In Safari 14 - as well as Safari versions 1–13, and every other browser I’m aware of - there’s never any ambiguity about which tab is active, in either light mode or dark mode: With Safari 15, it’s almost a guessing game, a coin flip, when you want to determine which tab is active: A very common scenario, I think it’s fair to say. Consider a window with two tabs, perhaps both from the same website. They work because they both look like tabs and embrace the tab metaphor. Google Chrome - and Chrome-derivatives like Brave and Microsoft Edge - now use tabs-on-top layouts very much like what the Safari team experimented with in 2009. It was an experiment Apple wound up abandoning, but they didn’t need to - it could have worked well with some tweaking, as I explored in a copiously illustrated post at the time. Even the Safari team at Apple has experimented with various different tab styles - most famously, in 2009, when they put the tabs at the top of the window for Safari 4’s public beta. Try different browsers, try different windowing OSes, and you’ll see many different takes on tabs. And those tabs have always looked like tabs, because why would anyone want to make them look like anything other than tabs? There are certainly a lot of ways to style tabs in a UI.
AESTHETIC GAMES FOR MAC FOR MAC
Apart from that brief weeks-long stint when it debuted as a public beta in 2003, Safari for Mac has always had tabs. Safari actually debuted as a public beta in January 2003 without any support for tabbed browsing (which, humorously, I was OK with - the tab habit hadn’t gotten its grips on me yet), but within a few weeks it had tabs. I have to think, continuously, about something I have never had to think about since tabbed browsing became a thing almost 20 years ago. Thus, trying to use the new Safari 15 on Mac (and iPadOS 15, alas), I feel somewhat disoriented working within Safari. Buttons do not work as a metaphor for multiple documents within a single window. And my brain is very much comfortable with the particular visual metaphor of tabs in a web browser window. Tabs that look like real-world tabs aren’t just a decorative style. These new “tabs” waste space because, like buttons, they’re spaced apart. The “Separate” layout, with “Show color in tab bar” off, is the closest you can get to Safari’s previous tab design.
Is that Defector’s button? Or is it Safari’s? It sure as shit looks like it’s Defector’s - but it’s Safari’s. The color matching does not extend web pages at all.
Match the colors of each site, extending your web page to the edge Tabs have a rounder and more defined appearance and adjust to (Note that I’ve done nothing, explicitly, to support this feature on Daring Fireball.)Īpple, in the “What’s New in Safari” alert that’s shown upon first run after upgrading to Safari 15, describes the new tabs thus: Here’s what it looks like as you switch back and forth between tabs with this option on. But the “Show color in tab bar” option is on by default: The “Compact” layout that puts tabs and the location field in the same row - by using the tabs themselves as the text editing fields for URLs - is, thankfully, off by default. The most controversial Mac Safari changes shown at WWDC - compressing tabs and the URL location field into a single row at the top of each window, and coloring the entire window with the accent color of the currently frontmost web page - are settings that (thankfully) can be turned off in Safari’s Preferences window (under “Tabs”, natch). Safari 15 on iPad suffers similarly, but it’s the Mac version I’ll concentrate on here. Our long national iOS 15 Safari nightmare ended last month, praise be, but the lesser of the two bad Safari designs unveiled at WWDC persists and actually shipped: the new tabs in Safari 15 for Mac. The Tragedy of Safari 15 for Mac’s ‘Tabs’ Friday, 1 October 2021
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