Introduction: no WWDC-related observations?

Maybe you’ve wondered why I haven’t written my usual post-WWDC article sharing my observations about the keynote. Well, once again my main job absorbed most of my time and energies. But also, frankly, there hasn’t been anything extraordinarily good worth scrambling to write down.

Don’t get me wrong, plenty of nice things have been introduced at WWDC 2021 across all Apple platforms, but overall it felt like going to a nice restaurant serving you decent food. Did you eat well? You’d say yes. Did you eat so well it’s worth leaving a lengthy review online? Not really.

I will write something about WWDC, if I find an interesting-enough angle that’s worth writing about three or four weeks after the event.

The Mac — Saving the last for last

What’s really worth mentioning, though, is how Apple has screwed up the whole dessert.

The dessert is the Mac, of course, and in calling it a dessert I’m trying to give a respectable, polite label to something that was left for last. Deal with it, I’m still a Mac user first, the Mac platform is still the one I care most, so I’m giving it precedence over everything else.

There has been a wave of pieces written in recent times by pundits who now say that those who believed Apple did not really care about the Mac were wrong. Look, the new Apple Silicon chips! Look, new hardware updates! Even redesigned Macs! Whoa, crazy stuff indeed.

Why was Mac OS left for last at the WWDC keynote? Because essentially, everything new that’s coming in Monterey are features originally devised for iOS and iPadOS devices, and then adapted for Mac OS. And Universal Control I’d call an ecosystem feature. Nothing, to my recollection, was conceived specifically to take advantage of the Mac as a powerful, versatile machine and platform. Nothing was designed specifically with the Mac in mind. Nothing was designed as a Mac-first feature.

The utter user-interface butchery happening to Safari on the Mac is once again the work of people who put iOS first. People who by now think in iOS terms. People who view the venerable Mac OS user interface as an older person whose traits must be experimented upon, plastic surgery after plastic surgery, until this person looks younger. Unfortunately the effect is more like this person ends up looking… weird.

These people look at the Mac’s UI and (that’s the impression, at least) don’t really understand it. Its foundations come from a past that almost seems inscrutable to them. Usability cues and features are all wrinkles to them. iOS and iPadOS don’t have these strange wrinkles, they muse. We must hide them. We’ll make this spectacular facelift and we’ll hide them, one by one. Mac OS will look as young (and foolish, cough) as iOS!

Safari’s facelift

The new Safari. Image © Apple, Inc. and taken from the Mac OS Monterey Preview webpage.

For years, Safari’s interface has been a good balance between minimalism and functionality. The app chrome was shaved away, iteration after iteration, and it seemed it had reached its minimum but still viable footprint.

On my 11-inch MacBook Air (running Mac OS 10.13 High Sierra and Safari 13.1.2), the total vertical space taken by Safari’s Title bar/Toolbar, Favourites bar and Tab bar is 86 pixels, 64 if you hide the Favourites bar. The 11-inch MacBook Air’s display is only 768 pixels tall, but even in these ‘cramped’ conditions there’s still enough space left to a website for clarity and meaningful navigation. Especially if you hide the Favourites bar and use Safari in full-screen mode.

On my 13-inch retina MacBook Pro running Mac OS Big Sur 11.5 beta and Safari 14.1.2, the total vertical space taken by Safari’s Title bar/Toolbar, Favourites bar and Tab bar is 110 pixels, 82 if you hide the Favourites bar.

In both instances, the vertical space taken by the Tab bar is 28 pixel. Twenty-eight.

The point I’m making with all this pixel peeping is that these are negligible measurements. Getting rid of the Tab bar with the excuse that you’re saving space is the stinkiest bullshit I’ve ever smelt in a while. 28 pixels for any of the current Mac displays is nothing.

In The reshaped Mac experience I wrote:

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.

What Apple has done to Safari 15 is no different. Ever since WWDC 2020 this damned quote by Alan Dye (Apple’s VP of Human Interface) has stayed with me, and most of what’s happening on Mac OS and to Mac OS always comes back to it:

We’ve reduced visual complexity to keep the focus on users’ content. Buttons and controls appear when you need them, and they recede when you don’t.

I’ll reiterate this until I’m out of breath: it’s not the right approach. Or at least, it could make sense if applied thoughtfully in certain parts of the interface. What’s going on in Safari 15 is that buttons and controls have actually been swept under a rug with an (···) icon, and they don’t appear when you need them — you have to look for them. And it makes no sense whatsoever that one would want to go looking for the Reload button in a tiny menu with a More… icon.

And what’s more arbitrary than the new Tab bar design? 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.
• A proper Tab bar, with as much horizontal space as possible, to be able to open a lot of tabs and read at least a small part of their titles.

(And no, I don’t think that only nerds open dozens of browser tabs at a time. I’ve seen it firsthand in so many occasions and contexts that it can’t be just anecdotal data.)

And what have they done in Safari 15? They merged these two browser bars, of course, thus delivering the worst of both worlds:

• On the one hand, the Address bar keeps shifting position and changing width (meaning it gets shorter) as you create more tabs. Please, turn on your common sense, and consider how ridiculous this is.
• On the other hand, now that tabs have to coexist with the Address bar on the same line, they have less space. Meaning that on a relatively small 13-inch display, it’s probably enough to open just six tabs before things get cramped and tab text gets truncated to meaninglessness.

In other words, what a browser needs is horizontal breathing room, instead we have Apple doing things backwards, sacrificing horizontal space to give us what, 28 more vertical pixels? It seems as if the people in the design team are all working exclusively on 32-inch Apple XDR Pro Displays.

Many people are also commenting negatively about the new feature where Safari’s app chrome changes colour by taking the accent colour of the currently loaded website. Michael Tsai says: Having the page background color bleed into the tab area makes it harder to read, and it feels weird for the current page’s color to affect the way other tabs look. It also works inconsistently, even on the same pages on Apple’s site. At least there’s a preference to turn it off. And I agree with him, but this is a minor offence compared with the rest of Safari’s UI butchery.

By the way, in case you thought it was an original feature, go have a look at Vivaldi browser. While you’re there, take a look at how Vivaldi tackles the ‘too many tabs’ problem. Spoiler: by adding a second Tab bar. And I say, why not. There’s enough vertical space on current computers. And those users who usually deal with a lot of tabs prioritise having easy access to them and tab legibility, not having 20 more vertical pixels available.

While we’re on the subject of browser tab management, Apple’s proposed solution — creating groups of tabs — is rarely efficient and overall unconvincing. A little experiment: how many browser tabs do you have currently open? Let’s be conservative. Let’s say nine. How many are so tightly related among one another that you can meaningfully group them together? I bet none to very few. Unless you maybe start using such generic labels that you always need to check inside each group to see which sites you have there.

I have currently 18 tabs open in Brave on my main Mac. Each points to a website that is not related to any other and can’t be put under the same label or category. In everyday browser use, tabs are a messy affair that is kind of messy by design and users are generally fine with it. 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. In this scenario, pinning tabs is much more useful than grouping them and hiding them away. Your most visited sites have a persistent place in the Tab bar. Their tabs are reduced to show only the favicons because you know them well and there’s no ambiguity. And that’s really it. This way of browsing is not a problem in search of a solution, Apple. You have so many more UI issues to fix, instead you add some more by ‘revolutionising’ Safari. Stop — hiding — UI — elements — arbitrarily!

I dearly hope the new UI in Safari can be neutralised by some toggles in the browser preferences. But I also hope this thoughtless UI won’t give strange ideas to the designers of Brave, Firefox, and other browsers. I’m really liking Vivaldi at the moment, by the way. Its user interface can become quite complex, but the developers and designers have been open enough to give the user a great deal of flexibility, so that you can truly customise Vivaldi to your needs.

I’m also really liking another browser I’ve been beta testing for quite a while, about which I’ll hopefully talk in more detail soon.

Safari 15 on Mac OS, a user interface mess was first published by Riccardo Mori on Morrick.me on 18 June 2021.