but not the feature is gone and requires a third party app.

                    No, I have macs, at work - to test software on - I would never pay for that kind of crap or work on in voluntarily.

                    • Sorry: google it if you can not find it with the built in search of "preferences".

                      The only idea about case I have is: you have weird mouse. I have one, too - which I obviously do not use: you have to move the mouse nearly a yard the get the pointer over an 14" screen. Did not check what is really wrong with it. I use my other mouse.

          • No, they don't. Mouse button 4 and mouse button 5 literally do nothing at all on Mac OS.

            https://apple.stackexchange.co... [stackexchange.com]

            There are little hacks to work around it, but the problem with OSX is it doesn't have a universal understanding of the mouse 4 and mouse 5 bindings. So in order for it to work in a given application, you literally have to create some kind of keyboard binding workaround.

            The author of the first answer in the stackexchange article is incorrect though, that isn't windows only hardware, it's p

        • Finally, like 15 years ago.

        • Macs always had a right mouse button.

          And if you need stupid navigations on mouse buttons then simply buy a mouse that has those keys.

          The only Apple mouse I ever had was the one that came with Mac SE in 1992 - who buys an apple mouse and complains about lack of buttons?

          but they still haven't caught on to the other 3 commonly used mouse buttons.
          No idea which those buttons are.

          But: if you have a mouse with those buttons, it will work just fine in Mac OS. Stupid idiot.

          • by Reziac ( 43301 ) *

            Right over yonder I have a G4's original puck mouse that has but one button. No right, left, or center, just one button.

            That G4 works fine with a standard USB mouse, but only the left button works.

          • Macs always had a right mouse button.

            Nobody said anything about the right mouse button (or the context menus, which Apple stole from Windows) however your statement is totally false. Right mouse buttons didn't start to show up in macs until at least 2005, though probably later.

            And if you need stupid navigations on mouse buttons then simply buy a mouse that has those keys.

            That's fine and all, but those keys don't actually do anything even if you have them on your mouse. If you actually had a multi-button mouse, you'd know that.

            No idea which those buttons are.

            Yes, I'm keenly aware of that. And that's exactly why you have no idea what the shortcomings of Mac OS are: you'v

      • Here's the problem with the ribbon. Microsoft office has uncountable number of features. Some people care about some more than others based on their workflow. So the menu system had equal weight on many of the features, but the ribbon did not. It emphasized the ones that were more common above those that were less common. This is great, assuming a a vast majority also found those the features they used. If you didn't well then it was more painful.

        • Some people care about some more than others based on their workflow. So the menu system had equal weight on many of the features, but the ribbon did not.

          Tragedy of commons. Treating everyone as equals is rarely the most efficient use of a resource, be they real resources or just time / number of clicks. The reality is Microsoft has the data, we complain endlessly about how they collect it, and the data was used to drive the design of the ribbon bringing the most used features to the forefront for the general betterment of society at the expense of some edge cases.

          I agree it is annoying clicking through the advanced menus for something which previously was a

        • As you say, well..maybe. Or maybe not. One of the main ribbon bars (or segments, or whatever they call them) in Word is Mailings. Who in their right mind uses Word to do mailing lists? I haven't done that kind of thing since 1985, and I don't know of anyone else who has, either. So either I--and everyone I know--is a very UNcommon user, or something's wrong with Microsoft's notion of what's common.

          Similarly for Word's Design and (to a lesser extent) Layout ribbon tabs. Or PowerPoint's Transitions and

      • The ribbon is a night mare for everyone who simply wants to safe a file or print it.
        Because: none of the file related commands are in the ribbon.

        I get a phone call from people every day:"oh, I have this new ribbon office, and opened a file, I can not save my changes!! Please help!"

        Sure, they should have learned about cmd-s/ctrl-s and cmd-p/ctrl/-p however: those shortcuts only make sense for english or German speakers. How should a Thai memorize them?

        If you can work with the ribbon, Kudos for you. I simply

        • Another thing that's wrong (as in God and I say it's wrong) is that Save takes you to this wonky back room thing, intentionally hiding the document you're trying to save. If this is the first time you're saving it, you might want to *see* the doc while you're cogitating about an appropriate filename. But no, you're not allowed to do that. Wrong design, just plain wrong.

        • The ribbon is a night mare for everyone who simply wants to safe a file or print it. Because: none of the file related commands are in the ribbon.

          No. It's even easier, directly available on the top of the screen at all times regardless of ribbon context. Better still, even if it weren't the save and print options are located under the ribbon option called "File" which is not only where they make sense to be, but also where they fundamentally have been since 1985. NINETEEN EIGHTY FIVE. Windows 1.0 put the save and print options in the "File" menu where they remain to this day.

          I suggest if you get a user calling you then you should tell them to put the

      • I fail to see how "contextual based UI elements" have anything to do with context, unless you're talking about popup menus. If otoh you're talking about the ribbon, I can't see how it has any more context than the old menus did. It's just that menus used words, whereas the ribbon uses hieroglyphs. (And you know how long it took to decipher Egyptian--not to mention Mayan--hieroglyphs after their meaning was lost: millennia.)

        As for the supposed advantage of "grouping elements by use", I agree; that's exact

    • by BAReFO0t ( 6240524 ) on Monday October 04, 2021 @05:25PM (#61861353)

      When did "UX" suddenly become the new thing everybody's saying instead of "UI"?
      Feels like that suddenly appeared out of nowhere, about a year ago, and ever since, everybody who doesn't follow, is shouted down.
      Was there some big conference or cult meeting or something, that everybody was invited too?

      I mean how much more "corporate-speak bullshit bingo" can you get, than "Ooohh, it's an expeeerience!!!"? How this term got popular, is a mystery to me.

      • AFAIK, UX is when there is interactiveness involved (clicking, animations, etc) UI is just static design. Sure, everything is interactive these days, but I think they mostly complain about the looks, not the actual âoeexperienceâ ðY
        • No, an interface by definition implies a two-way communication.

          Otherwise it would be a format. E.g. a document format.

          Do you know of any APIs that qualify as purely one-way, for example? As in: only static declarations, constants, etc?

          So while you are probably right about what "designers" think it means... they are wrong.

      • Fashion. In theory UX is better and more designed in how it is _used_. In practice companies and people using the term are more into appearances, and end up doing the opposite and forget how to design the User Experience.

        • Very silly comment, and speaks to your lack of knowledge about the topic.

          UI refers to the gadgets on the screen.

          UX refers to the overall usability of the system, whether the system is solving the right problem, whether what are often multiple systems (sometimes non-computerized systems) work to provide a smooth flow for the user, whether information is organized for findability, whether the system is manageable, what resources are in place to feed new content regularly, and about a thousand other things.

          Doi

          • Aah, ... the "UX" snobbery cult has arrived.

            No, I have to disagree: Whoever taught you was already a cargo culter. The style of your comment has all the signs.
            You can throw in as many competent-sounding but ultimately meaningless terms from your last training presentation or book as you like.

            UI... User Interface, means exactly just that, and nothing narrower. So for a shell program, everything between the keyboard via stdin and the model in case of a MVC design, and everything between the model and, via std

            • by jddj ( 1085169 )

              Sorry guy, no "cargo cult" to it. I've been working in the discipline since 2007 or so. You should learn a thing or two about it.

              If you go to a nice restaurant, and your experience is mainly a matter of knives, forks and spoons, you're living in an experientally impoverished world.

              User Interface does indeed mean the interface between a user and a computer. And it should be well designed.

              But User Experience doesn't stop at the screen. It includes architecting information before the first screen is created, s

            • I agree with you. UI designers thought about all the things that jddj listed long before anyone referred to it as "UX". There were even guidelines (Apple and Microsoft both had them) about UI guidelines. "UX" is just a fancy new name so the new generation can pretend they're doing something New And Better.

        • Ah, so what we called "ergonomics" or something sounding like that in the early 2000s, when looking at the psychology and behavior for UIs became popular at the company I worked in back then.

      • UX and UI are not the same thing. One is a subset of the other.

        It's okay, I don't expect Captain Ignorant to understand what's going on in the world around you.

        • Sorry, but UI is correctly defined as whatever you call "UX". You just had no clue what "UI" actually means and narrowed its definition, until you needed a new term for it. That just makes you overconfident laughing stock.

      • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        UX has been around for a couple of decades I think, certainly much longer than a year.

        It kinda makes sense in that a good way to develop a UI is to consider the user's tasks and workflow, rather than just basic principals like how things should be arranged. Unfortunately most of the people claiming to do UX don't seem to actually do any UX stuff.

      • Its been UX for a decade now, but in practice they do mean the same thing. But the experience gets more to the heart of what's desired. I'm not a luxury car driver, it seems stupid to me to pay more for a car than you need to. But my dumb friends how do, will complain that the interior of a ford, volkswagen or other equally capable car isn't as "nice". "I don't like being surrounded with that much plastic". "this one has wood!". I mean it sounds really dumb to me, but they literally pay a premium for it. S

      • by Misagon ( 1135 )

        Don Norman explains [youtu.be] the origin of the term.

        The user interface is a part of UX (the "User Experience"), but originally the emphasis when using the term UX was on everything around the actual app more than on its user interface specifically.

      • UI gets work done; UX sells product and promotes brands etc.

        - UX in the last decade's extreme fad of "don't make me think" lead to the old mindset: the customer's feelings are always right. UX is a superset that includes other factors and motives. Corporate BS lingo, marketing, blindly being guided by customer emotions... which naturally say "don't make me think."

        - UI empowers the user to communicate; maybe even be a tool for their minds. It does not have to play with your emotions; or involve packaging or

        • I've been commenting to posts above yours that UX is just a new term for UI, and as BAReFO0t says above, any supposed difference is because the new generation re-defined UI to be a much narrower thing that it really was.

          However, you give me pause; if what UX has, that UI didn't have, is corporate BS lingo (and logos) and marketing, then maybe yes, that's true. And maybe UX is also about pastels and rounded corners and hiding useful capabilities (like the late and unlamented charms) and fonts that make a st

      • Because "UI" means user interface. And is basically implying he user has an interface from which the computer can interact with him. So it is the from word. Just like "remote" or "remotely" is usually translated wrong into German: "entfernt" instead of "ferne". "Wo ist er denn? Der 'entfernte' Computer?"

        In embedded or Car/Plane industry: they say HMI: Human - Machine Interface. More correct, but unlike GUI - which one can live with, I think, it does not imply if it is graphical or text based.

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Chrome introduced tab groups, they are very handy on mobile and there seems to be potential on desktop too.

      The Windows 10 Start Menu was a decent upgrade too. It largely did away with manually managing the menu structure and just made search and tiles the primary choices. The tiles were similar to how people organized their desktops, except in a pop-over menu for ease of access. It needed tagging but was definitely an improvement over everything since Windows 95.

      I liked the ribbon UI too, sue me.

      • "The tiles were similar to how people organized their desktops." Wrong. I've seen two styles of desktops. Either every file the user has opened for the last three years is scattered across the desktop, with a result that's worse than old pigeonhole desks, or their desktop is empty (like mine), and they store files in a hierarchical filing system which can be accessed logically.

        Maybe what you meant to write was "The tiles were similar to how people mis-organized their desktops."

    • Actually nope. There never was a good UI change since 10 years, I would dare to say 15 or even be bold and claim 20.

      Yesterday Chrome auto dwonloaded and activated night mode/dark mode.

      After I hat rejected that 10x manually, minimum. Now I have to search in the options how to deactivate it again.

      HEELLLO YOU DUMB ASSES: there is a reason why I run one browser in dark mode and the other one NOT!

  • by slack_justyb ( 862874 ) on Monday October 04, 2021 @04:34PM (#61861221)

    Remember when Firefox made the tabs look like buttons? It was, "Grumble, grumble... Firefox is being stupid with the UI." Well now Apple took that stupid as fuck design and cranked it up to 11 here. I mean seriously, look at this shit. And yeah look at the top, the ones in the middle are from a post long ago. [daringfireball.net] Okay, say what you will about Firefox's UI choice, but clearly Apple and Mozilla are in a race to see who can create the most fucked up UI and Apple has a pretty fucking strong lead now in that race.

    But as someone else has already said, "WATCH OUT" Google will be heading for fucked up UI at Warp factor nine soon enough.

    • I knew there would be a Firefox comparison. Just like with the Firefox change, people on /. are acting like Apple nested tabs under like three menus or something. These changes are purely cosmetic and don’t change how the browser functions in the least bit.

      It shouldn’t surprise me. I remember in the early days of Mac OS X everyone on /. bitched about the Dock and any other design choice that didn’t mimic Windows. I have come to realize that the people who bitched about the Firefox tabs (an

      • These changes are purely cosmetic and don’t change how the browser functions in the least bit

        If anything I'm lampooning the very people who bitch about these changes. I have no idea what I was voted insightful, I figured at best I'd pulled +2 Funny, but whatever. That said, my point here is...

        I have come to realize that the people who bitched about the Firefox tabs (and now Safari) are the same people who use MATE because once they have become accustomed to something any minor design change is an utter travesty

        ...that the answer is people just like to bitch no matter what and that bitching about anything without substance behind it ought to be ignored.

        But clearly I forgot the /s in my comment.

    • by Reziac ( 43301 ) *

      They're already doing something... as of Chrome's most recent update on linux, the title bar no longer respects system settings. I guess next they'll move down one line to fuck up the tabs.

  • by 140Mandak262Jamuna ( 970587 ) on Monday October 04, 2021 @04:37PM (#61861227) Journal
    No one targets desktops or 24 inch monitors anymore. Websites are simply 5 inch portrait screens stretched to 24 inch landscape.

    User interface clearly marking controls about what is clickable and what is not is gone.

    Apple implements something, it is automatically the coolest thing since sliced bread and that is the standard.

    Long back when Microsoft was the king of the hill, there was a joke, "How many Microsoft developers does it take to change a light bulb?" A: "None, MS declared darkness to be the industry standard". Well, now s/Microsoft/Apple/g the joke is valid again.

    • I'm a tallscreen user, you insensitive clod!

      . . . ;)

      (Really, if you're a coder, or manage files or write text or handle any form of lists, a tall screen is simply superior. Wide screens are only good for movies and games and anything with a timeline that you need to be able to overlook like a horizon. For everything else the format doesn't matter.)

      Also, with a nice tiling window manager, you always have two websites side by side. Or a browser should just display any site as multiple columns if it's too narr

      • When I had dual monitors, I used to have code monitor in portrait orientation and application in landscape.

        Then I realized, the 1080 p monitor in 10 point font shows nearly 75 lines on the editor pane. After leaving two lines of menu on top, window decoration, status line at the bottom, after all that I still have 75 lines on the editor pane. Decided, if my functions are larger than that many lines, I should refactor the function, not mess with screen.

        Now I have gone completely in the opposite direction.

        • Who said anything about having only one function on screen?
          I write mainly Haskell. Anything more than a single line feels too big for a function there.
          But for an entire module, a tallscreen monitor is just fine.
          Imagine cutting out ALL the scrolling from your daily work.
          For an average programmer, that might be 50% of his actions saved right there.
          Also makes it way easier to see the big picture. And stupid code folding isn't needed anymore either.

          And even with two windows, looking up and down is faster, becau

        • "I am totally mad." And I am totally envious. Can I play in your asylum?

  • Love how this Apple Stan suggests that Safari's "old tab design" is somehow best of breed out of sheer merit when, in fact, it is merely a part of Apple's standardized UI.

    "The tabs that are now available in the Finder, Terminal, and optionally in all document-based Mac apps are derived from the design and implementation of Safari's tabs."

    Did they? Or did they come from the same place that Safari's tabs did? What's the difference? A lot a narrative, that's the difference.

    "...nd optionally in all document-

  • by dark.nebulae ( 3950923 ) on Monday October 04, 2021 @05:00PM (#61861287)

    I do like the tab handling. Tab I'm on is fully expanded, and tab I'm not on gets the favicon. It's better than the "partial" text it used to have where you could see part of many but not enough to know what they referred to...

    • Yeah, maybe I have my configuration set differently than everyone, but I'm really not seeing the outrage. In fact, until I saw this article I don't think I noticed any difference. Yes, the tabs at the bottom of the page in iOS is kinda dumb, but that was easily swapped back.

  • by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Monday October 04, 2021 @05:01PM (#61861295)

    No one spends money on changing something for changes sake. The sad reality as much as people don't like to hear it is that tech companies rearrange deck chairs in an effort to seem "fresh". An unchanging interface is a stale interface and leads to non-technical users exploring alternatives. That is a well known phenomenon and precisely why so many companies seemingly pointlessly change the look and feel rather than the features of the software.

    But that in and of itself isn't an excuse for shitty UI design.

  • by BAReFO0t ( 6240524 ) on Monday October 04, 2021 @05:15PM (#61861335)

    They shouldn't exist at all.

    I was a proponent of tabs ever since Opera first had them.
    And I hate every task bar that wants to "group" my windows.
    But I realized that it's just bad design that lead me to want the opposite of what would be best.

    Because really, tabs *are* separate windows that belong to a *group*.
    It *should* be the shell's job to offer such a grouping feature.
    But not in the ways that we got now.

    The problem with having the tabs just be regular windows is, that they still semantically are a second level below windows, but the window manager does not offer anything to handle that! So it becomes a mess.
    And the problem with grouping, as it is done in many window managers, is that theat sub-level isn't permanently visible. Not even when using the program. It's just a stupid pop-up. And like drawers, they are bad design that only exists to look neat. While a pegboard lets you instantly see what's possible.

    Instead, the task bar should simply have two levels!
    Which is functionally a 100% equal to a normal tab bar, that has just been moved downwards. (Something you used to able to do in Firefox.)
    But it would be a built-in shell feature, available to *every* program.
    Hell, there's no reason to offer even more, upon request.

    So really, the entire reason we have tabs is to work around how bad window managers and task bars are in popular consumer operating systems like Windows or OSX. But doing one wrong thing to fix another wrong thing only means you have two wrong things now.

    Oh, and if you have more than 6-9 tabs, the feature you're looking for is called *bookmarks*.
    (A browser should just flat-out refuse to open more tabs unless they can be considered a list of things of one group and can be put in a group. (Like a set of images from a gallery that you want to go through.)
    Having dozens or hundreds of tabs open all the time is not sane. Such people are never using them. And there is no structure. They're just using them an inferior substitute for bookmarks. Store them as actual bookmarks, and group them into sub-folders it there's more than 6-9 in a folder. Otherwise it's just hoarding.
    I think this could be generalized for all software too. And it kinda is. All desktop OSes already support saving bookmarks as files. So in-browser bookmark are another stupid inferior feature duplication for no reason.
    Oh, and bookmarks *with* state... that's just *saving the page with everything* as a file. If that command in your browser doesn't support getting back exactly where you were. Even in a complex 3D game or whatever... Then it's defective.)

    • Why am I not surprised to see such ignorant drivel to be a BAReFO0t comment. Two level task bar? Man you're on a roll as of late.

    • by Misagon ( 1135 )

      I agree about task bars/docks: it would be useful if a Task Bar would show a list of an app's tabs when you click or hover over its icon, instead of just its window instances.

      BeOS/Haiku's window manager allows users to stack any windows together and swap between them, and there are also a couple third-party utilities for MS-Windows that adds tabs on top of windows, allowing them to be stacked.
      But I think that all tabs in a group should belong to the same app, otherwise there is a risk of confusion.

  • Developers have to have some reason to justify their existence [slashdot.org].

  • Goddamnit, they must have hired same the Firefox graphic designer responsible for the previous atrocity!
  • Sadly, IMO, good UI design has been missing for several years. I hate blended or subtle boundaries that make it hard to see where to enter data, and sometimes even what data field you are entering. I like clear, clean boundaries and borders. I see some websites and think they should be banned from using anything but black and white. I also get annoyed when UI focuses so much on being pretty that it is hard to see the text. We need high contrast!
    • Foreground vs Background is a human visual skill to be leveraged not confused with illusions.

      The UI designer here is an Artist and is choosing pretty symmetry by killing tabs natural asymmetry as an indicator. Then, to screw up even more, they are wanting balance/symmetry and similarity so much they are removing the similarity between the context and the foreground by choosing equal contrast for all tabs from the surrounding context. They could fix this ERROR by making the window the same brightness as the

  • by satanicat ( 239025 ) on Monday October 04, 2021 @07:43PM (#61861593)

    I was far less kind in my wording when Microsoft introduced the ribbon to office without any sort of option to use the legacy toolbars and menu layout.

    Im not sure who the target audience was that they thought were screaming for that type of change was, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't the group of dedicated users that had used office for years.

    To this day the ribbon bothers me, its not consistant enough between applications, or even between microsoft owned applications to give a user any sort of standard convention as to where things might be.

  • Safari? Is this guy crazy. Property page windows, even the taskbar at the bottom, are tab controls.

  • I quite like the new design. Mostly because of the extra vertical space! I wish they implement it in all the apps! I think after a while Apple figured out they wouldnâ(TM)t be able to convince the web to ditch the huge sticky menus at the top of most websites, and all they could do about it is help us in some other way. It quite a brilliant move!
  • Depending on the website and color changing is the only issue I might have with the new tabs. Still functional. Who in the heck keeps 200+ tabs open ? Your porn tabs ? "Google could and should run ads targeting Safari users, with a simple welcoming message: Switch to Chrome, the Mac browser where tabs look like tabs." I will NEVER have Chrome on my iMac. Tried it years ago and didn't like the interface. Memory hog, tracking and reporting back toGoogle were other issues that killed it for me. NEVER !
  • Safari > Preferences > Tabs > Separate

    Fixed that for you, Mr Gruber.

  • Crap, I hope we're not headed down the iTunes road. You know, where they changed the UI every update, to the point where it breaks all your workflows, and you're just sick of hunting through menus to try and do what used to be simple. I gave up on iTunes a couple of years ago. Bad Apple! Bad!
  • The problem with Chrome is that it simply uses about 10x the memory Safari needs.
    No idea why. I guess excessive attempts to cache stuff that is chached anyway already by the OS.

    I type this on a Safari 12 - on night mode. Ugly ass hell. No idea if Apple is "investing in more beauty", basically all changes in the UI the last 10 years, were:
    a) unnecessary
    b) ugly
    c) had a learning curve to deal with it - a complete unnecessary burden

    If I rent a random car I expect it to work more or less like the previous random

    • "If I rent a random car I expect it to work more or less like the previous random car." What??? You mean you don't want to steer your car with a joystick or handlebars? What's wrong with you, man? These are New And Improved, not to mention Bright And Shiny! And our lab studies (done by the same people Microsoft paid to show that their Ribbon was better) have proven that they're better!

  • Personal preference, but I have no issues with new tabs. They work. Who keeps 200+ tabs open and why ? Use Firefox as secondary browser. No to Chrome, NEVER !
  • tl;dr
    "Waa, waa, waa, it's different, waa, waa, waa!"

In the long run, every program becomes rococco, and then rubble. -- Alan Perlis

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