> It seems as if the people in the design team are all working exclusively on 32-inch Apple XDR Pro Displays.
Makes me think of the complaints in video game text over the past few years and how it had become so small as to be nearly unreadable on normal TVs at normal viewing distances. The natural assumption here is that the game devs were doing all their work inches away from large fancy monitors not thinking of the so-called 10’ experience most people use to consume the content.
At least many console games now have text size sliders (with varying levels of usefulness).
The majority of these are better explained as "PC game ported to console". The same problem has long existed in reverse, console game ported to PC with enormous UI.
There are a vanishingly small number of games that actually do this properly - a scalable UI that has some good default assumption for the platform it is currently on. Of course games rarely make significantly more money because the text is perfectly sized vs the 1,000 other things that are competing to get done before the release date.
Nah. Console exclusives have had this problem for a while too. It was really dreadful on 360 where some devs assumed everybody played on HDTVs despite the console supposed to be SD friendly as well. Some text was literally unreadable in Mass Effect on my 20" CRT TV at ANY distance and was just barely readable on the 20" 480p LCD I was able to upgrade to a little later.
Like the "attract" screen when playing on a console which previews the game in a loop. (guess it came from arcade games, or maybe like DVD menu screens)
No need for that with a PC game - you're launching it manually, why add a "click to continue"?
I am amazed by those reaaaaallly wide displays - developers in the 1990's might have predicted 16:9, but 32:9??
Size of UI text in general is an issue IMO, especially since it's often hard to configure. Sometimes I just want slightly larger text. Why can't I just set that in Firefox? I need to use some userChrome CSS hack (which, of course, breaks some UI elements), and for other applications it's even harder (I tried looking it up for GIMP and couldn't find an easy solution, but I didn't spend a very long time on it).
Recently I've been playing Baldur's Gate (the Enhanced Edition), and while it does allow resizing the text size it becomes so large that it doesn't fit in many UI elements (most notable, the dialog box). I guess it's better than nothing, but with just a very small amount of effort it could have been much better.
Say about the web what you will, but the ability to resize almost any text is a great feature.
Also I think Windows actually manages all of this much better, where you can just set a text size in settings (I think? It's been years since I used Windows, so not sure).
Why do browser updates keep fucking with the basic interface design? None of these changes are ever necessary.
If designers need to justify their jobs, fine. They should design the interface layout with modular components that can be entirely customized by the user.
IMO no user should ever be forced to use designs that are the product of meaningless fads in the design world.
From what I understand, the question is similar to “why do developers keep inventing new frameworks and new programming languages?”
Maybe developers are justifying their jobs. Maybe younger developers are excited about ditching the old crufty frameworks and languages, and exploring something new. Maybe every 10 years they reinvent the old wheels, and older developers are grumpy that the change was not needed in the first place.
Creating new browsers doesn't bother me at all. I think the appropriate analogy is something closer to changing the spelling of a language's keywords arbitrarily. Change for the sake of change, which is easy enough to adjust to, but introduces a transition period that costs time, for no good reason.
The backward compatibility effects aren't quite as bad in the browser context... except when the plugin API is affected.
Right: every profession does stupid stuff I am sure, and developers certainly waste a lot of time throwing away good code to start over again; but I think today we are talking about designers?
Toolbars in mac apps tend to be really good about this. I didn't realize (coming from Windows) that many apps (Notes, Safari, Mail, Finder, others) are using the built-in toolbar system, which gives you a very large degree of customization. That experience seems to be the default, and even third-party apps like Fork often use it.
Browsers like this exist, but require configuration you're probably not willing to set up. If that's the case, then perhaps it's safe to say that most people just don't care enough.
I vehemently disagree that vertical space used is negligible. Due to standard aspect ratios, the vertical space of the display is at a premium. 1920*1080 means you have 840 less vertical pixels than horizontal - it makes a lot of sense to me to try to reclaim some of that space for actual content instead of widgets.
Things like the tab bar and the reload button are not mere "widgets"; they are the core UI elements. They are the single most important part of the app. This is simply a bad call.
I'm all for saving vertical space whenever possible. But this is a bad call.
The single most important part of the app is the content.
I would be interested to see a version where the tabs and url bar roll up to one line if you have the space (few tabs, large monitor), but wrap to two if you don't (lots of tabs, small monitor).
To a certain extent. If you show too much content at the expense of navigation you simply make your app harder to use. There’s a sweet spot in the UX bell curve and I feel like the new Safari missed the mark. Although, the iOS version looks like an upgrade for one handed use.
In usability heuristics, that's called an accelerator. We would normally call it a shortcut. Whatever you call it, the point is it's an alternative to doing it in a more accessible way, not THE way.
I understand that, maybe they’ve done studies on how often people reload a page and made a decision based on numbers.
After 20 years of browsing the web, at least for me, THE way became the shortcut and I never click on that (now useless) button. I can understand why they pushed it a click away, maybe numbers/studies back this up, maybe not.
Personally I like having some buttons on the toolbar but I think I prefer the cleaner UI even more and I don’t mind doing 1 click to find them back. Anyway when we play games we never count clicks right? It’s not like it really cost us anything … but that’s just me.
> After 20 years of browsing the web, at least for me, THE way became the shortcut and I never click on that
Again, that’s an accelerator. That’s for advanced use. So you’re an advanced user, good on you. Things are not designed just for advanced users.
> I can understand why they pushed it a click away, maybe numbers/studies back this up
No studies would back up making an interface less discoverable, thus less intuitive for new users, and also increasing cognitive load by requiring users to remember where something is rather than it just being there. ‘…’ and hamburger menus have always been poor substitutes for well-designed navigation hierarchies.
There are no numbers on the planet that could justify lowering usability. Apple themselves gave a WWDC session on how minimalism != usability. Of course, they can have a minimalist interface; that should never come at the expense of usability. They don’t eat their own dog food.
> Anyway when we play games we never count clicks right?
If I CMD+R on Hacker News, it reloads the page. If I do it on outlook.office.com, it starts drafting a reply to the email I have selected. Reload button does the same thing everywhere.
This is one thing I'm grateful for as a Firefox user, I can disallow websites from overriding built-in shortcuts both globally or on a site-by-site basis. I don't believe Safari offers this unfortunately.
I use ⌘+R and actually just press R with vimari but if i'm just casually scrolling the web with my mouse sometimes I just want to press the reload button which is now two clicks.
But the tradeoff here isn't between a few dozen pixels vertically and a few dozen horizontally. It's 28 vertical pixels in exchange for cutting the horizontal space for the address bar and tab bar each in half, roughly.
Who really needs an address bar spanning the entire width of their screen? If you run into an URL that long then it's highly unlikely to contain useful information anyway. Or do you regularly notice yourself scanning through 400 characters of query string gibberish and thinking "that information was so useful that I always need all of it on screen"?
You don't. But why use that space to put the tab bar which DOES require the entire width? Chrome's and Firefox's compromise seems good enough where they stuff everything else to the right and left of the address bar except tabs. This Safari change is just awful
Chrome is horrible when you’ve got more then a few tabs since each tab just shrinks to a tiny unrecognizable notch, Safaris approach of scrolling in the tab bar is vastly superior in my opinion and makes the area much more useful even if it’s smaller. And this is without considering the new tab groups. I never really liked chromes tab-bar.
Tab groups are Apple’s solution to having less space for tabs. As a casual Tree Style Tabs user I can see them really working better than one giant mess of tabs.
Honest question. How are people using tabs such that they would want to organise them? Most of my tabs have lifetimes of seconds to minutes and there is no order in the chaos to be found.
I find how people use tabs a lot like how people use Excel. Excel is super flexible with thousands of features, but people only use a few of them. The rub is each person uses a different few. Tabs are similar. They are a flexible tool and people design personal workflows around them.
How I use tabs is probably nothing like how you use tabs or another random person uses them. I’m actually fascinated how people design their own workflows in this way. Anytime I see someone’s screen I end up with a ton of questions asking ‘why’.
I definitely wish that I could group tabs when I am working. I keep groups of tabs together, and these tab groups have long lifetimes. I also open various differently size windows depending on the content of each page. All of this is to work around the mess of "good enough" user interfaces that I deal with everyday. If I see myself opening more "ad hoc" tabs, I closed them as soon as I can. I don't need any more chaos.
Right now I am not at work, and I have three browser windows open and there are no scroll bars. I have managed to turn off tabs for the most part using Firefox userChrome.css and about:config. If I need another browser page, I'll open another browser window. When I have more than 4 or 5 browser windows I start stacking/offsetting the windows.
I’m on chrome, but I’m using them through a simple development extension I wrote which examines the url of ungrouped tabs and adds matching tabs to a few predetermined groups that I’ve hard-coded into the JavaScript. It was a quick and dirty hack that took me about 30 min to setup, but it’s made the tab grouping functionality so much more useful.
I’m toying with the idea of adding an options page so that I could release it to the chrome store, but I hate UI work, so I haven’t gotten around to that yet.
I keep 2 browser windows, each with 10+ tabs. One is those with short lifetimes, as you mention. The other is a "reminder list" of things I want to defer for a few hours.
As someone else with a small laptop display, I run everything in fullscreen mode, and toggle out whenever I need to use the controls. If you’re hiding the controls anyway, why not just use fullscreen mode? Then, when you want the controls, you don’t need to have them hidden in a bunch of layers, they can just all be there.
Hey, whatever if we just made all the browser controls a modal or fullscreen context of it’s own?
You can't always use full screen, often you need to have multiple windows open next to each other, and that's where minimizing chrome is especially important, because your windows are smaller now but the size of the chrome remains the same.
Is there a browser where the address bar spans the entire width of their screen? I've got FF Dev on Mac right now - about 60% of the screen eyeballing it. Have managed not to install Chrome on this machine and have to give it back in a couple weeks so I don't intend to install it if I can help it but from what I can recall it's not 100% either. Where is this entire width of the screen thing coming from?
Which is why it makes it so strange that no browser designers seem to get that the way to go is to stack tabs in a vertical list instead of horizontally. It would use more space but the space is in less demand so it wouldn't matter anyhow.
So until the browser designers get a clue I will be stuck with Firefox and the Treestyle tabs plugin which is the least horrible solution for people that use a lot of tabs.
I've tried tree style tabs a few times but it always ends up being too much.
The implementations of vertical tabs I've liked best so far are OmniWeb's (perhaps one of the original vertical tab browsers), Edge's, and Firefox with Tab Center Redux and custom CSS to hide Firefox's frustrating mandatory sidebar header.
Granted, it seems that nobody at the Edge team thought of actually giving the vertical space used by the horizontal tab bar back once you flip to vertical tabs mode, but the feature itself is there.
Exactly. Which to me is why the parent complaint is a bit silly. If vertical space is at such a premium on Mac laptops supposedly, why then does the default Apple UI [1] consume such an enormous amount of vertical space? This is many, many pixels more space than on Windows, where you only have the taskbar at the bottom. Apple's dock is much larger than the taskbar, in addition to having a global bar on the top!
So I conclude that Apple's designers are in fact not attempting to maximize vertical space, or at least that to the extent they do care about this, they're willing to make absurd compromises in apps like Safari while not fixing the glaring issue with the overall UI.
I find that horizontal space to many times be more constrained. If I toss and IDE and browser window side-by-side so I can code while looking at docs I need to at least close the vertical tabs on my browser to have a sane amount of space left for content. Usually also collapse one of the sidebars in the IDE to get a decent width for the code.
Clearly horizontal space is going to be more constrained than vertical space if you put two windows next to each other horizontally, as you're going from 16:9 to 8:9. But if you stacked them vertically, well obviously vertical space would be even more constrained than that, to the point where it's so useless you don't even think about doing it. So this is an argument for vertical space being more scarce than horizontal space actually.
Unfortunately on Windows there's this annoying slide-out animation that slows you down. It happens even if you disable UI animation.
On top of that sometimes the bar doesn't show up at all when specific windows are maximized. Which means you need to press the start button to get it out.
At some point one figures "f this shit, just toggle off auto-hide".
The Windows task bar has been movable since 95 I believe. I know because I moved it to the top in the old days. With Mate I keep the main panel on the left as well, however some widgets were not happy in vertical orientation until a few years ago.
I dont agree with getting rid of "widget", but I do agree vertical space are very limited. Your example of 1080P will be on a 16:9 Screen or iMac. MacBook uses 16:10, but even that, vertical space are still at premium. Once you have Dock at the bottom, and all web design has another layer of navigation at the top, you are quickly looking at 480 out of 1600 gone [1]. That is 30% of my vertical screen space. Leaving effectively 2560 x 1120 for content at Aspect Ratio of ~21:9 ultra wide.
I would have used Full Screen Option if I could have Tab Bar showing instead of Address bar + Tab Bar. And Safari for some reason has strange GPU / CPU usage problem with full screen usage which hasn't been addressed for years.
May be instead of software design, hardware should have adopted to it. Microsoft Surface Laptop has a 3:2 Aspect Ratio. On the same MacBook Pro 13.3", that would have been an additional 120 pixel.
Another point worth mentioning, the Big Sur redesign actually have the Safari ( and macOS )Toolbar "thicker" as in taking more vertical space.
[1] I tend to hide the Dock Bar, without the Dock it is only 340 of vertical space.
More than aspect ratio or physical pixels the real metric is "inches of screen space". You can put 8k in a 13" laptop but if you want to read the window title and url bar and dock you're still eating the same amount of physical real estate as if it were a 1080p laptop. You can change the aspect ratio sure but outside of desktop setups the space constraint is already in depth so all you're doing is chopping off width that wasn't a problem while keeping the same depth profile. I.e. very few are buying a 13" laptop because 15" is too wide rather than too deep.
I agree. I'm running the new OS. There were some UI changes that frustrated me. But when I thought about why I was frustrated, the reason was simply because the UI was new and my old habit patterns didn't work. When I took the time to learn the new UI, I liked it more. The event was a learning experience in why people hate change. It takes effort to realize the benefit (if there is one), otherwise without the effort just frustration (unless the change is bad).
Does anyone else not just use spatial browsing on OS X with Safari? Its the best browser for that. I almost never use the tab bar but will have multiple windows open and I can just three-finger swipe down on my touchpad to get exposé for all my open Safari windows and can visually identify a page versus the sliver of nothing Chrome for example gives you with tons of tabs open
Yes. One of the first thing I do when I set up a new Mac for myself is to move the bottom dock to the right side. Then the vertical space feels much more comfortable. This is applicable for both 15 inch and 13 inch macbook pros.
This is why tree-style tabs make sense. It puts the tabs on a sidebar, where their content can be read, and leaves maximum vertical space for the actual page content.
Am I the only person who likes this change? Normally, I’d have 4-5 tabs that I keep switching between fairly often and then 20-xx most of the time useless, de facto bookmarks. I use a keyboard shortcut with fuzzy find to pick the right one.
Reclaiming the address bar space to cram more tabs on the screen is a marginal gain, at least in my case.
What I find most interesting in this discussion is that it implicitly hinges on how each of us organises and browses information. For example, some people are good at recalling stuff that they have seen before, so bookmarks and search will work well for them.
At the same time, other people can handle a lot of information but only as long as it is readily present in front of them. Hide that information away and it is as if it never existed. Tools that depend on their ability to recall information will fail them. Tools that give them the ability to keep that information available and visible will make them shine.
It seems to me as if some OP/commenters fail to realise that not everyone uses browsers the same way, in turn making assumptions that things make no sense on that basis, e.g tabs as history va tabs as actively used documents, vertical tabs saving space when fullscreen-ish but not with side by side windows, or having multiple windows each with a few tabs vs a single window with hundreds, single display vs multihead, browser as quasi-OS vs browser as web browser (!) with OS as OS and native apps, laptop vs desktop, or anything in between or beyond that I could not think of right now.
Personally I'm glad Safari isn't yet another Chrome-like UI. I did not upgrade to the beta, but it seems to me the choices made would make sense for the way I use a browser on a laptop or desktop.
It just feels like another flamewar, which I can safely ignore while I continue enjoying my daily driver browser.
I like it as well, for the same reason: I usually only have 2 to 4 browser tabs open and the new display works very well for users like me. I usually focus on some task or activity, and like to keep my working environment tidy. I have worked with many people who keep a huge number of tabs and perhaps browser windows open - that would bug me, but each to their own…
So, I didn’t like the new interface at first, but now I really like it. On my M1 MacBook Pro I really like the ability to run a few iPadOS apps, and the watch/phone/iPad/laptop handoff experience is also very good. I am very happy with the beta OS releases from last week.
I’ve not tried 15 yet, but I really like the idea of named groups of tabs. I have groups of stuff in windows for things that I’m researching and i hate having to open and look at every minimised window to see if that is the group of tabs I’m looking for as it’s often hard to tell from whatever tab url I left that window at before i minimised to the dock.
Workona works for uses cases like you, the only time that gets annoying is when you are using firefox containers. So I appreciate the new UI (didn't tried it yet) but seems that somehow fits my current workflow.
I like this change as well. I don't use tabs at all, I use pinch to show all tabs and switch more often than having to align my mouse along the top of the screen to switch to a tab after reading the text. It's similar to the KonMari method for laying out your things.
I'm with you. Here's what it comes down to: I use an internet browser maximized, usually. All monitors are wider than they are tall. Thus, vertical screen real estate is at a higher premium than horizontal real estate. Thus, control/chrome elements of the operating system, browser, etc should minimize vertical pixel usage in favor of horizontal usage in order to allow content to assume as many pixels as possible. E.g, move the operating system application/task bar from the default bottom of the screen to the left or right, integrate the address bar and tabs into the same vertical pixels, etc.
The reality is, I've never seen anyone stay productive with more than 5 or 6 tabs, not to mention battery and CPU utilization issues. The brain can only multitask so much, and none of the browsers are good at managing more than, say, a dozen tabs, so why not reclaim some vertical real estate and drop that number to six or so? If you really need the extra tab space (or, to see the full web address at all times, which is even more strange), I think that should be behind a Preferences option. Safari's design makes sense to me.
Of course, Safari probably wont make it configurable, but I hope we see this design trend also happen in Firefox, and while I won't opt for it, lets make it opt-out.
I'll have to give it more time but so far I like the change.
Typically I have dozens of tabs open, so at first blush it might seem that the redesign wouldn't work for me at all, and that would be true if I didn't adjust my tab habits.
What I've done is swept those dozens of tabs into a handful of purpose-oriented tab groups. I don't really need all of those tabs open at all times, all I really needed is somewhere to put them that's more ephemeral and has less management overhead than bookmarks. As a result, most groups only have a few tabs open and pose no problem with the new UI.
Theoretically, this approach may also have the benefit of improving focus. Because online message boards and the like live in my "general" tab group, when I'm switched to my "programming" tab group I'm soft-locked out of those sites by way of reduced accessibility, making it harder to drift off of my current task when googling for documentation, etc.
I’ve started to shift to this workflow too. There is content that I use once a week yet the tabs don’t always stay the same so the tab group paradigm is much better than committing everything to bookmarks and having to keep them updated.
The updated Safari has had a baffling UI update. It does not make any sense at all, on THE most important application that's shipped with the operating system.
It's those kind of UI ideas that look great on a mockup, but do not work in reality with real data and real users, those that open 35 tabs—behaviour encouraged by macOS windowing system by the way—and now all of those are crammed into a ludicrously small space that's constantly moving around.
I don't know what Apple were thinking there. Let's not call it UX, this is designers changing for change's sake at the expense of user experience. I'm struggling to see how is it justifiable in any way.
I think their hoping tab groups will reduce the 35 tab situation, but it’s too hard to organise when in information gathering mode. I hope they put a preference option to go back to the current interface. I’ll be filing a bug report.
It’s hard to judge something that’s constantly changing, to make a final decision anyway. They exploit our good nature and milk the benefit of the doubt with military precision, leaving us confused, powerless and hooked on the update system of their products and services.
I don't know what they were thinking either. It's a horrid change. Can't see the tabs any more, the URL is no style hidden now, and the URL bar is now jumping around like crazy.
> However I think, but don’t have data to confirm it, that they should be catered for and that “those that open 35 tabs” are a vocal minority.
This is the first time I’ve ever even considered the possibility that someone is capable of using a browser with only one or a few tabs open at a time. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure they exist, but having a million tabs open is so ingrained in how I consume information on the internet I suppose I kind of forgot it’s possible to do it any other way.
It makes me wonder if I’ve ever had only one tab or window open at a time? Maybe in the 90s? I don’t remember AOL having “tabs” the way browsers do now but I think you could have multiple windows open.
What? I'm saying there's a ton of people opening a lot of tabs, nowhere in my comment I was disparaging towards them. Please don't make assumptions. I'm just saying their use case has been ruined by this update, a use case that is seldom represented in neat and oversimplified designer mockups.
This weird user interface décisions also completely negate all that talk about speed. On iOS you now have to tap through a submenu with animations to do anything. (Share, Private Mode, Reading list…) the tab groups are useless as they are also hidden behind more taps (on Mac having multiple windows makes way more sense anyways, maybe let people name those or somehow see them grouped in the current open pages view on the bottom). Every action now feels slower, because even if the page loads 10ms faster than in another browser, any useful interaction will end up in hundreds of milliseconds of animations.
I found that to just change the animations to fade instead of scale/pan. The duration is unaffected, it just makes it flatter and uglier. I wonder how fast things would feel if you could disable all animations, Windows XP style.
Reduce motion is an accessibility option made to… reduce motion. Changing the animation from swipe to crossfade accomplishes that quite neatly. It keeps everything in place as it switches.
I use it because moving the entire display can give me motion sickness. It’s doing exactly what it should do.
I believe this new design is the best Safari design 'in the constraints of the new Big Sur design language'. I'm liking it mostly because the Big Sur's new toolbar is too thick.
With the menubar, toolbar, and the tabbar, 106px of my total 800px height display gets to display non-content information, much of which is clutter when I'm trying to focus on the webpage. It's a whopping 13.3%! Most of this comes from the thick toolbar that Big Sur has started.
But since Apple won't be changing that thick toolbar (as we all know), the 30px vertical height (which translates to 3.6%) that I get by hiding the toolbar is precious. So I appreciate the new Safari 15 design. Really, the only problem I'm finding is the refresh button, which I'm like 99% sure will come back with all of this fuzz, and the other functionality in that (...) button needed multiple mouse clicks in Safari 14 anyway. Like... disabling the ad blocker required a long-click on the refresh button, it's now more discoverable.
Shifting address bars... I can see how that might make people freak out; Personally I've had zero problems, so YMMV.
About tab management – I can't disagree more than the article. Creating group of tabs is very much useful, it's much more helpful than having a group of windows each with different topics and prevents idle windows eating memory and CPU when only one window gets used for a long time.
I have five tab groups, one about my school, two on my personal hobbies, one on generic development-related information (including HN) and one on my work, each with 10~20 tabs. I'm guessing the writer doesn't use tabs pervasively – that's fine. But I would like to point out that it is not rarely efficient nor overall unconvincing. Thanks Apple for that tab group feature, I'm seriously getting a ton of mileage over it.
Imo, the new address bar is better because it attached to the current tab. This is how it already works, but the design never reflected that. Previously, the address bar was a global UI element which doesn’t modify the global state. I think this could easily be clearer for new users. (And possibly clearer for technologically challenged existing users.) To me, the big complaints are just reacting to it being different. I don’t think that’s fair.
Linked article refers to the changes in Safari as "thoughtless UI", which is a fairly common argument used against changes that people don't like. Against Apple, Microsoft, WinAmp, Reddit, etc.
But let's be fair and note that there quite certainly a lot of very proud, considerate, intentional designers and developers who are behind this change. People who probably put thousands (millions?) multiples of "thought" in considering the changes, versus someone saying "Whoa...this is different and I don't like different." The whine about site colors bleeding into the chrome seem particularly subjective, yet they're presented as if they're objective truths.
I use a macOS beta 15 device beside a 14 device, all day every day. At first install it was jarring, but then I became acclimated to it and it's fine. Tab groups are fantastic. I appreciate the aesthetics of chrome bleed, but that's just my subjective opinion. My only complaint about the browser is that it's crash-prone right now.
It's fairly common because it's commonly true; people don't like the changes for good reasons. Actual innovations in design are fine, but too often changes to user interfaces are arbitrary or are a response to the latest fad or some bright idea marketing or management cooked up.
There is a strong argument for user interface stability. People don't just learn user interfaces, they seep into people's unconscious and muscle memory. It can take a while to learn the idiosyncrasies of a user interface and making changes should have a string justification.
It should be noted that people who are paid to design user interfaces are not paid to use them. Their incentives are to create and tinker. This is a disincentive to do what is often needed: nothing or very slow change.
This. I work on a website where a new ui was rolled out every 2 years? Why? We (the developers) finally figured out it was because it gave the business people work to do that was more interesting than what they were really supposed to be doing. They got to go to all these catered meetings with 3rd party design consultants. They got to report to their higher ups that they were doing all this very important work. And every 2 years they could roll out the new ui to great fanfare while patting each other on the backs. It had absolutely nothing to do with improving the experience for our customers.
The worst part was, often functionality that was well loved was scraped because there wasn’t time to work it into this redesign. It turned out they would do that on purpose so people would complain so they could go to their higher ups with complaints in hand to justify budget money for a new round of ui design work. Rinse repeat.
> We (the developers) finally figured out it was because it gave the business people work to do that was more interesting than what they were really supposed to be doing.
Did you get them to confirm this hypothesis? Or did you just figure it out by deduction and projection?
This is an honest question. I work on both sides - dev and design, and so am privy of the driving forces behind the projects.
Sometimes they could include personal agendas but are almost never limited to those.
And I have had cases where I had to ask questions in confidence to uncover the political forces.
Have you had the opportunity to ask such questions and confirm your suspicions?
There came a time where the site was moved to a different department. We, the dev team, went along with the site. Before we left we asked the business person we got along with best about our suspicions and she confirmed every one of them.
I think the role of the aesthetic of a product is a bit under appreciated. If Safari was exactly as functional but still looked like Netscape navigator, it would negatively impact people’s opinion of the browser.
It’s just like the idea that you first eat with your eyes. For example, eggs with yellow yolks and orange yolks taste the same in blinded tests, but when people can see the eggs they usually go for the orange ones. Periodic UI design updates are needed so that people don’t associate a dated GUI with a dated product.
UI changes are only good if they improve usability. By far most UI changes these days are only done for the sake of looking different and "fresh", UI design has become purely fashion driven. Where's the scientific research and white papers going along with the Safari UI changes which clearly justify point by point why every single change makes sense, all backed by user studies? All I usually see is "emotional bullshit", not rational facts when UI designers talk about their work.
This used to be different during the 80's and 90's and I'm convinced that this change (turning UI design from science/engineering into fashion) is why we are deep in a UX crisis.
> Where's the scientific research and white papers going along with the Safari UI changes which clearly justify point by point why every single change makes sense, all backed by user studies?
Are you being hyperbolic, or is this your actual position? That’s a ridiculously high bar that most organizations could not muster (and there’s no way Apple would release that stuff publicly anyway).
“Emotional bullshit” is so needlessly negative. We’re not machines — we have emotions! If a UI designer can change an interface to please me a little more, that’s a good thing.
As parent is an actual user, I guess they'll be able to tell if the UI pleases them.
Edit:
> UX used to be driven by researchers like Bruce Tognazzini and Jakob Nielsen, who absolutely did studies with actual users to drive their designs.
Large [UI driven] companies still do this or hire agencies to do so (of which there are far more nowadays given the field is more mature). The fact that UX researchers haven't much visibility outside of UX -- Nielsen started blogging relentlessly at a point in time where there wasn't really anyone else doing that, and it was hoovered up by a wider audience that needed that knowledge. That doesn't mean in any way that he's unique, or that companies who can afford UX teams don't do this. Nielsen and Tognazzini -- they were popularisers, good at producing easily digestible writing for a general audience
I'm dead serious. Almost every piece of software (and hardware) in a computer is driven by incremental improvements backed by research. Operating system kernels, file systems, databases, 3D-APIs, etc... there are tons of publications, white papers, discussions, all happening in public how those components are improved over the decades. There are dead ends from time to time, but those fail, and those failures are also discussed, analyzed and eventually replaced with better solutions.
Why are user interfaces special in this regard? Where's the research, where are the white papers which clearly demonstrate what the advantages and disadvantages of specific user interface philosophies are?
As a UX designer & executive for 30 years, I’ll respond.
I agree that UX/UI is sometimes swayed more by fashion than empirical goals in service of the user. E.g., Jony Ive’s sad obsession with flat (featureless) design in iOS 7 is something we are still paying a price for.
However, the majority of UX research these days goes into things that are explicitly not in service of the user. Facebook doesn’t want you to be happy, they want you to keep using their product. Pay-to-play games don’t want you to have a good life, they want to squeeze micro-transactions from you at every opportunity.
Creating and propagating these manipulative dark patterns is a huge amount of leading-edge UX these days. It works. We know how to manipulate people towards goals that are antithetical to their well-being. The tech industry as a whole makes billions of dollars a day doing exactly this thing.
So yes, the research exists. UX continues to get much better. Just not in service of goals that you (or I, frankly) embrace.
This isn’t the fault of UX as a discipline or UX designers generally. Just like a coder intentionally optimizing a ratio of negative to positive stories to keep you fearful and scrolling, UX designers are driven by the same constraints — the product direction of their parent organizations.
Should UX designers individually, or as a discipline, rise up in revolt? Exactly as much, or as little, as programmers should. We’re all in the same boat. We can choose to serve the manipulators or not. Trouble is, there’s a fuckton of money in this manipulation, and you don’t have to spend much time here on HN to see how motivating that is, and the extent to which individuals will hold their noses and do what they’re told, as long as they’re motivated richly enough.
Ah shit is Ive really to blame for iOS 7? The OS and increasingly MacOS feels so dreary, lacking contrast, etc ever since. Animations also never recovered imo
It’s an awful shame, really. The man’s very talented, but he needed an editor. For years Steve Jobs was that editor, and he was brilliant at it. It was the two of them together that made Apple’s industrial design so damn good.
I agree about animations. I remember reading (probably here :D) a story from an Apple mobile engineer. He was on an elevator and Steve Jobs got in afterwards, and asked his notorious, “What are you working on?” The engineer opened the app on his phone to show Steve, who looked at it for one floor. He said, “Not enough texture,” and handed it back.
That, specifically, is the voice that Ive needed to do truly great work.
As others point out, the discipline is called Human-Computer Interaction and has a rich history. The best example in the field might be work on Fitts’ Law, such as https://www.yorku.ca/mack/hhci2018.html
For more practical examples of how websites can be redesigned through science, though, see https://www.nngroup.com/ and other resources online regarding scientific study of UI, user experience (UX), etc.
I think very generally speaking, you have a point. But there are genuinely changes which make things worse.
For example, in Firefox 89 the contrast between the active tab and the inactive tab is so low that they are not distinguishable when the viewing angle to the screen or the lighting isn't perfect - looks fancy, but is not even acceptable by their accessibility standards.
On top of that they removed the blue bar that - as a crutch - indicated the active tab ?
I don't understand being this invested in such an obiously bad design decision - contrast is just neccessary.
All that being said, I found a bug report from 19 years ago, when Firefox was still called Phoenix, that complained about almost the exact same issue (sans the blue bar), and it got fixed.
I don't think "UX crisis" is neccessarily too strong a word.
S/UI/clothing; your argument suggests the move to add color to fabric doesn’t make sense because it is simply fashion and has aught to do with the interface presented by a shirt. I think the parent comment nails it on subjectivity; the form of a thing is as much a part as its function. The luxury goods industry attests as much.
A functional tool can still look nice, but the function is still more important than the looks, otherwise it's just useless bling (the fashion industry is the perfect example though, they need to sell new stuff each year without actually changing anything important, all they can really do is change pointless details).
It's removing all buttoned and zippered pants from your store one year and replacing them with spandex one year, then coming back in 5 years and removing all spandex in favor of buttons and zippers.
i generally decide my own clothing. and... if I choose UI X... I would like to keep using it. At some point, I have to adopt someone else's ideas of 'good UI' in order to keep using a computer for 'every day' stuff. At some point, my online banking forces an upgrade, and that means 'new UI', whether I like it or not. I can keep wearing 70s flares and still go in and use a local bank if I chose to.
exactly. just fucking flipping the "contrast, on" switch buried in accessibility is not a panacea, and it is no substitute for a regular high-contrast UI on beeauty grounds alone! God forbid third-party apps even utilizing a native API for it.
“People who probably put thousands (millions?) multiples of "thought" in considering the changes”
In my experience it’s usually one person’s vision behind major design changes (good or bad). It may be “discussed” so long as the discussion doesn’t deviate from boss’s vision (or you’re not a fit for the project).
One I've learned from grim experience is that most of the time, 1 person with a strong vision and the willingness to fight for it is better than 10 or more people just kinda doing their own thing in their own sandbox. Sure, the former might turn out bad. The latter is almost guaranteed to.
This is kinda like the argument between an authoritative government and a democratic one, the former works great until it doesn't. When it works, the former is more efficient and can get things done much more quickly but when things go wrong it can go horribly more wrong as well because the checks and balances aren't there.
I think it's a matter of stakes. In UI design, while the risk to the business will vary case by case it's almost never as costly as the risk in governing. Committees just aren't great at moving fast, and in UI design moving slow might be more expensive than moving in the wrong direction and learning something.
> Linked article refers to the changes in Safari as "thoughtless UI", which is a fairly common argument used against changes that people don't like. Against Apple, Microsoft, WinAmp, Reddit, etc. [...] someone saying "Whoa...this is different and I don't like different."
Back in the 90s Microsoft did put some research effort into Windows 95 and i do not really remember much of a blowback to the new UI despite being radically different from Windows 3.1. There were a lot of people complaining for the higher system requirements, how Win95 felt slower and even how "infantilized" DOS by forcing a GUI on them, but as far as the Windows UI itself goes pretty much everyone agreed was a big improvement to the point that other UIs started copying it to a functional level (ie. not just the window theme). There were even projects that recreated it on Windows 3.1 (Calmira).
To this day a lot of people consider Windows 95 to be one of the best and most well thought UIs.
(and honestly even though i think that overall Win2K is peak Windows, i do believe that ever since Win98 Microsoft started taking a form-over-function approach - see the toolbar buttons losing their relief and becoming shapeless elements indistinguishable from any other icon despite having different interaction with the user)
Sure, some reactions in UI changes tend to be "i do not like different" but that doesn't make all reactions so. And even then, do not dismiss the pure "i do not like different" reactions either: people spent time and energy to learn the UI they use, unless a change is a radical improvement (e.g. Win3.1 -> Win95) they are very justified to be pissed off at how the designers of the new UI wasted all that effort and nullified their knowledge for marginal gain (assuming there is any at all... or even worse, becoming harder to use like many overpadded mobile-first UIs look on desktops).
(the same applies to changes programmers often dislike too, like languages, APIs, frameworks, etc - for many users UI changes are the equivalent of Python2 to Python3, except as users are often powerless to do anything about UI changes, they happen way more often)
Reminds me of how almost any corporate logo redesign works. Company makes a new logo, everyone is outraged by how awful and horrible it is, then we get used to it.
The Discord logo redesign was one of those logos that elicited a very odd amount of outrage for what it was. Multiple video essays were made about just how terrible the logo is [0].
It's really not a bad logo at all. It's a minor change. But once you get used to something, any change seems to be perceived as a threat. After a few months, I bet most people will get used to the new Safari UI and forget what they were even mad out.
And the new one appeals to a different market - personally I thought the old one was pretty ugly, especially with how it would shatter into a ton of spinning fragments when it was loading. It said "hello this is a safe space for Gamerz", and I am very much not a Gamerz.
Now it doesn't say that. And now I'm less inactive on the various discord chats I've been invited to. Most of which are not really full of Gamerz anyway - but staring at that very Gamerz logo for a few seconds every time I opened the thing made me not want to open it.
I don't think the logo is bad myself, it is a tiny change overall.
However, it's worth noting it was shown alongside wordmark, and the font used by that wordmark (a modified version of Ginto Nord Black) is... not great, in particular I think the letter "i" looks somewhat off in relation to other characters in word "Discord" - I don't know what's wrong with it, I'm not a typographer.
That said, because the wordmark is not seen often (pretty much the main page and the page announcing new logo), in practice it's fine. After logging in to Discord there is no real reason to go back to the main page.
Also, out of curiosity, I checked the videos you linked to, pretty much all consider the logo to be fine, but they all criticize the font or the letter "i" specifically (even the video called "discord's new logo is alright").
A simple question. Why change something that already works for everyone? To solve which problem exactly?
I understand redesigning UIs when that redesign affords you some new capabilities for new features you want to add. I don't, however, understand redesigns that just move things around without adding anything new.
Android 12 is the prime example of this right now. Android 11, which I currently have on my phone, works fine. Its UI is well thought out. It's mature enough. The best thing you could do to it is leave it alone. But then someone at Google wanted a promotion, which meant redesigning an existing product, and now everything is opaque and has huge paddings for no good reason. And when they say "material you is customizable", I really hope it's so customizable I could just make it look like it did before they released this mess.
I have the opposite question: why do people let themselves get upset over UI changes? Why don’t people seem to take pride in their ability to adapt to change?
Change is inevitable. Even if we stipulate that change sometimes happens for bad reasons, like someone wanting a promotion, it’s not like bad reasons are suddenly going to disappear. People are still going to want promotions a year from now, or 10 years from now.
So designs are going to change. Why not take the approach of “let’s see how I can adapt to this”?
> why do people let themselves get upset over UI changes?
Because a UI is a tool I use to get something done. I don't like when the thing I've been using intuitively gets changed so I have to learn to use it again. It's a tool. It's not an art piece.
> Why don’t people seem to take pride in their ability to adapt to change?
Because this adaptation doesn't make their lives any better. It's change for the sake of change. It's like weather, except weather isn't quite controllable, but these changes are deliberately introduced by other people to mess with you for no good reason.
> Change is inevitable.
Progress is inevitable. Moving things around isn't progress. Progress implies adding something.
> Even if we stipulate that change sometimes happens for bad reasons, like someone wanting a promotion
The incentive structure in most IT companies is wildly wrong, I'll say that. No one at Google got promoted for maintaining an existing product because afaik promotion requires completing a "big project". So the easiest "big project" is a UI redesign. The second easiest is apparently an instant messaging app.
> Why not take the approach of “let’s see how I can adapt to this”?
Let's see. I adapted to this by avoiding installing any major updates unless absolutely necessary. Security patches are fine tho.
RE google; I can't remember who here stated otherwise but I believe that promotion policy (unspoken or otherwise) is no longer in effect and the rot has... presumably a different antecedent if we accept the premise anyways
A couple of reasons. First of all, the UI is just a means to an end. If it changes just for the sake of re-arranging, then people have to put in more effort to accomplish the same thing they were doing before. Sure, most people will eventually adapt. But, still feels like a waste of time when the updates offer no real increase to functionality, and sometimes seem to reduce it.
Secondly, the complaints come because, for many of us, our computers and phones feel like an extension of our offices and homes. We're staring at these screens for the majority of waking hours. The UI is basically part of the furniture. Many people would feel resentful if their chairs, couches, and doorknobs were changed without permission every year as part of some update. They're going to have similar feelings about the electronic portions of their spaces.
If changes are going to actively hamper use, why wouldn't people get worked up? This very article is a prime example of bad design affecting usability. Same with what I've seen of Android 12. Huge quick shortcut buttons that take up half the screen in the notification shade. 2 toggles where now I have 5. This is terrible. "live with it"? No
> So designs are going to change. Why not take the approach of “let’s see how I can adapt to this”?
Because there's huge costs for everyone involved...?
"let’s see how I can adapt to this”... Across how many devices? If a school lab updates, but I don't... I know have to learn something new when it's probably not necessary. If I update, and the school lab didn't... will my stuff be compatible? If I send a document to 'version Y', will I still be able to use it in my own local previous 'version X'?
If I'm a business, how do I support X changes across multiple customer bases? And for how long? I have support people to train to answer every stupid question from people who can't find ABC menu item any more because it's now rendered as 'abc' in a different menu area.
In MANY cases, there are compounded, massive costs to seemingly small/trivial/design changes.
> Why not take the approach of “let’s see how I can adapt to this”?
Our computers (and phones) are not fashion. They are tools, they are commoditized.
Let's change everything every two years: you screws and screwdrivers, controls in your car (with everyting going touchscreen, that's exactly what we'll soon get), buttons in your elevators, plane controls, heart monitors...
See, how stupid "let's wait and adapt to this" sounds?
> People who probably put thousands (millions?) multiples of "thought" in considering the changes
Thoughts maybe, but did they ask users what they wanted? Did they run usability studies to verify that these changes make sense? I can't imagine that they did. Certain UI changes in macOS, Windows, etc. are so obviously bad (and are eventually changed) that no matter how much they thought about it, they didn't care to check what users thought.
Every user thinks they're the aggregate "users", though. That their personal opinion and take is universal.
For instance the address bar on here is a canonical truth and is the linchpin of the experience. See how every time a browser touches it (e.g. Chrome truncating the address) is met with mobs of the angry. Many users -- including even "power" users -- seldom interact with the address bar. Nor is it verification of anything much. It simply isn't that important anymore.
Another comment mentions that the reload button is two clicks away, which is a fair point but that everyone who actually uses reload (generally developers -- zero web apps should ever require the user to hit reload) use a keyboard shortcut.
Eh.
"Certain UI changes in macOS, Windows, etc. are so obviously bad (and are eventually changed)"
True. At the same time, every UI change of anything ever has yielded a firestorm of criticism and pushback. And more times than not the new design was better and people acclimate to it and eventually prefer it. I judge nothing on initial reception.
> Many users -- including even "power" users -- seldom interact with the address bar. Nor is it verification of anything much. It simply isn't that important anymore.
I interact with the address bar every time I go to page or site. It is my single most interfaces with the browser after the sites themselves.
And that it isn’t much use for verification is exactly the reason why people advocate that it should display all information!
> Every user thinks they're the aggregate "users", though. That their personal opinion and take is universal.
Because it is. Ultimately, your comfort is the only thing that matters when you're using a computer (particularly Macs). If something doesn't operate in the way that you want it to, why is that not a valid argument for replacing it?
It's not a valid argument that everyone should bend to your whim, it's possible a valid argument that (a) there should be a load of config options and/or (b) you should be able to edit the source code to make it work how you want.
One of the clearest examples of this for me is having the address bar at the bottom on mobile devices. There is pretty much no disadvantage to placing it there yet whenever a browser does that, people get inevitably angry. I hope Apple sticks with it and the other iOS browsers like Brave adopt it.
Was this an optional setting? Was it suddenly turned on with the option to turn it off buried in a settings menu than normal users are scared of?
I actually didn't know iOS had this, I only know about FireFox on Android and it asked me if I wanted to opt in before thrusting it upon me. That's a good way to make major UI changes.
This is Apple we're talking about, the last time they asked users about something is when they failed to litigate Corellium for virtualizing their software.
Someone's casual opinion about "readability" is not objective. It is the very definition of subjective. I mean, if you've been on HN at all you've seen massive debates about fonts, colors, contrast, and so on, where people have profoundly different opinions about readability.
Run a study and then talk. Otherwise it's just subjective observations.
Further, we're talking about page theme spreading to the chrome of the browser. It makes the chrome less important than the page contents. It seems they're putting "readability" focus exactly where it should be.
Have they? The base of your argument is a classic appeal to authority. They're "very proud, considerate, intentional" designers so they must be right and everybody else wrong.
Where's the data? Aren't unhappy users valid enough data to demonstrate a downgrade in user experience?
> They're "very proud, considerate, intentional" designers so they must be right and everybody else wrong.
Contriving a straw man to argue a position does no good.
I specifically took issue with claims that it's thoughtless. That in no way says it's right or wrong [1], but I'm extraordinarily certain that a lot of people thought long about every detail of this, they probably argued and different people had different takes, and we can see the results of that process. Trying to casually dismiss all of that as thoughtless is gross.
> Aren't unhappy users valid enough data to demonstrate a downgrade in user experience?
Unhappy users aren't proof of much at all but that people really dislike change, and that you can't please all of the people all of the time. The eventual net result is an entirely different thing.
And again, the net might be positive and it might be negative. I've made zero assessment of that. I happen to be a pretty malleable user and I just flow with whatever, adapting to whatever various platforms demand I use.
[1] Although notions of right and wrong depend upon the inputs to your assessment. e.g. often we'll some users feel that a certain function or trait is a first class, primary element, while it isn't to others. What is right for one can be wrong for another. Seldom is it universal. Every design of any complexity is wrong for some subset of users.
Nothing is thoughtless, if we're being pedantic assholes about the situation who only care about protecting Apple from mean words.
For the sake of conversation though, yeah, I'd argue that Safari is the most thoughtless among the mainstream browsers. Compared to Firefox, Edge, Chrome and even Brave or Vivaldi, Safari is a less compatible, less up-to-date, less secure and less cared-about experience.
It has been running for centuries. It’s called typography. Its rules are not arbitrary and legibility is the most important one.
No need for scare quotes around readability. It’s a science.
There’s a latitude of contrast ratio between which human eyes can comfortably withstand and discern tones. It varies across individuals, of course, but not as much as you might think. No human sees ultraviolet, for example. And even if you have 20/20 eyesight, you need to design for a much wider spectrum of the Bell curve if you care at all about accessibility.
You might be interested in checking the history and methods behind CIE 1931. Also, “The Elements of Typographic Style” is a deep but fascinating book.
It’s not off the cuff. It uses the site’s background as it’s own and has to guesstimate what color the letters on top must have in order to remain legible.
Compare the job of this algorithm, having to deal with a crazy amount of possible color combo, to that of an experienced UX designer making just a dark and light theme, both thoroughly tested, and you can begin to grasp the trouble they’ve put themselves into.
I can’t quite understand if you agree with me or not, but there’s a way to avoid falling into the trap of endlessly delving into a philosophical discussion on the existence of an objective truth: test thousands of eyeballs. If lots of people find it hard to read, it’s garbage.
And this been done. There’s a minimum contrast that works for comfortable reading for most people. That’s not controversial, or at least, it shouldn’t be.
There is zero reason to eliminate the tab bar and combine it with the address bar. It's idiotic and there should at least be an option to undo it.
I have accidentally close more tabs than ever before - and that's with me actively being aware of it and trying to be careful. It's a HORRIBLE user design.
Um, you don't need to waste copious amounts of dollars on designers and developers to know that it is a terrible idea to mix the address bar with the tabs.
It's a mess, and the vertical space you save is nominal compare to the increased frustration you will create for users when they have a tougher time being able to read their URL (something that's already an issue for everyone) and relegating the tabs to about half the horizontal space they could have had.
This is utterly pointless. It's not about being an old person resistant to change, it's about "fixing" something that was not broken and not even doing a lateral move, but totally regressing the utility it served.
Yes, it’s basically NeXT and is 100% a Jobs thing. The parent is correct that it’s had major ux issues since day 1 though. Interestingly they also mixed in terrible OS 9 ux (cough Finder, cough .DS_STORE).
Apple has always been like that with the exception of the Apple IIe.
Lately things have been taking even more of a nose dive though. Have you ever used Apple Music? There is no excuse for that product to be as bad as it is. It’s probably the worst mainstream consumer app in the market.
This one is a particularly bad idea. Regular people don't always understand the difference between the browser and the contents of a web page. This blurs that line even more for people who already have trouble seeing it in the first place.
the clear separation between trusted outer chrome and untrusted content, so that content cannot fake chrome to malevolent ends (e.g faking a dialog, a SSL lock icon, a URL...)
FWIW, while watching my mom use her MacBook I've noticed that sometimes she can't tell the difference between a website with a back button and the browser's own back button. For less tech savvy users, the delineation isn't always clear. Especially if the browser's chrome changes frequently
Multiple people putting several hours of though behind a feature is what we call design by committee. It doesn't matter how much time was spent if the committee is not capable of finding a unified direction to the proposed changes.
Way too late to edit this, but please note that I erroneously referred to macOS 14 and 15...not sure how I didn't notice that before, but it should be macOS 11(.4?) and 12. My mind was thinking of iOS 14 and 15.
Alas, don't want anyone perpetuating that mistake. Cheers!
Yes, I read the article. And I completely disagree with a lot of the claims made in it. Claiming that these changes are "thoughtless" is grossly unprofessional foolishness to pejoratively stomp one's feet to "get their way". It's embarrassing.
You can disagree with the changes. You can make arguments (understand that other people also have arguments -- for instance on the importance of the address bar, or how a browser should work with 35 tabs, which fwiw they all are trash at that level), but if you need to demand that anyone with a different opinion is "thoughtless", you have no position at all.
I have no affiliation with the author, but he's provided reasoning as to why he thinks the design doesn't work for him. You can window-dress the wording, but that's essentially what the article is about.
What are your reasons for 'trashing' the importance of the address bar and the need for 35 tabs?
I actually like this change. I’ve been using software for more than 25 years so I’ve lived the evolution of UI a bit and sometimes we feel that it’s a regression. But after a period of transition every time I liked the product more.
« The familiar is comfortable; change is upsetting ».
I can’t imagine being stuck with a Windows XP style for ever I can’t even believe having used it so many years and looking back it’s a disaster but back then people loved it and complained on every single update.
Browser makers are always doing aggressive (and thus questionable) things with the UX, partly because the chrome is the only part which is under their control (and not the content).
The two most questionable decisions I find in the latest Safari UX are:
- A focused tab goes from the title to the address: this means you cannot see the title of the page you are on, and that tabs change relative positions depending on focus. This is unfortunately a hard problem, because users/designers expect a signal that you are on the correct site to prevent phishing - adding a disclosure field for viewing/entering the address anchored to the left is insufficient.
- Tab Pinning is still not supported on ios/iPadOS, and since tab groups are synchronized they cannot be pinned. Pinning adds some really nice behaviors for curation, so the whole tab group feature feels less useful than it could be.
I have to admit I don't hate the Safari image he's picking on, but it's not great. It's a big shrug.
This line is gold though:
"Going through Big Sur’s user interface with a fine-tooth comb reveals arbitrary design decisions that prioritise looks over function, and therefore reflect an un-learning of tried-and-true user interface and usability mechanics that used to make for a seamless, thoughtful, enjoyable Mac experience."
Cross out "Mac" at the end and it applies even more to Windows than to the Mac. This lack of unified conceptual design, combined with a mindless ape-ing of mobile interfaces on larger machines with large screens and keyboards, describes the whole UI regression trend of the past 10-15 years. We went from thought-out utilitarian UIs with consistency to... a shitpile of random design choices made in isolation. Windows is by far the worst offender here, but Mac has been moving in the wrong direction too for a while.
A desktop is not a phone any more than a tractor is a car. Yes desktops and phones have similar chips in them, but their role and use case in the larger ecosystem is very different.
Desktop/laptop isn't dead either. There are many more PC machines today than there were in the 1990s at the height of the original "PC era." There are just even more phones and tablets (and IoT devices, and voice assistants, and smart cars, and...), and globally the PC's percentage of the market has declined quite a bit. In absolute terms the ecosystem is larger than ever and these machines are used to create virtually everything in our world.
This post makes a lot of good points, which I agree with strongly. However:
> In other words, what a browser needs is horizontal breathing room, instead we have Apple doing things backwards
I disagree with this in general. Which I'm sure is the general opinion of browser developers. We often add extra whitespace to the horizontal margin to assist reading.
I think the issue is that we are so used to toolbars on the top of the window, we don't know how to squish it all in there.
Instead, take a clue from tree style tabs and put the tab bar on the left side instead. I'm sure designers with proper buy in from stake holders can make it look less horrible but stay usable.
I think the hard part is making a compelling UI which works in all of: up, down, left, and right reading order. Practically everyone will also be dealing with something like 16:9 and 9:16 aspect ratio, so users will need to be able to transition from vertical to horizontal naturally.
In my limited experience with side-panel navigation UIs I believe I would find it hard to use with my vertical
displays.
The new tab/address bar thing could be the reason I switch back away from Safari after using it as my main browser for a few years due to its energy efficiency compared to Firefox and Chrome.
What UI designer thought taking away more space for the tab bar was a good idea? Does that person even use a web browser?
They are. They are optimizing for end users not developers. This UI change must be driving people who keep many tabs open nuts (I am not one of these people, I like a tidy environment with only a few tabs open that support my current activity).
Maybe Apple has decided to nudge users in the direction of Marie Kondo; if a tab does not spark joy get rid of it.
For me, whenever I switch tasks or activities, I usually quit out of safari and restart it. I like to concentrate on a single activity and not flit around trying to do many things at once. Maybe Apple is trying to healthier use of devices, as in providing Screen Time usage reports.
Do you honestly think this is a one-person job? While you might question the outcome of product development, assuming that a multi-billion R&D budget accounts for 1 designer is just unhelpful.
Even just the WebKit commits with Apple engineering contacts is enough to build a whole company around...
One person had the initial idea; the hive mind doesn't make radical changes like this on its own.
A lot of times, you can end up with amazing new ideas that way, but sometimes a change based on ego / "that person is just so brilliant" is just bad. The tab bar thing is going to be Touch Bar 2.0, I think.
The question is, how long is Apple going to push it? I was hopeful the Touch Bar would die with M1 Macs...
I'm sure there is one (administratively) responsible person in the end, but I haven't every had a large-scale design lean on just 1 person or have very low-quantity lynchpins.
I doubt Apple's inner workings are simplistic in such a way that one person with some sort of clout pushed this with no further thought.
At the end of the day this is just speculation but purely negative speculation is just some form of populism/FUD and makes everything worse.
I'm not arguing this change as good or bad, but the pattern of one or two key people deciding something and others getting on board to implement it is common.
This is really interesting because it might be the reason I switch to Safari after using Firefox for years. All I really want is proper site isolation after this.
> Two things any user, no matter their tech-savviness, has needed in a browser. A wide Address bar to see exactly where they are, which webpage it’s loaded, the whole URL
This is clearly wrong and brings the judgement of the author into question.
People care that they are on "Facebook", "Google", "Youtube". They are not remembering that a stupid cat video belongs to URL: ?v=X2KsttcwC04
99% of HN users want to see the full URL, myself included.
However, we only care because we know what a URL is, and what the different components mean.
The average user doesn't understand the intricacies of URLs, nor should they have to. Parsing URLs unambiguously is hard even for programmers, and has been the source of numerous security vulnerabilities.
I think there should always be an option to show the full URL bar, but I can't really argue for it being the default behavior anymore.
Strongly disagree. Vertical space is not negligible. We already have way too many things taking up vertical space:
- menu bar
- tab bar
- URL bar
- bookmarks bar
- scrolling site headers
- dock
Eliminating, combining, or hiding just some of these by default is a huge win for space savings. It's why people have been asking for a combined tab/URL bar for years.
The blended chrome does indeed make websites feel like they take more of your screen.
Overall this change is seriously tempting me to move from Firefox to Safari.
It seems like UX/UI design has devolved to eliminate extensive (actual) user testing/feedback/enhancement.
Instead, the big FANG cos are happy to accept whatever their 'experienced' designer thinks is an exciting new look with some perfunctory review by the marketing dept.
IMHO the what's-old-is-new-again can't come soon enough when it comes to UI design!
For tabs, I beg to disagree -- tabs have been somewhat meaningless to me when pinch to "expose" was introduced. It works really well, I can search through my tabs if I have a ton of them as well.
For share being buried, I'd have to agree. It's the one thing I use most and we end up having to poke more at our screens to do so.
That said, it's no means perfect. Some features I want to see in Safari are:
- multiple profiles (work, personal etc.) ideally integrated with this new Focus concept that the new OS introduces
- grouping: create, manage and switch tab groups
- bring back the single click share button
What if I don't want to lose my spot in the page by scrolling to the top[1]? This is a straight up UI regression. Just because there are workarounds doesn't mean it's not shit.
Edit:
[1] For example if I want to load new comments in a
HN thread I'm reading.
Relevant transcript from the first two minutes of the video:
> Since very early in the evolution of the web browser, most of the browsers we've used have had a few fundamental thing in common. There's a very tall toolbar at the top with a slot for the URL that's on it's own line. And the website stays inside this space, this portal to the web, the viewport. Of course, as users, we've trained ourselves to put all of our focus on the website that we're using, but for years, the browser itself has maintained a strong visual presence. No matter how a website is designed to look and feel, the browser interface framed that design and dominated it. What if we could get rid of that frame and extend the design of the website to every edge of the window? Well, that's what we've done in Safari 15. This year we've reimagined the browsing experience as we know it. We're putting all the focus on the web content. The new Safari blends the tab bar into each website by changing its background color. The entire interface is on one line, and things naturally appear when needed. This makes your content feel more expansive. Each web page or web app takes over, extending to all four edges of the window. The browser interface yields to the content.
New Safari design really reminds me Internet Explorer 9 and 10. It also had tabs right to the address bar. Back then I was amazed with the idea, but looking at window icons taking massive horizontal space I became disappointed. Still tried to use it though, but it quickly became clear that there just not enough horizontal space with 720p monitor to fit more than 2 tabs while still understand what is open.
I love the colour of the page 'bleeding' into the 'tab area' - providing they can maintain a decent level of contrast. It looks really nice in the provided example.
Of course, I hope they've used `<meta name="theme-color"...` instead of the background colour so pages with a white background and a black header don't end up with white chrome.
> providing they can maintain a decent level of contrast
Safari wouldn't apply the theme-color if it makes the UI inaccessible (it has a very few narrow range of color that it won't apply). Also, if the tag is not specified, Safari would not blend the website content into the tab bar.
What's the recommended way to move a window that has no remaining title bar? (Honest question, not specific to Safari.) Or am I supposed to only use full-screen windows now?
the entire top bar area can be grabbed to drag the window around. Just click and hold anywhere that isn't a button or tab (including between and just below the tabs).
Ok, but the entire top row is now 90% buttons, tabs, and address-bar. Leaving me to struggle with the trackpad to position the mouse on a tiny sliver of border. Is there a keyboard modifier for move-mode?
I love Apple and Safari and frequently provide bug reports to WebKit but I also absolutely hate the new safari and hope they reconsider it. I don’t mind change that is for the better and simply requires time to change muscle memory but this requires that and the end result is more clicks to do things, fewer static targets and the supposive benefits aren’t benefits for me at least. I find it most awful on iOS. The WebKit team is great and have to assume this direction to make the chrome of the app even smaller came from higher up. Hopefully more public backlash when the public betas come out so apple can rethink it. At the end of the day it’s still better than the alternatives for my use cases but hate that for me it’s a worse experience for something I use more than any other app.
I much prefer less "chrome" so i like the new safari re-design, if it was me i would have just reduced it to just having a keyboard shortcut(cmd + f) that pulls up a spotlight like search that has the url and a list of the tabs you can arrow down on.
On Google Chrome since tabs are on their own row at the top of the window and maintain their size and position you can fling your mouse to the top of the screen easily hit them. On Safari since the address bar expands from the active tab, the size and position of the tabs are drastically changing. This makes selecting a tab more difficult. Additionally, since the size the address bar is wider the distance your mouse has to travel to select the neighbouring tab increases.
In the end this leads to more effort and bad ergonomics. I would love it if they just had the tabs on one row and address bar one row, until then I will stick with chrome on the desktop.
I have switched back to Windows because macOS is like a second-class citizen in Apple :-/ I am programmer with many Bash scripts in macOS. But the switch is quite smooth actually (thanks to WSL 2).
With the similar price of M1 iMac, I can buy a Windows with a much better GPU (for gaming, deep learning, mining, or whatever) and a 140+Hz monitor. With a high refresh rate monitor the UI is so silk smooth. Expect iOS level smoothness when scrolling web pages.
However there is something I still want a solution. Say the continuation of the current website (between Edge and iPhone). Password synchronization and Notes (the official iCloud web Notes is almost useless).
I’ve considered switching to Safari on my Mac because I had heard that it has stellar performance. However, with no support for uBlock Origin because of their incomplete implementation of the extensions API, and now these UI changes, it looks like I’ll stick with Firefox.
I still plan to stay with my Mac because of the ecosystem. I’m one of the few who seems to actually like Windows 10. There are warts in Microsoft’s software, just as there are in Apple’s. But I like having my iPhone integrated with my Mac. The only option on Windows is Android phone integration. I’m trying to remove myself from Google’s ecosystem, though.
Adguard is NOT free. Beyond that, it is the worst plague of the modern computing age - subscription.
An ad blocker has access to extremely invasive data and Adblock wants me to pay them a subscription so they can get my PII and associate it with my browsing?
It is also not Open Source so I can't rely on the hope that someone smarter than me would have caught its dirty tricks.
I use Safari for a tiny subset of my browsing due to this gaping hole...
Ad blockers on Safari are apparently unable to block YouTube ads, due to API limitations.
I wish Firefox wouldn't excessively drain the battery on macOS, and Chrome wouldn't excessively drain personal data to Google, and Brave wouldn't excessively violate the trust of its users.
As of today, there's not a single browser on macOS that I don't strongly dislike. Looks like Safari won't improve soon.
Is it free? I'm looking at the Mac download now and it says that it's a 14-day trial with a monthly subscription afterwards, and I'm not entirely happy with relying on a subscription-based service.
It is not. But you can buy a cheap lifetime family account for Adguard on stacksocial for $20/$29. (not affiliated, but extremely happy user, been using it for years)
Honestly, as a macOS power user, I love the new approach Apple is taking with Safari.
More vertical space is a win, especially with those wide screen displays that are getting more popular and lets be honest: Actions like reloading are best done by using keyboard shortcuts anyway, so having a more minimal UI is a win in my book.
The new feature, where Safari’s app chrome changes colour by taking the accent colour of the currently loaded website is just awesome and really brings the website you are currently visiting up one level closer.
If you're touching a standard browser's URL bar, you might touch a tab instead (and vice-versa). But if you put them on the same horizontal plane, this problem is solved.
And from a touch perspective, the URL bar has a ton of wasted space; you don't need more than the length of your average URL as a touch target, so all the horizontal space that comes after it is essentially unused.
I think this is yet another way in which Apple is preparing to make macOS touch-enabled.
I don't mind it on macOS because of keyboard shortcuts, but I desperately want my refresh and share buttons back in the iOS version of Safari. Pull down to refresh is great if you're already at the top of the page, but when you're at the bottom you have to open a menu just to refresh the page?
Overall though I think the new look is fine, and the author is being a real disagreeable crank about the inevitable merging of iOS/macOS aesthetics.
Also known as: "The day I dump macOS for Windows." I feel it coming. One thing that's kept me from getting an M1 Mac is that I'd have to run Big Sur. Given that Apple is continuing in this dumb direction my 2015 MacBook Pro running Mojave might, indeed, be the last Mac I ever own.
It's too bad too. With the M1 macs they had finally fixed the keyboards.
I’ve been using iOS15 beta on my iDevices and tab groups has been a life-saver. If you had. 18 tabs open at any time like the author here said now you can separate them through tab groups that will sync in between devices, so I can have a group for my guitar tabs and a group for all my tech stuff, that leaves the default view clear if I want to start going into a new rabbit-hole
Modern UX people are monsters that come out every few months to terrorize me. I’m honestly scared to install MacOS updates.
I don’t recall the last time an update made anything better for me. But I’m a “power user” so I guess that means I should expect to re-learn basic navigation endlessly.
My computer is a tool. Please stop changing how I use it.
You’re welcome to use Windows XP for that matter … seriously I understand because it’s a tool for me as well but it’s the price to pay when you have a product used by millions / billions of people … there is so much different needs and every user thinks he’s the center which is understandable but Apple and others have to evolve with their vision they can’t stuck themselves in the past because we like things the way they are now.
We have the choice of switching platform, writing our own or not updating software as well but we as individual are not and will never be the center and « majority » use case …
For some time now, I've been using a CSS mod for Firefox to put the window controls on the same row as the navigation buttons and address bar, and I use the Tree Tabs extension to get a vertical tab bar on the right, which I overlap with VS Code's file navigation so that the meat of both apps are in view even if they are overlapping.
At some point, an update made the window controls disappear. I still haven't fixed it, but I like my toolbar being as small as possible to give me more vertical screen real estate. I don't mind this change to Safari tbh. A big draw of Macs is also the 16:10 aspect ratio.
Hmmm this time I don’t agree with Riccardo. The new interface to me looks better, I’m testing it and I like it, there are only things that I don’t like:
1) the “unified color” in the menubar is terrible, really. You must disable the overlay tab/menubar coloring because this is the only big mess.
2) you have to make 2 taps in order to open the reading list, because you can’t “pin” it but when you open the sidebar you have to choose anytime if you want to see the RL or bookmarks. And this is a bit annoying. Workaround is to use a shortcut (like alt-R to open and close the RL and you can see it straight without two taps)
> We need open tabs, we need to see what’s open at all times, and we need to be able to quickly jump to the tab we need in the here and now.
I’m working on Amna which tackles the too many tabs problem, and this is a huge generalization. I can have 22 tabs open just for single task. For example opening two HN articles in new tabs will bring the total to 3. Seeing what’s open all the time is overwhelming to most users. I’m a fan of the new tab groups and unlike chrome which puts a bunch of dots, Safari neatly sends tabs away to work with less clutter and a blank slate.
> While you’re there, take a look at how Vivaldi tackles the ‘too many tabs’ problem. Spoiler: by adding a second Tab bar.
On the subject of optimal use of horizontal/vertical screen space:
Vivaldi's killer feature is native support for vertical tabs, which is a better solution both for large number of tabs and for being able to read their titles easily.
If memory serves me, it also supports a tab-tree, ie. each tab's children are indented under it, which is a really cool way to browse.
You with tree-style tabs you can see where everything came from, instead of just throwing it in a big pile.
I don’t really care about the address bar being small, but I dislike that you can’t open too many tabs at a time. IMO you should be able to see at least the favicon even when you have 15+ tabs open.
I swear it was possible in the past to drag and drop all UI elements, including the tab bar, by right-clicking the chrome and dropping into edit mode, do you remember?
I'm not going to take Safari over Firefox or even Chrome, but this design isn't thoughtless. It looked to me from the demo that they did put some thought into the design. Integrating the address bar into the tabs is a nice idea for saving the precious vertical space people (validly) keep complaining that we're losing. It won't work well for me because I have too many tabs open all the time, but they even thought about that issue and gave tab groups as a way to help keep the number of tabs under control.
I really like the new design on my 11inch MacBook. I don't use the tab bar, I use expose for tabs by pinching my fingers and there's a great view there to switch tabs.
I don't have macOS 15 beta yet, but I'm running the Safari Technology Preview now on Big Sur which has most (all?) of the new UI changes.
I love pretty much everything about it. It looks gorgeous. Tab Groups are incredible. The "address bar is in the tab" concept does take some getting used to and that's likely the area they'll tweak the most over the next few months. But overall, huge step forward in my book. Can't wait to get it on my iPad as well.
The new UI changes were introduced in tech preview 126, but that one is only available for macOS 12. The download page at https://developer.apple.com/safari/download/ says "macOS 11 - coming soon".
I have tech preview 125 from earlier and no software updates are available in system preferences.
So how do you have the new 126 UI changes on Big Sur already?
Lots of people saying that they like the new Safari, and lots saying that it sucks.
This is why we need customizable UI. Everyone's laptop is different and everyone's preference is different. Firefox suffers from a similar issue. Of course more customizable UI isn't an easy task, but it would probably be good in the long run to develop a more customizable general-purpose GUI framework.
I welcome these sort of new experiments as long as they give an option to revert to the previous behaviour. At least until they have a real world data to confirm 99 percentile users are happy with it. I don’t know if Apple provides that option in this case, but I think that will reduce the public outcry.
It doesn’t make sense to not expect experiments like these in an actively developed product.
What happens with background images or gradients and the page bleed effect? Does Safari add additional padding to the top of the page to start top aligned background images from outside the viewport?
Consistency is the most important principle of good user interfaces. At first glance, changing the color of the same interface controls when switching pages seems like it would be very jarring.
This whole article is written from a very subjective point of view. It's obvious that the author has strong emotional feelings about this. At one point the author says something like "I’ve seen it firsthand in so many occasions and contexts that it can’t be just anecdotal data." (this is the very definition of anecdotal data).
What I would like: Infinite tabs, they don’t get too small in the tab bar, newer ones to the right, older ones can be accessed by scrolling left. Older than last 15 don’t take up memory. Tabs get saved into disk/cloud and reappear when you restart the browser like on iOS. Basically so you can put off dealing with your open tabs indefinitely.
Safari already does this. Tabs begin by showing the page title and optionally the site favicon. Once you've got a bunch open they shrink down to just the favicon. After that point the tab bar scrolls horizontally. You can scroll it with two finger swipes on a trackpad or Shift + Scroll on a mouse. You can see all tab contents by hitting the tab view button (I don't know a better name).
Open tabs are synced between devices via iCloud. In the tab icon view you can see tabs open on other devices listed. You can click to open one or ⌘ + Click to open them in new background tabs.
On the subject of user interface messes, I recently switched away from Chrome on Android to Firefox, solely because of the "tab groups" feature.
I usually can live with UI changes, but reading the reviews of Chrome on the Google store, and the Chrome subreddit, it seems I'm not alone in disliking this change.
Does Safari 15 not do that thing like Mobile Safari where when you scroll the entire address bar goes away?
I feel like that should definitely be a thing. The 13-inch MacBook Pros of today seem oddly space constrained compared to the non-Retina MacBook Air I used years ago. But maybe I’m wrong.
Teams grow they need things to do, managers need to justify increasing head count and love redesigns and rebrandings ...
I think we are at a point where there is non-triivial size weather app team @ Apple
I've been using Safari 15 on macOS and iOS since they released the betas and while I could get used to, and enjoyed some of the changes, some I don't think I'll be able to live with.
From good to bad :
- The tab grouping feature. I'm not sure I understand the complaining, as this is a purely optional feature that you don't have to use. Each new window you open will have it's own "group" that isn't shared anywhere, but you can, optionally, save tab groups that get synced across OSes. I find that to be very useful to make thematic groups and being able to switch from one to another easily on iPad, and having those groups opened on separate windows on mac.
- The sidebar is a bit clunky on iOS, for example if you want to browse your bookmarks through it, you'll have to go back to the root state of that tab (pressing back a few times) in order to be able to close it. Thankfully, that's not an issue on macOS ! Having multiple back buttons on screen though, I'm not certain that's a great design for novices, but you can argue it's more of a "power user" feature.
- Hiding the close button on a mouseover on the favicon on mac. Quite frankly this one was infuriating the first couple of days, but I did get over it. I do think it will be very jarring for most users though, and a very bad experience for not much reason. Even more puzzling is the fact that on iPad, since you can't mouseover, the close box is visible for the main tab, but not for the others, so closing a non selected tab is a two click process that brings back (or maybe reload) the tab, and that doesn't feel good.
- Hiding the reload button. As someone who don't always have my hands on the keyboard, I used that button fairly often on macOS. The touch target to the ... is also fairly small on iOS and I can't say I'm hitting it all the time. The menu that pops also has a peculiar design with some buttons being extra high, and a whole, massively scrollable list of features that are not in an order that particularly make sense to my usage. It's one of this case where you'd wish for some usage based learning as Microsoft tried to do years ago with Office.
- The Chrome tinting is something that kinda looks good sometimes, but gets visually jarring quickly. HN is a good example. I do like Orange, but that's just too much to my taste (that feature doesn't seem to be there on iPad). It can be disabled though in Preferences which is good.
- Moving around the location bar. That's the change I don't think I can get over, this has been terrible to use for me in practice. The fact that the bar changes width and location, I find visually and mentally jarring on mac. On iPad it's not much better, though at least you understand the premise there, it's about saving vertical space. Conceptually I can't get behind that one : they have voluntarily constrained their design to their smallest screen size, and did it mostly for cross OS consistency.
Is there a way to downgrade to an earlier safari version? I'm about to get a new macbook, and I'm not particularly looking forward to having to deal with these UI changes ...
I’ve said this before on HN, but as a reminder the following are all verifiable facts: there is no dedicated macOS team anymore, Apple market iPads as a superior alternative to a laptop, and macOS as a percentage of revenue has over a long period dwindled in favour of iOS (with a few minor blips along the way).
A reasonable conclusion is that macOS isn’t apple’s priority. Meanwhile with WSL and Terminal Microsoft is pushing hard at developers. apt get is a better system than home brew and always has been. Vote with your wallets.
The MacPorts project has existed for 7 years longer than Homebrew, and is a much more sane experience similar to FreeBSD ports. In fact, Jordan Hubbard, the co-founder of FreeBSD and the original author of FreeBSD ports, was involved in the MacPorts project (along with other Apple employees).
I’m always baffled that Homebrew is seen as the standard macOS package manager. MacPorts has existed for many more years. It behaves more similarly to package managers on other operating systems without weird symlink tricks. It doesn’t send analytics to Google. It has over 25,000 active ports (Homebrew doesn’t seem to publish its formulae count but SO threads seem to indicate something in the region of 4,000). To each their own, but I highly recommend anyone reading this to give MacPorts a try.
Macports is great and better than homebrew. But it’s an add on, with no (official) support from Apple. Apt is first party, WSL is first party. Debian and Microsoft won’t make breaking changes intentionally that impact those systems. This happens regularly with homebrew and Apple. (Macports having a more independent universe in /opt and being less vulnerable to breakage is partly why I prefer it. Although it still takes a dependency on Xcode cli tools last I looked.)
I tried MacPorts back in the day and royally screwed up my computer and couldn’t figure out how to fix it. Iirc, homebrew symlinking prevents what happened to me.
However, I’ve learned a lot since that time, so perhaps macports would work just fine for me now.
Second vote for Macports. It's awesome, and filed some bugs during the Big Sur beta, they all got triaged and processed really fast with new package releases only days later.
The fact that they have invested what must be an astronomical sum in moving Macs over to their own CPU architecture suggests otherwise. It’s probably more fair to say their vision for MacOS doesn’t align with what everyone would like?
Personally I’m very happy with MacOS and think Big Sur is a great iteration, I really like the look and feel, and the attention to detail to UI that I find lacking in alternatives. But that’s the beauty of choice, not everyone has to agree!
You’re probably right, but that won’t happen until we can do all the things we care about on whatever the “one true platform” I don’t think. I believe Apple will always support “power users”, if just because they need to support developers, and their large audience of creatives using their machines.
I think it’s strange that browsers, routinely displaying responsive design layouts, have never tried this for their own window chrome.
They keep trying to shoehorn all screen sizes and space savings into one layout, when the web itself does a wiser thing: it adapts and makes better use of space if available.
Foolish design is everywhere.
Look at web trends. No underlined links, no clear button distinction, childish color schemes and rounded corners everywhere.
Apple UI/UX design is trend setter. They try to be cool and resonate with naive audiences. This is Design by Marketing.
This is the result of corporations hiring cheap millennial designers without proper design foundations, ready to serve and adapt to marketing concepts with compliance and enthusiasm. The burden of boomers expertise and professional code is no go for the future designed to serve boards of executives and shareholders.
This trend will continue rapidly, complexity will increase to the point where users will need AI to make choices and filter UX crap created by semi-pros for pennies.
Yep.
What constitutes an adult color scheme for you? Why do rounded corners offend you? Are there examples of what you think are appropriately designed products or websites?
Think what you want. I can give you an excessive list with examples what is the foundation of UI design as a logic and implementation. What is Accessible and Usable interface. There are a ton of books on the subject. But reading, drawing and deep research are things that require serious focus, dedication and critical thinking. Those skills are not available for people who have more time on hand for “social” media and dribbble or instagram, self validation. I seriously doubt that Steve Jobs will accept the “modern” Apple HIG and iOS redesign of Mac OS, on a simple and logically grounded premise called mouse pointer. Don’t let me start on colors, contrast or flat design. Bad idea from Microsoft Mobile UI gone wild. But don’t worry and be happy. Hey, in the end all user input is error and the almighty emperor will save us all from cognitive overloads with tiny colourful implants.:)
You don't have to give me an excessive list, a rationale behind your criticisms of Safari's design or explaining what constitutes an adult color scheme would suffice.
Flowery language and technical jargon don't actually have much substance on their own.
The most striking difference between children and adults is the shift from a warm to a cool color bias. Psychologists have known for a long time that the majority of adults choose blue as their favorite color, with green and purple also landing in the top favorite list. Meanwhile, red, the hands-down favorite color for 3-year-olds, quickly drops to the middle of the pack by early adulthood.
http://www.joehallock.com/edu/COM498/
Seems like the author is so used to the current design language, that they are vehemently opposed to any change.
I personally like that Apple attempts to make websites feel more like applications by making the browser disappear.
Websites have evolved to becoming essentially applications that can run on any platform. And with WASM this is only getting better. This is a great thing!
Do applications have a permanent bookmarks bar, a reload button, a URL bar? No. It's all built into the OS. When you want to open an application, you search in the Dock or in Spotlight. When an application freezes, you force quit and reopen it. I can imagine how Apple in the future integrates the Safari URL bar into Spotlight search. On iOS this is at least partly possible already. Websites become more and more applications.
> I personally like that Apple attempts to make websites feel more like applications by making the browser disappear.
Now if they could provide a stable platform like they do for their applications versus the pain and edge cases Safari almost always introduces (especially the mobile implementations). I know its not a flashy thing but one WWDC it'd be great if they came out and said how many nearly decade old bugs have been addressed rather than a UI uplift - the cynic in me assumes a "redesigned" app is going to be less, not more stable.
Yeah, to me much of this sounds great. No menu bar? Great, I never use it. Keyboard shortcuts make it unnecessary. No reload button? Great, one less thing I don’t use cluttering up the UI.
I understand that less experienced users may find this confusing though. Although saying that i think anyone can learn Cmd-R and Cmd-W, and would be better off for it.
I agree with the article on the tab/address bar merge being bad though.
Can you name any non-niche casual website that requires you to refresh the current page?
Unfortunately, I can’t recall one, and it seems to me that refreshing a page in 2021 has become a niche feature reserved for IT guys who know how HTTP works.
Then why not remove ALL the buttons. Stick them in a hamburger menu. And present everyone with a list of keys they must memorize during OS first boot?
This is how far UX discussion has fallen since the early 00s. We went from talking about affordances, discoverability, and "principle of least surprise" to fashion. "I like it to look clean. Less chrome, and let the users eat shortcut keys, hamburger menus, and gestures."
Your comment doesn't reply to anything in mine. I haven't written anything about hamburger menus, things looking lean, chrome or gestures.
The only thing my comment was about is the practice of imagining non-computer-expert people to be mindless zombies who don't know basic stuff. Cmd+C, Cmd+V, and Cmd+R are one of the most popular shortcuts in computers, known by people who aren't computer experts. Just because something is done with the keyboard, doesn't mean it's some l33t knowledge exclusive to "power users". But computer professionals often talk about "casual users" as stupid, probably to feel better about themselves, because they know all that oh-so-advanced-hard stuff.
So yes, just like a "copy" button would be a waste of space, when Cmd+C is so widespread, a "refresh" button is similar in that regard.
Apple would be the last company to optimize for power users.
Makes me think of the complaints in video game text over the past few years and how it had become so small as to be nearly unreadable on normal TVs at normal viewing distances. The natural assumption here is that the game devs were doing all their work inches away from large fancy monitors not thinking of the so-called 10’ experience most people use to consume the content.
At least many console games now have text size sliders (with varying levels of usefulness).
https://kotaku.com/the-year-in-tiny-video-game-text-2019-184...