Improvements to compact tabs

madks

whatisdelicious completely agree, the Safari implementation is vastly superior and I don't particularly get why the "design principles" of Apple are more important than UI and UX when ultimately, improving those is the end goal.

Hybrid

madks We actually had this conversation with Apple back in 2013 when I was leading design for an app that was featured on the App Store banner.

Apple said something along the lines of "HIG Guidelines are easy review, and known patterns that work. Partners can break the HIG if the end result provides an intuitive and better experience than the HIG provides, as long as it continues to provide a native feel"

So, at the time, this meant the skeuomorphic design was out (iOS 7) and as long as the design language was native feeling, we could break the rules, and they welcomed it. Because we could provide reasoning for our deviance, we were still able to become a partner and receive the front page banner slot.

HIGs are really there specifically to cater to the general population of developers without User Experience... experience?

If you can provide something better, you are welcomed and encouraged to disregard the HIGs provided the design looks "Apple".

JSiuDev

Maybe merge my suggestion into here too: https://orionfeedback.org/d/9670-can-we-break-down-the-toolbar-into-smaller-components

8pac200

Hybrid That can be true at the same time as this: a key point being argued is that in the case of Compact Tabs: Orion actually does not provide something better; what it provides is simply a differently opinionated interpretation. Those are not the same thing, and just as arguments can be made for "here are the rules, breaking them to improve upon them works best", they can be made for "here are the rules and following them works best".

But no amount of pointing to guidelines and rules will provide validation to users approaching Orion and seeing it runs on WebKit, seeing it looks like Safari, seeing that it's known colloquially as "Safari with better extension support", and having not-unreasonable expectations that Orion will maintain a Safari-like user experience as opposed to a different and more opinionated user experience - and then for those users to find out that the Compact Tabs feature has been approached differently enough for users to experience friction with their expectations, and for them to then take issue and provide feedback in hopes of reducing that friction.

Yes, Orion did it a different way than Safari and the team has reasons. Yes the Orion team appears to think those reasons are good reasons. Does everybody agree? No. If I try to use Orion and experience too much friction in a key feature, I'm not going to stop each time I experience that friction and ponder about how the team thinks their implementation of rules and guidelines in the key feature is better, what I'm going to do is seek a different tool with less friction.

madks

Hybrid i think you misunderstood. what i was referring to is how Vlad was arguing previously that it was more important to follow Apple's HIG, and how Orion did that better than Safari.

my argument here is that the HIG should not stand higher than user experience, which your detailed response seemingly agreed with.

i agree with many others in this and previous threads that keeping address bar in a static place, at least to most people, is less important than effectively utilizing screen real estate, which this design clearly does not, as illustrated by others already.

this is an objective drawback that limits navigation on small screens, the ease of which should be one of the key focuses of browsers.

and there is of course all the subjective stuff like ease of use and intuitiveness but that could be debated ad nauseam.

galacticmice

I don't know anything about UI/UX design, so just an anecdotal feedback about my experience with this:

I like compact mode because I'm using this on a smaller sized Macbook 13". As such, I want as much screen real estate as possible. I have compact + mini toolbar turned on just because I want to min-max space WITHOUT going into fullscreen. Orion has one of the slimmest design for toolbars currently, which I am grateful for.

But sometimes I go into split screen to take down notes, Orion on left half and maybe a Doc on the right.

It is so incredibly hard to navigate through my tabs with that gigantic address bar. This is what it looks like

See how small the tab navigation area becomes? This is only with 3 tabs open. I can't even see which tabs are before and after this one to effectively use keyboard tab navigation.

I rarely need a dedicated address bar--in fact, I never ever do. Maybe power users might need it, I don't know. But Safari's compact tab design works really well for most people's needs, under most circumstances. Can't say the same in this particular case.

Hybrid

madks my argument here is that the HIG should not stand higher than user experience, which your detailed response seemingly agreed with.

Yes. You misunderstood my take as disagreeing with you. I was providing a real world example of Apple themselves giving permission to break HIGs if the solution is better, which is opinionated / subjective.

In Orion's case, they stuck with HIGs, and whether it is better than Apple's design which deviates from HIG is a subjective opinion.

I have no skin in this game, but I will say that I believe there is a reason we do not see the IE9 style layout in Edge.

TechEnthusiast

Vlad I'm sure many/most people who come to Orion do so from Safari. Having a separate URL bar from the tabs is driving me bonkers. I can't adjust to it. It looks/feels like a duplicate.

If nothing else, please allow us the ability to just remove the URL bar from the toolbar and just let tabs serve as the URL. Right now we can't remove the URL without also removing the tabs, which I need to see. Why do I need a dedicated URL when a tab can serve the same function?

izzi

I feel the same, I am coming from safari and the compact tabs layout with the dedicated address bar in Orion is just weird and makes no sense. It's super confusing as someone who is coming from safari and as this browser is meant for macOS I think many people who decide to try Orion are coming from Safari so it should be a priority to enable seamless transition from the browser they are used to... I might go back to safari because I value effective use of screen estate and compact tabs is done right.

mrmanafon

I sign this petition wholeheartedly. HIG has nothing to do with it, and HIG changes at a whim whenever Apple finds a better way to do stuff, so that cannot be a valid argument. This ain't a theocracy, and Apple's HIGs can't be religious scripture that we defend the lack of UX thinking with.

The only valid agument in my book is Vladimir's subjective gut feeling about how a feature should (or shouldn't work). I would like the browser to be opinionated - and if the solution doesn't suit me, so be it. This ain't a democracy. I'll just suck it up and get used to another option.

However, one must understand that in order to be opinionated, Vlad will have to buy our patience and trust with consistently rolling out smart opinionated choices that are also very, very polished. A great deal of attention to detail. That is what being Steve Jobs is all about. This could be that. But it aint.

None of the 2 non-standard tab modes are polished at all, so I'm sorry to agree with @madks and https://orionfeedback.org/d/92-compact-tabs/372, Orion delivered features that they had to deliver (because they are becoming the norm) on paper, but in reality the non-standard tab choices miss the mark in various ways.

Standard tabs are probably the best one at the moment. I suppose having 20 years of tab usage solidified the patterns so that they can't be too warped. It feels very Safari, very Snow Leopardy.
Compact, what can I say, that hasn't already been said. Kinda misses the whole point of having a compact design. I would even argue that it violates the HIG, since it forces the user to become cross-eyed by offering 2 simultaneous "active" focus points (which is a nono), with additional bonus points for the second focus point (the tab) is going to be in a mystery horizontal place every time. I could see it work - it is a gamble - with a huge amount of work on details/tricks, such as unifying a focus point, variable sizing of the address bar etc. Maybe.
Vertical/Sidebar is super duper clunky. Sorry but i gave up on it. Causes resizing lagging, has no touch gestures, no onboarding, weird-ass keyboard shortcuts, no ability to focus and keep the address, offers a weirdly unique hierarchy. Feels like that meme about "Temu feels like raccoons selling things they found and they don’t really understand what they’re called or how much they should cost" it gives very uncanny valley. Like it was made in a hurry, by someone who fundamentally doesn't understand the emerging patterns around sidebar usage - but at least it has gotten a lot better since a year ago when i last tried it!

Hybrid

Good news, @Vlad, Apple officially killed Compact Tabs in MacOS 26. They seem to have agreed with your take, and they no longer exist in Safari 26.

Csaba

As a new user to Orion I was happy to see the compact tabs feature, because it seemed like a great way to save some space on my small screen. However, I met with quite a few difficulties in my daily usage.

The URL bar is too short to safely validate whether the URL is the one I wanted to visit or not:

Here, I have the profile button hidden, I don't have the "Show full website address" setting turned on either, and yet, it is really hard to say if I'm on the right website or a fake one (it could be orionfeedback-fake.org and I wouldn't know).
When I hover over the URL bar to click inside, I also have to be careful to not hover over the first part, because reader mode might push the other buttons under my mouse, resulting in a miss click (not a huge issue, but can be annoying), so, I'd rather have the buttons at the end only, or separate from the URL bar.
Another thing is that I'm a tab hoarder, I do a lot of research (or other kind of reading), and open many tabs, but beacuse the minimum tab size is still quite large, at best I can see 7 tabs, related issue: https://orionfeedback.org/d/11687-add-tab-squishing-to-orion I find myself using the tab overview quite frequently because of this. It works, but I'm more used to glancing at the favicons and clicking on tabs.

Now, I read through the whole thread here, and have seen interesting ideas, and a lot of pushback as well. But as things are, I'd say the compact tabs is generally not too usable, at least for my use case.
I know that @Vlad mentioned multiple times that the URL bar is the most important element in the browser window and it should have a fixed location, but I'd argue, that I for one don't care about a fixed URL bar at all. I care about:

The current tab
The URL of the current tab (preferably seeing at least the whole domain name)
And the other tabs

And this seems to be quite well solved by khoanguyen0001 's comment. It shows well, how having compact tabs and URL bar mixed together can work. It takes up less space, makes sure that the active tab is visible and the URL is at the same place where the open tab is, allowing for quick checks.

Anyway, I'll stick to the standard tabs while I use Orion for some time to validate it for my needs, but I just thought I'd give my two cents about this.

michbert

Just learned about Orion and was excited about having an improved alternative to Safari. Since I like having the Browser UI as compact as possible I naturally picked compact layout. Funnily enough, even before opening another tab I found it strange that the navbar is left aligned rather than centered, but I could not "fix" it by customising the toolbar. Since the default toolbar in that dialog gives the impression that it should be centered, I was thinking maybe it was a bug.

After eventually opening another tab I was pretty confused that adding another tab apparently seemed to add two new tabs, which to me is the most weired and unintutive part of the current compact layout (at least the first tab should be always shown from the start. Clicking a plus button on an empty space and then having two new elements appear instead of just one, really is a prime example of suprising the user and frankly feels like a bug. Especially if you do this on the startpage, there is really no way to tell that it is not a bug.)

It really took me suprisingly long to figure out what was going on and then I spent searching the settings twice to figure out the option to make the compact layout behave like safari and not just move the tab bar up in the toolbar (which I think is the right way to describe Orions "Compact" tab layout) and was suprised not to find one, which lead me here since I was curious to find the reason behind it.

After reading through the posts here, it feels like the most probable reason is that implementing the compact layout like Safari is just a lot more effort. And I can totally understand that the Devs want to safe themselves the effort, if it can be avoided. (And if it's not their preference anyway. Like many others here the given reasons, like HIG and the navbar being most important UI element, however don't convice me that it is a good choice regarding UI/UX design.)

While unfortunately Orion cannot be a Safari replacement for me (yet?), since I consider the current compact layout to be a degradation rather than an improvement, I may occasionally find a use for it and keep an eye on it’s development.

Meanwhile I would suggest a simple fix to avoid the bad initial UX I had as someone familar with Safari's compact layout (Which is likely going to be a very high percentage of Orion's target audience.): Just don't call it "Compact Tab Layout" and don't have the UI for selecing the setting even look exactly the same as in Safari. (This is clearly setting the wrong expectations) Instead just pick another name or even make it a simple option for the standard layout to move the tabbar up into the toolbar (Which actually is exactly what the current implementation is)

I hope this is helpful in some way.

Meng

Sorry, but I kinda feel raged. I came across Orion not long ago and generally be happy about it, except that the address bar isn't merged with the tabs in compact mode, and existence of compact mode is what drove me from Safari to Orion. Now I see that the thread is more than one year old, and the devs still stick to their obsession of following the so called "fixed important UI position" design philosophy. What use is this philosophy if it doesn't save space and causes lots of back and forth eye & cursor movement?

vampire

When I first started using the compact tabs, I thought the feature was bugged because of the way it looks. It feels really weird sticking the address bar to one side of the screen, instead of having it centered by default and scoot over as more tabs get added.

I'd suggest either:

Center the address bar & tabs. Newly added tabs will be added to the right side of the address bar (as currently already implemented), but instead of aligning the entire address bar + tabs section to the left—center it.
Merge the tabs & address bar, and center them—same way Safari used to do it.

Example of what I mean by suggestion 1:

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