Safari 15 Announced

For anyone considering switching to Chrome, it's worth checking out Vivaldi, which uses Chromium and has a built-in tab sidebar option, plus e2ee sync (Chrome has e2ee sync as well, but I often wonder how long that option will stick around). Vivaldi fashions itself as a spiritual successor to the Presto-based Opera browser, which I enjoyed back in the day.

I don't really browse the web on my iPad, so hopefully I will be able to avoid that nonsense. I do use Safari on iPhone fairly regularly, so we'll see what happens there, and I'm open to switching if need be--even if Chrome uses the same rendering engine, at least the UI wouldn't be junk. I don't use Safari on desktop, so it doesn't matter.

I think if this manages to ship we can safely assume the people in charge of HI design at Apple have completely left the building.

[…] If you are running Big Sur, you can get the same UI experience in the latest version of Safari Technology Preview. It is a very big change. […]

The current Apple feels very similar to John Sculley's Apple.

When they showed the redesign I threw up in my mouth a little bit. It's horrid. What were they thinking? This very much will likely get me to switch from Safari until they revert it. And they will.

Safari 15 tab UX on macOS is an absolute car crash. Have they never heard of Fitts' law?

The tab/location bar jumping around is bad enough with normal tabs, but if you add pinned tabs into the mix it all just goes crazy.

As a long time Chrome user I had high hopes for the Safari redesign, but it's a disaster. What happened to the old Apple where there was so much thoughtful consideration put into UI and UX?

>I think I like the changes for iPhone. The controls are easier to reach at the bottom of the screen, and it’s quicker to switch between tabs.

I hope I won't hate the reload button being hidden too much. On a Mac, I never really need it because cmd-R, but on an iPhone, well, y'know.

>It’s harder to get at buttons and extensions hidden under the … menu.

Hamburger menus are the worst, whether they're horizontal lines or an ellipsis.

(I especially don't get it with the new Firefox. You got the whole menu bar, and then… you replicate those same menu items, poorly arranged, into a hamburger menu? Probably just for cross-platform consistency? Sigh.)

>The purported benefit of all this is that you get slightly more vertical space to devote to the page content. I don’t think it’s worth the tradeoffs. If I wanted to save vertical space I would put the tabs in the sidebar (like in Edge), which would also make it easier to see their titles when there are lots of them.

Yup. And yeah, that thought with Edge came to my mind yesterday: we already have a solution to this, if you really need it — just put the tabs on the side.

(Why doesn't Apple do that? Probably because they don't just feel they need to remove vertical space taken up by UI, but also that they want the UI to be a lot less prominent. But like you say, I just don't think it's worth it. Safari's UI doesn't bug me that much!)

>The current Safari Technology Preview release is built on the new Safari 15 update included in macOS Monterey, and as such, it includes several Safari 15 features. There’s a new streamlined tab bar with support for Tab Groups to organize tabs, along with improved support for Safari Web Extensions.

Incidentally, that preview has since been pulled for Big Sur.

Whether they didn't intend to ship the new UI to Big Sur after all, or they ran into a critical bug, I'm not sure.

Conspiracy theory: The slowly disappearing UI and slowly worsening forms of input is actually just getting us prepared for when Siri® is the only permitted form of input, and all other forms of input are completely banned and enforced by 15 different forms of code signing and encryption.

But don't worry if all that makes you want to swallow glass while driving off a cliff, because Apple Healthcare is here along with your forced upgrade to "macos fourteen dumpster fire".

Firefox just had a really great update, you know :-)

It's such a bizarre move to make the desktop UI worse in ~100 ways, in order to save a few pixels of vertical space.

FWIW, I like that Apple is being bold, but they should be doing this in a fork of Safari.

To be fair, this "we must reduce the browser chrome" trend is neither new nor Apple-specific. It's basically Google Chrome's entire shtick (hence the name).

Like, I'm OK with the happy medium we've reached in the Yosemite era, but even that removed some affordances, such as a large grabby title bar, where you could even click on the title to get a proxy icon-like menu to navigate upwards (remember those days?).

>Like, I'm OK with the happy medium we've reached in the Yosemite era, but even that removed some affordances, such as a large grabby title bar, where you could even click on the title to get a proxy icon-like menu to navigate upwards (remember those days?).

Holy crap that sounds awesome. Like it actually changed the path or what? I'm always editing the URL and path and stuff (I hope whoever thought centering the URL in Safari was a good idea gets shot).

[…] 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 […]

@ Mike: see here: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=69Uq-33zzgU&t=69

@Sören They removed the title bar menu from Mail, too. :(

One thing that hasn't been mentioned and that I don't like about the new Safari is their VPN lite.

It might turn out great, but it seems to me that it gives Apple even more power to turn off websites it doesn't like.

Until now the web was basically open. Now, Apple could "save" people from themselves by banning "bad websites" which provide things they don't like, either for ideological reasons or for monetary reasons.

The internet was supposed to be decentralized. It's becoming ever more centralized.

>It might turn out great, but it seems to me that it gives Apple even more power to turn off websites it doesn't like.
>
>Until now the web was basically open. Now, Apple could "save" people from themselves by banning "bad websites" which provide things they don't like, either for ideological reasons or for monetary reasons.

Per Apple's claims, that's not possible. I also don't think Apple is interested in that. However, governments could be quite interested in turning to Apple to try and censor websites.

All that said, I'm still hoping for a infosec analysis on how iCloud Private Relay actually works. If it can be shown (perhaps through independent audit) that, as Craig claims, 1) Apple's ingress servers know your IP address, but not the intended destination*, and 2) Cloudflare, etc.'s egress servers don't know your IP address, but the intended destination, then this scenario wouldn't occur.

*) that's the sticky bit. For that to work, a key negotiation would have to take place where your devices can encrypt something, Apple cannot decrypt it, and the egress server can. How can we know for a fact that Apple doesn't also have the key? What happens if it is in fact designed that way right now, but a Five Eyes government one day approaches Apple and demands they change the code so they do have a key?

My initial impression of Safari 15 was just as negative as the ones expressed here. Philosophically, I agree with the complaint that Apple’s design team has a disturbing tendency to “simplify” user interfaces by removing essential controls and burying them under less convenient, less accessible, and less discoverable “More…” menu buttons Everything does seem to be designed with an “iOS worldview” lacking an understanding of, or appreciation for, many of the elements that make a great Mac application.

But after playing around with Safari 15 on all three devices—iPhone, iPad Pro, and MacBook Pro—for the last several days, I admit that the changes are starting to grow on me, and that’s without even playing with tab groups, which don’t make a lot of sense for the sort of tabs I typically have open in Safari.

So this remindis me a bit of the initial backlash against the Final Cut Pro redesign, where months later many video editing pros conceded that the new design was actually better but frustrating to experienced users because it required them to re-learn how to use the software.

I definitely agree with Riccardo Mori disagreement with Alan Dye's quote, “controls appear when you need them, and they recede when you don’t".

Okay - fine. But what if you're just leaning how to use the program? Or are someone who (warning: possibly ageist here) doesn't like things in menus/windows/toolbars/toolboxes/etc to *keep changing and/or appearing/disappearing all the time*?

Why didn't Apple learn from Microsoft's "Ribbon Disaster" ? My impression was that was why the Ribbon was so hated - it kept changing all the time, and usually not in the ways that “the user wanted” (perhaps AI wasn’t good enough at predicting it then). Of course, maybe Apple *did* - back in the SJ era.

I blame it on the fact that "the people today" (meaning those under age 32 or so) are "interface exploratory", and *like* interfaces that are kind of "secretive". But what about those users who aren't?

I’ve often wondered what would have happened if Apple had taken HyperCard, and combined it with OpenDoc, and made some kind of system where you could literally *redesign the interface completely*? Meaning if you wanted a particular function in a particular place, you could simply *put* it there. This would take an absurdly high level of abstraction to pull off, and would have taken (probably) a good deal more processor/memory/memory-bandwidth than was available back in the late-80s/mid-90s.

Kind of like “Make Your Own InterfaceBuilder”. Ironic, given that IB and NextStep are now the (relatively) close ancestors of almost everything Mac-/i-OS. Maybe they could eventually do this with some kind of “user-oriented SwiftUI”?

Per Apple's claims, that's not possible.

Hmm... For that to work, they'd have to do the following:

- OS asks Apple for public encryption key for URL commands, and provides a public encryption key to encode the content on the way back; Apple relays request for a key, and OS' public key to 3rd party

- 3rd party provides public encryption key to Apple and accepts the OS' public encryption key; Apple relays 3rd party public encryption key to OS

- OS sends "GET" suitably padded and encrypted to Apple, which then forwards it to the 3rd party, which decrypts it using its private key, and... gets the data which it then encrypts with the OS's public key.

- This is then sent to Apple, which forwards it to the OS, which decrypts it using its private key.

Ok, so this is possible, but all that means is that Apple would have to lean on the 3rd party to block the URL (and Apple is their client so not much leaning is needed), or add code to the OS to block the URL (which it could do previously).

@ Jim

> Why didn't Apple learn from Microsoft's "Ribbon Disaster" ? My impression was that was why the Ribbon was so hated - it kept changing all the time, and usually not in the ways that “the user wanted”

I don't know if the Ribbon was hated. I personally wasn't a big fan of it, chiefly because Microsoft seemed unwilling to address the (IMHO) deeper original issue: constantly growing menu bars and toolbars and aging dialogs without much of a rethink if some of those could've been reworked without the need for a new UI paradigm. Even with the Ribbon, even as of Office 2019, you can find yourself in dialogs that feel largely unchanged since ca. 1997 (try clicking the bottom right arrow on Paragraph, say).

Lipstick on a pig, if you will. You also see this in Windows a lot; see, for example, network settings that aren't yet available in the Settings app; you'll find yourself going from Windows 10-era UI to Windows Vista-era UI to Windows 2000-era UI to set an IP address. Apple doesn't do that sort of thing, or at least not to the same extent; I find they're far better than Microsoft about consistently moving the entire app to fit the UI refresh.

That said, I think "Ribbon bad" is a facile argument. UI elements moving around are a problem with it, but that largely doesn't happen if your window size is consistent. One big problem I have with it is scalability; many of its elements (such as tabs) just don't make sense for small apps. The Ribbon just looks and feels stupid when you have an app like WordPad. But, to be fair, it often works just fine — ever since File Explorer moved to the Ribbon, UI that used to be hard to get to is finally surfaced a lot better. Many of the contextual tabs work rather OK for me, in practice.

It does seem like Microsoft is (very slowly?) moving on from the Ribbon. They've introduced a "simplified ribbon", which is really just a glorified toolbar with text to the right. I don't think they've posted a retrospective on what went well and what didn't, though.

All in all, while I'm mostly anti-Ribbon, I do applaud Microsoft for trying a new concept like that. (I also think the concept only makes sense on environments like Windows, where you don't have a global menu bar.)

@ OUG

I'm not sure what you mean by blocking. I imagine this is like an HTTP proxy, with the special twist that the decryption key is one layer deeper.

* device (? Apple?) generates keypair; device has the public key, egress server has private key. The flaw in this is I don't see how Apple can guarantee they don't also have the private key.
* device issues HTTP and HTTPS requests over proxy. The proxy endpoint from the device's point of view is Apple.
* Apple gets request, but cannot decrypt it. Passes it on the egress server.

I would hope this is explained in more detail in the next update of their security guide.

@Sören

Blocking would be preventing the OS from accessing a website (if Apple decided it wanted to prevent its users from accessing that website for whatever reason).

I basically described an onion-style protocol (as in TOR). Yes, it's an HTTP proxy but encrypted so Apple & your ISP can't see what you're up to through packet inspection, and also so that the third party provider can't see your IP address so they can't figure out what you're up to either.

The OS could generate the keypair with a random number generator. But yes, the problem is that it could tell Apple, and/or used shared information between Apple and the OS to generate the key deterministically. Either way, ultimately you're trusting Apple to not peek around the curtain it erected.

Documentation would indeed be good, for this and other things.

>Blocking would be preventing the OS from accessing a website (if Apple decided it wanted to prevent its users from accessing that website for whatever reason).

Right.

> The OS could generate the keypair with a random number generator. But yes, the problem is that it could tell Apple

Well, either it has to tell Apple (so Apple can in turn pass the key on to Cloudflare, etc.). Or it directly tells Cloudflare the key, but then Cloudflare knows about you, at least for the key exchange. Neither seems great.

Well, either it has to tell Apple (so Apple can in turn pass the key on to Cloudflare, etc.).

Sorry I wasn't clear.

If the "proxying" is done in a privacy preserving manner, the OS generates a public/private key pair. It gives Apple the public key, and Apple forwards it to Cloudfare, or whoever. Then Cloudfare knows how to encode data (as does Apple) but neither of them can decode it. Cloudfare does the same thing via Apple, and so that the OS (and Apple) knows how to encode data it will send to Cloudfare. Apple serves as intermediary to ensure Cloudfare doesn't know who you are, and the encryption serves to prevent Apple from knowing what you are doing.

If the "proxying" is done to appear secure, but actually to give Apple full visibility, the OS could give Apple the private key as well as the public key. More surreptitiously, the same effect can be achieved by ensuring that the way in which the private key is generated is deterministic so that Apple can figure out what it would be. The latter is harder to catch, but might be inserted to make governments happy.

Probably not much help, but on iOS I pretty much always used iCab in lieu of Safari (unless the device was super old and slow, then I used Opera mini for light browsing). It looks like the current cost of iCab mobile is $2.99 (US Dollars, not sure about other markets) and was last updated in May. I know under the hood everything is essentially Safari, but since this discussion revolves around dislike of the new interface, perhaps iCab would be a worthy alternative to try.

On Mac OS, iCab is likewise still around, but costs $10 (10 Euros), but can be used free as shareware with a nag screen. I love iCab on Mac as well, so again, maybe a worthwhile alternative for those seeking a Mac native browser. Otherwise I prefer Firefox but have used Chromium and Brave as desktop browsers. Vivaldi isn't bad either. Similar to my rule with Safari, I do not use Chrome proper on any platform.

[…] Redesigned Safari – We discuss how most of are not a fan so far. […]

meta name="theme-color" functionality has been removed from latest Safari TP, it seems https://mobile.twitter.com/Malarkey/status/1411043189906104326

I'm not much of a tab user. In fact I have no idea how the chrome-heads deal with the typically absurd numbers of tabs they keep open.

So, tried out the new UX in STP. And I quite like it. I haven't tried iOS version yet.

I alway option-L to get to the location box so basically no difference for me. The tabs aren't taking up extra vertical space anymore (which does matter to me on a 13in macbook). The little hamburger menu seems totallyfine. Something tells me Apple knows exactly how often those things are really used and they have the most used things there. For the fraction of users that actually use them.

Honestly as mentioned above, this sounds like the Final Cut Pro situation. Lots of loud noises about how Apple is screwing it all up, but 6 months later... everyones gotten used to it.

Finally upgraded STP to the new (bad) version. Its as horrible as every one says. This is no Final Cut Pro situation. Its BAD.

- The URL bar keeps jumping around.
- Tabs are indistinguishable after like 5 of them, because they truncate the page name or just go to the favicon, which is terrible when its all the same site.
- Speaking of the page name, its basically gone because the URL is there.
- You have to LONG press to drag tabs from one window to another, which is quite annoying
- Controls are all over the place because there is no room for them any more

I will NOT use this. I already switched back to Safari (after having used STP for years). And once I eventually upgrade to Montery, I'm switching to Vivaldi. Its THAT bad of an experience.

[…] Tsai has a big roundup of opinions, including many serious criticisms. Like Steven Shen showing off how hard the tabs are to use on […]