Compact tabs

Spirarel Many users have chimed in explaining the merits of the Safari compact tab design

Correct, but many ppl also like the proposal to have the address bar in a static location. Just because what Safari does looks great necessarily mean that Orion can't take what Safari did and improve on it.

Spirarel It's one thing for your preferred design to not prevail

Indeed, but its impossible for everyone to get everything that they want. Compromises need to be made, and no matter what, some people will be unhappy. The end result cannot be having dozens of choices to choose for the tab bar UI.

Spirarel Why what does this achieve?" Until you actual live in it and learn how people who love it use it.

This argument swings both ways. Maybe we should all try the proposed Orion style compact tabs and see if we like it.

Also, just to clarify, just because Safari is a "UI reference" does not mean that Orion has to replicate everything Safari does. Safari does some thing's great, some things poorly. Orion developers try to take what is very good, and improve what safari does poorly. they believe that the static address bar location is something that is necessary.

Vlad

Just to clarify, nobody said this.

I've removed the quotes from my OP to avoid giving that impression. Those were my words alone.

Dropping the discussion of compact tab—Vlad, I would serious consider changing that line in the FAQ. I found your website last night, read the entire thing (FAQ included), got super excited, installed Orion this morning, immediately looked for Safari15-esque compact tabs, and then found this thread.

Reading all of it, I can tell you most comments are for people looking for Safari compact tabs (prior to crafting a poll where they weren't even an option). It's just misleading to claim to "abide by [the decisions that Apple made] at every point where they serve our users' interests." when your users have made their Apple-aligned interests known, and you chose contrary.

It's a pretty souring experience which is avoidable in the future by not setting that expectation.

Anyway, all the best. It's a very cool project and I wish you success.

Vlad

That is a very bold statement.

Unfortunately, the conversations here mostly are subjective opinions being presented as objective fact without any evidence to back it up.

I just find it ironic that you want to adhere to Apple HIG, but you're looking to 2011 Microsoft for Interact Design Principals, which we're all aware of how great the Microsoft user experience was back then.

It was designed in an area where 75% of users had 3.59 tabs or fewer open, while the high end of tabs were upwards of 11 tabs. According this same article (which uses date provided by Test Pilot), Microsoft used similar data in designing IE9. [1]

Another study conducted by Patrick Dubroy in 2009, albeit a much smaller sample size than the million Test Pilot users, showed similar results to the Test Pilot study [2]

Today's browsing habits are significantly different. If there was research to conclude that this tab design provided a better user experience, or users had a significant attachment to it, Microsoft likely would have kept it around just 4 years later in the release of Edge. Instead, it only lived on with Internet Explorer 11. which was simply a release to keep corporations happy with a consistent interface for compliance reasons.

It was difficult to find modern large scale studies on the number of open tabs, but based on a quick survey of individuals near me, our average is as high as the outliers in the surveys from 2009 and 2010.

User Experience is not designed. Subjective opinions are not fact. A design not adhering to HIGs is not a poor interaction. In fact, some of the best designed products have gone against standard HIG.

In no world is a swipe to scroll an intuitive user interaction.
In no world is two fingers to click as a secondary menu an intuitive user interaction.
In no world is an address bar docked on the left side of the screen while my active tab is on the right an intuitive user interaction.

These are learned interactions.

That is not to say that your design is bad. It is good.

Now, it's important to acknowledge that design is always subjective, and a subjectively bad design can provide a better experience for many users.

Based on the forum here, more users prefer the compact tab design of Safari 15, but are willing to settle for Internet Explorer 9.

At the end of the day, innovation dies by adhering to 10 year old HIGs.

I admire what you're doing with Orion, and I'll continue to support both Orion and Kagi, but I am disappointed with the way that the discussion and implementation of this feature has turned out.

1. https://slate.com/human-interest/2010/12/a-new-data-set-from-firefox-reveals-our-browsing-habits.html
2. https://dubroy.com/blog/how-many-tabs-do-people-use-now-with-real-data/

Hybrid At the end of the day, innovation dies by adhering to 10 year old HIGs.

Respectfully, who exactly is asking for UI to be constantly innovating to a point where it’s HIG-breaking? As a user, I’d rather use native apps that follow the HIG of its host operating system than trying to shove its brand identity down my throat or do something “innovative” that is completely unexpected from how other apps function.

Not sure if we are still voting;

Primary: 3 - It's clean, tidy and much easier to see the active tab
Secondary: 2 - Second natural choice for me, given its similar to Safari

Lack of compact tabs is why I haven't fully switched to Orion yet. The old Safari ones just feel too clunky.

Mbrgv try "Use Compact Size" by right-clicking on the toolbar?

I too support the decision of having the address bar in a fixed position and having the choice to keep the tabs in that line saving some vertical space.
I'm new here, I saw this feature marked as planned, is there any schedule to this, I'm sorry if this is dumb question.

thuvasooriya I'm new here, I saw this feature marked as planned, is there any schedule to this, I'm sorry if this is dumb question.

Planned is more like it’s on the roadmap, but not necessarily a solid date as to when it comes out or gets implemented. For this particular feature request, I think we still have to pass the UX stages before it can be handed over to the developers to implement the feature in Orion and be released in the RC builds.

alicerunsonfedora Got it Thanks for the reply.

Vlad Orion's vertical tab implementation has won me over (it's my primary reason for wanting to switch to Orion). I empathize with how difficult managing the sheer volume of feature requests (+ bug reports) Orion gets must be, and I think the team does an admirable job of responding to them. I think the characterization that Orion does not listen to user feedback is wrong. Orion takes an methodical, and some times opinionated, approach to design that's aligned to Apple's HIG. I appreciate this, and I think it is the reason why Orion feels closer to an Apple browser than Safari in many respects.

I just read through the entire 200+ post discussion procrastinating my work. I used to be a big fan of compact tabs in Safari, but I ultimately dropped them, because Safari's implementation is just bad in the corner cases. One consistent theme in the discussion is many users requesting that the URL bar + tab is integrated, and the team insisting that it shouldn't be. The reasoning laid out is the following (my summary):

1. the URL bar is a core UI element so it should not move around
2. the primary reason for using compact tabs is to save vertical space, and the horizontal placement of the URL bar does not affect this

I believe these reasons are not sound, and here's why:

1. I agree that core elements should not move around. The example of the back/forward buttons is a good one. I do not agree that the URL bar is equivalent to the back/forward buttons. The URL is associated with the website currently being viewed. For most users, it is a "more precise" description of the title displayed on the tab. These are interpreted as the "identity" of a website. Would you say that the title of a website/favicon moving around is bad UX? No, because those elements are associated with an object that should move around on the screen just like a file in Finder. An over-zealous application of this logic would be to have a dropdown menu for all tabs instead of the tab carousel we see in most browsers.
2. Before I tried Orion, I felt that this was the reason I liked Safari's compact tabs. Orion made me realize that this is not the case, since Orion's compact mode offers more space for content than Safari's compact tabs. Actually, compact Orion + vertical tabs w/ favicons only maximizes this metric. Instead, I realized that Safari's compact tabs were pleasing because they removed visual clutter. Part of that is the integration of the URL + tab. I totally agree that being able to quickly access the URL for the currently viewed website is crucial for any browser. I disagree that being able to see it at a glance is required or even useful. I (and probably most users) must spend <5% caring about the URL of a website beyond the domain name. Even then, the title of the website offers all the infomation that a domain name would.

I took the time to write out this explanation, because I felt it was never explicitly articulated in the full discussion. I hope what I said makes sense. While I completely agree with your approach/thought process to this issue, I think you are missing a few details that end up resulting in a different conclusion that I would.

I would say it is fair to give the team the benefit of the doubt until the design is released. The only ask is that the team considers integrating the URL bar + tab as a possible option. In other words, maybe it is a settings toggle in the final design if enough users continue to request it. This is in contrast to a hypothetical request moving back/forward buttons, which I think the team can objectively reject as a possible option.

@Vlad I think at the end of the day, any dissenters here are simply asking that you give the same open mindedness to the Apple design as we're trying to give to the Orion implementation.

I personally trust and believe that your implementation will fulfill your goals, and will you will execute it exceptionally well.

But your implementation does very different things, interacts in different ways, and there are two different use cases and desires here.

Can't wait to see and play with your design, even if it's not the feature I'm looking for.