Apple love to preach “the UI gets out of the way of your content” with each new redesign, but how true is that in practice? Let’s compare the total height of the Safari UI with a toolbar, favourites bar and tab bar visible, across the three latest Mac OS design languages – Yosemite, Big Sur and now Tahoe. I’ve added a red line for emphasis.
It sure looks to me like the UI is eating more into my content with each redesign.
Holy shit, the new controls are massive.
I hate how this needs to be read right-to-left. First thought that the ui took up less and less space.
/c/afterandbefore
This shit really pisses me off. But a lot of the things they’re doing with their new GUI piss me off.
Download the Feedback Assistant app and file complaints with well-thought arguments for why this hurts functionality / usability. Any changes that might be made to improve it have to come now, before they’re locking changes to ship this fall.
I’ve been using the iOS beta. I can’t speak to the Mac beta. For iOS, the execution needs work, but I think I actually agree with the sentiment that content should own the entire screen and the controls should float over the content. However, there are some serious readability concerns that they need to sort out. But think of Instagram from 5 years ago compared to TikTok. TikTok really demonstrated how the content should take over the screen, and now every major social media app has a TikTok style vertical feed that fills your entire screen. I don’t use TikTok, but I enjoy apps that let content take up the screen. Apple does things that are genuinely really frustrating like refusing to redesign the Magic Mouse or putting the power button on the bottom of the Mac Mini. But in this case, I think maybe we should let Apple Cook - pun intended - but push back on obvious flaws like readability.
Oh, it’s a cool theme, to be sure. But they overshot and need a lot of feedback to correct the mistakes. Let them know the places where this doesn’t work so they can improve it. The same was true several years ago when they last overhauled the UI (a lot of errors got fixed that summer), only this is far more ambitious and they need as much feedback as they can get.
Beta 1 definitely doesn’t represent the final UI product. If you compare it to the WWDC Liquid Glass video, they’ve got tweaking to do. However with that said, LG is so much better in person and in use than pictures and video portray.
Welcome to modern operating systems, apps, browsers, websites… just buy a high-dpi 30" screen :D
Any recommendations?
Apple isn’t alone in that. More and more sites and programs are become space inefficient.
Not all of us have dual 36" ultra high rez monitors for you to waste the space with more and more area round every element. I know you’re proud of your UI design skillz, but it’s getting really ducking annoying.
I had to send in a screenshot of one Google page for editing contacts. 90% of the screen was fixed sized menus and the contacts photo. The last 10% was a tiny scrollbars box for editing a very long list of options. The devs responded basically “meh”, though a few months later it adjusted to be a bit better. Do they ever test anything that’s not on a huge screen before rolling to prod?
Do they ever test anything that’s not on a huge screen before rolling to prod?
I feel this way all the time. I used to have to tell my (often less experienced) coworkers “that’s unusable on a device, which is how 75% of our traffic will consume it.”
It was usually because it looked nice on a huge monitor, and in an emulator.
I really want Apple to just stop redesigning things
They should bring back Mountain Lion or whatever. I heard it was peak
Leopard and Snow Leopard had vastly better virtual desktops than Lion onward. You actually had a grid of them and could navigate up/down/left/right with shortcuts; afterwards you only got a linear list of desktops.
Gridded desktops were great. I had a 3x3 grid, of which five cells were used. My main desktop was “centered”. Thunderbird was right. My IRC and IM clients were left. iTunes was down. I don’t remember what was up; it’s been a while.
Leopard was peak Mac OS X.
Even if people had dual 36" monitors or whatever, most sites or programs seem to focus more and more on making things fit into as small a horizontal space as possible. Even if you have a vertical mo it or you’d have huge swatches of white space along the edges of the screen.
For horizontal space, it tends to be really hard to design for larger widths and still maintain focus on the main content in a readable way. For example, you should avoid super wide blocks of text as it’s really easy to get lost as you read. This is why you often see a max width with large gutters for wide displays, especially on pages with a singular focus, such as an article.
Do people really have that much trouble focusing as they read? Honestly I have trouble focusing when you fit maybe a dozen words per line, with giant swatches of nothing surrounding it. I have to change any wiki article I read to the wide format or it’s virtually unreadable to me.
That is funny! I’ve opted-in to change the default & tried the wide format on Wikipedia a few times and each time it has reinforced what I perceived to be the obvious developer decision based on (ostensibly) the “obvious“ user preference… :)
That you’re terrible at reading?
Very much so. The longer the line, the more your eyes move and the easier it is to lose track of where you are. It can be worse when you move to the next line, as you lose your frame of reference from the previous line on the other side of the screen.
So why dont sites use multiple columns?
@Zorque Habit, I guess. If I create a website, I can chose from about 70 templates with Everweb, no of them having a two column lay out.
So I guess it’s difficult to get this right in HTML but I’m by no means an expert on this topic.
I can say i have experienced that occasionally, but it had less to do with being hard to read visually and more to do with just not caring about what I’m reading. Which seems less of a “We need to make this easier to read” and more a “We need to trick people into thinking they’re reading something meaningful” problem.
Is it something to do with shortsightedness? Maybe an ADHD thing that somehow doesn’t affect me for some reason? Maybe just I’m super good at basic visual spatial orientation?
Or is it just that people read with such small text that it’s hard to differentiate between lines? I honestly can’t fathom an inability to read a line in any other circumstances.
Here’s some tips.
- Disable favorites bar. That would remove a 3rd of the UI real estate.
- macOS 11-15, enable ‘Compact Mode’
macOS 26 Dev Beta 1 does not have Compact Mode. But I am confident it will be added back before release. Feel free to save this comment so you can dogpile me if I’m wrong.
Seems a bit odd the complain about screen real estate while representing the UI at its largest form, instead of its smallest.
There is a compact mode? Where do I find the setting?
Safari Settings>Tabs
- Cope
iPhone+++ with a screen 10x bigger than iPhone 15! Buy now! Buy now! Buy now! Buy now!
It’s exactly the opposite on iPhone. Most of the chrome is now extremely minimized. He’s just bitching about macOS.
Expanding like that usually is indicative of moves to make the UI more touch friendly. But since Apple seems to be firmly against touchscreen laptops for some dumb reason, who knows what their justification is. Probably something with the word magic or courage.
for some dumb reason
ive never understood why anyone would want a touch screen on a laptop? If its a foldable to a tablet type laptop, sure. But a regular laptop? why?
Keyboard, mouse, track pad, track point, all of them have limits. Sometimes just touching what you want to do is more convenient. And if you don’t want to use it, then you can ignore it with no adverse effect. It isn’t something that’s in the way or prevents you from using other input methods.
And at this point the technology is so cheap there’s no reason not to include it. Well unless your company’s entire profit structure is based on charging exorbitant amounts for minor upgrades and making the lowest cost option almost always have some sort of glaring deficiency to try to push users to pay hundreds more than they need to for the “optional” upgrades that should have just been included and cost pennies on the dollar for the company. Then using your cult like user base to gaslight each other and outsiders into believing they don’t actually want something you don’t provide.
I don’t understand - what limitation does a keyboard and mouse have which is directly solved by a touchscreen?
Gestures like pinch to zoom or swiping photos are easier with touch. Drawing a shape or writing a signature are another thing.
Multitouch is something a mouse can’t do at all. Macs have quite a nice set of gestures that can be used with the touchpad. A touch screen could use similar gestures.
For laptops touch screens are useful. Especially on convertible laptops, that transform into a tablet when folding over the screen completely. Also when you’re using it with more than one person at the same time.
For desktops, I don’t really see much of a benefit. Apple’s touchpads are pretty nice for that use case. I used to have a mouse on the right and a touchpad on the left of my keyboard.
Apple has completely failed to build a great convertible laptop for many years now. Windows laptops do it somewhat okay, but this is the product category where Apple could actually build something great. Apple Pencil on a convertible MacBook would fly off the shelves.
Since Tim Cook’s reign started there has been little vision regarding product design.
Apple should go beyond iOS, iPadOS, macOS to a unified operating system with an adaptive UI. I want to connect my phone with an M-series chip inside (or watch) to a thunderbolt hub and have a full desktop experience. iOS/iPadOS are too neutered. macOS is too neglected. VisionOS is a dead end toy.
I don’t want synchronization between four devices, I want one device that does everything and connects to various peripheries.
I want that too but with Linux + Waydroid on software, Convertible form factor + VoLTE + x86 on hardware side
Pushing buttons against a vertical surface or one leaned backwards when it’s a keyboard’s distance out of your way is very awkward.
And at this point the technology is so cheap there’s no reason not to include it.
It’s about $100 dollars plus support e.g. for dust accumulation especially for the cheap devices.
Well unless your company’s entire profit structure is based on charging exorbitant amounts for minor upgrades and making the lowest cost option almost always have some sort of glaring deficiency to try to push users to pay hundreds more than they need to for the “optional” upgrades that should have just been included and cost pennies on the dollar for the company.
That sounds like all the more incentive to provide a touch screen. What’s your conspiracy theory for them not providing it, if not just that it sucks?
It’s not a big power user feature, and one typically doesn’t sit there using the touch screen for minutes on end. It’s more useful for dismissing alerts or quickly focusing IM windows. It’s just nice in small moments where you’re juggling multiple things at your desk or just sitting back down. Being able to not think and jab your browser window to scroll down a bit is a natural gesture, even on a laptop.
Not an Apple user here, but I saw it on the front page.
Is it me or does the leftmost one on the screenshot really looks the best anbd most consistent?
The person who posted this image must read right-to-left. They put the newest version on the left, oldest in the right.
If you read the thread, they mention that the top left corner of the window was the best place to demonstrate the issue and they would have gone left to right otherwise.
I think they’re probably Finnish given the “Apple (Suomi)” tab in one of the screenshots, and their incredibly Finnish last name on Mastodon.
They don’t read right to left in Finland.Fair enough, Finnish isn’t read right to left.كاذِب
I think it’s up to personal taste.
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it looks the worst and it is the newest
A third of those screenshots is the Favorites Bar. Is that turned on by default these days? Turning that off helps slims things down a bit.
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Browsers also do a hell of a lot more over time, have to put the functions and UI for that somewhere. Would we wanna live back before Safari had extensions?
The screenshots show the same functionality.
Why use Safari on macOS? There are so many alternatives, and basically all of them are better.
Integration with macOS and features like synchronization with iOS/iPhone or generating new iCloud mail addresses.
I always use other browsers in parallel. Sadly they typically fail to adhere to macOS UI conventions or don’t integrate as well across devices.
I use Waterfox (Firefox fork) as a secondary browser because of the more powerful extensions. Other than that usability and OS integration is worse.
Camino used to a be a good Mozilla/gecko browser back in day. Sadly it was abandoned a long time ago.
Safari is the new Internet Explorer. A lot of Web APIs don’t work on it, or are incomplete. Apple is still trying to push users to use native apps over Web apps, where they can get their 30% on app sales and IAP.
I agree that their browser is broadly speaking pretty bad, but I also happen to think that native apps are generally preferable on account of web tech being a large pile of flaming garbage.
Broken clocks and all I guess
Safari is actually a pretty decent browser. If you want to not use any google, or google chrome related browsers Safari is the best integrated with the hardware and the system on Mac.
I don’t think I’d ever choose Safari over Firefox, to be honest.
I have because Safari is just better UI wise on iPhone and syncs to macOS’s Safari. I really don’t like any other browser on iOS.
Well you don’t have to. I would, I would choose it over Firefox on Linux too.
