Apple's design team must be fans of Internet Explorer 11.
Safari 15 on Mac OS, a user interface mess
251–260 of 374 posts
Re: Safari 15 on Mac OS, a user interface mess
#252> 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…
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.
Re: Safari 15 on Mac OS, a user interface mess
#253Earlier quoted context omitted.
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"?
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?
Re: Safari 15 on Mac OS, a user interface mess
#254I 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.
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 know of at least Edge and Vivaldi that do it.
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.
Re: Safari 15 on Mac OS, a user interface mess
#255I’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…
Adguard is 99% the same, and free, and on iOS.
AdGuard runs an Electron app in the background, though.
Re: Safari 15 on Mac OS, a user interface mess
#256Linked 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 c…
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 u…
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").
Re: Safari 15 on Mac OS, a user interface mess
#257Linked 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 c…
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!
Re: Safari 15 on Mac OS, a user interface mess
#258Hey browser vendors, GIVE US BACK THE CONTROL!
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?
Re: Safari 15 on Mac OS, a user interface mess
#259Modern 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.
Re: Safari 15 on Mac OS, a user interface mess
#260I’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…
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…
I think they need a platform for developers and macOS diehards. But fast forward 10 years macOS won’t exist.