Friday, August 6, 2021

Safari 15 vs. Vivaldi When Matching the Web’s Colors

Steve Tibbett (includes video):

Flipping tabs in the new Safari is terrible. The flipping of the chrome colour makes it even harder to see what tab is selected. This isn’t an artificial test, these were the tabs I had open.

John Gruber:

Mind-boggling that anyone thinks this looks good, or isn’t bothered by the fact that it’s very hard to see which tab is selected.

Peter Maurer:

Remember the auto-color playlist headers in iTunes? This is like that. They’ll leave it enabled by default for a while because they can, and because some designer feels strongly about it.

Then in a year or two, they’ll disable it by default. Eventually, it will silently go away.

Matt Birchler:

Vivaldi may not look as fancy as Safari, but I think it’s hard to ague it’s any less usable.

  1. The active tab is always the same color, so it always stands out.
  2. Most UI elements live in the always-white part of the app so they’re always equally visible.
  3. The active table is always white so the black text is always maximally contrasy.

Plus, it gets the hierarchy right by putting the URL—which is tab-specific—inside the tab rather than above all the tabs.

Previously:

7 Comments RSS · Twitter

Vivaldi is an outstanding browser and my default. I think Safari has the best ICC color matching of any browser (because it is the only browser that does ICC), and of course it has stellar battery life in no small part by eschewing all the half-baked web specs Google uses its browser monopoly to ram down everyone's throats.

The problem with Safari isn't how it looks.

It's that it's lagging years behind.

Firefox has a similar problem with tabs. It's nearly impossible to tell which tab is currently selected. This seems to be the current trend. More and more apps are making it hard to figure out what one is looking at. It's not just Apple.

Not from here

How’s this Matt Bircher guy stating “ Vivaldi may not look as fancy as Safari, but I think it’s hard to ague it’s any less usable.”
What what what? Does he even use that brain mutated Vivaldi browser? It doesn’t have a History menu, after closing a tab and having to re-open it is a headache, opening the side panes flicking through history and restoring that tab that show up in the bin is a convoluted brain twisting expertise not worth the effort.
Now seperate downloads window or a drop down tag, it’s again stuck in a side pane, user click click click to actually display the thing that then take up a boat load of browser window width, again brain mutated design.
Vivaldi doesn’t have a macOS share button in the tool bar and the toolbar isn’t even a standard macOS widget.
Vivaldi’s only useful and stands out feature is vertical tabs, totter than that, it’s just a Windows browser hacked together to kinda work on macOS, just like POS Firefox, it has a presence on macOS but barely any resemblance to a native macOS app.

“Safari is years behind” eh? Where do you get these people form that make comments like this? Years behind what? lol it does practically everything any other browser does, it certainly does URL autocomplete far better than any other browser in the history of browsers. It doesn’t have manual proxies and the custom style sheet doesn’t get rendered, though FF doesn’t do any better or worse either, and is that even available as an option in other browsers? Doubt it… OmniWeb and iCab back in the day used to be the most comprehensive power users browser, nowadays they are super simple.

I think the “years behind” refers to the rendering engine that doesn’t work properly with lots of sites/Web apps.

Yes, that too. But I was mostly thinking about everything here

https://nolanlawson.com/2015/07/05/safari-is-the-new-ie-2-revenge-of-the-linkbait/

Kristoffer: "Years behind" what? Chrome's ad-hoc non-standard interfaces?

That article is literally a big Mea Culpa, and apologizes for a previous "linkbait" title, and admits "by the raw HTML5Test numbers, Safari isn’t so far behind".

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