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):
- the URL bar is a core UI element so it should not move around
- 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:
- 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.
- 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.