Compact tabs

[unknown] It is a separate feature that requires probably another week or two of development.

csumpasd

This is the only thing keeping me from using Orion.

Congrats, you are now part of the 94 page long 'only thing' club https://orionfeedback.org/?q="only%20thing"

Vlad 94 pages of people saying the words "only" or "thing" or "only thing".

It is a marvel however that different people have different preferences in how they want things to work. You cannot run a product like this where you want as large a userbase as possible and as many people to give you money as possible if you aren't willing to indulge invidivual preferences.

This attitude you seem to have towards a lot of issues like this is NOT the only thing keeping me from using Orion day to day.

B4ND1T Fair.

I think this is fine. I won't use it, but it's fine.

It's the same reason I didn't use IE9. It's not user friendly and make me have to look in two different places to confirm which tab is which URL. It's exhausting and takes up too much space.

At the end of the day, we're 330 posts deep, and there's a universal consensus across users in terms of what your users, the users of Orion, would like to see.

Now, as a designer, I live by the phrase "The User Is Always Wrong", but in this case, they're asking for an interaction that they have experienced, enjoyed, and are comfortable with, as opposed to some amorphic feature with vague verbiage.

Vlad, you've created a great product. I love it, I really do. And I applaud the team for attempting to reinvent the wheel here and take a risk on improving the experience.

I think there's just a point where either the community needs to concede that its not going to get what it is looking for here in terms of compact tabs.

I'm sure there's a path forward to make a better compact tabs experience than Apple did, but IE9s implementation still feels the same as it did back then.

The impletation of the compact tabs is really nice.
Finally, after using Safari from time to time and reading a lot of this thread, I agree that Safari compact tabs is nice to the eye but unpratical. I'm glad you didn't copy paste but thought a lot about UX to gave us a pleasant looking experience but in a smart way before eveything else.
Well done!

Compact tabs is great! I think the colour feature that safari has is the missing ingredient but it'll make so many new users at home now having compact tabs

After finally making it through +300 comments, I'm on the same page as B4ND1T, csumpasd and rightsaidfred.

As someone new to Orion, I was thrilled to have found a browser that overall looks and feels like Safari while embracing the customisation and functionality we've been longing for. I'd argue all of us here were actively seeking an alternative browser that offered the Safari experience but on steroids.

While I understand the preferences of the Orion team, my impression is that these—justified and reasoned—creative liberties are stepping away from the Safari experience and start building its own. And that's fine, but I'm not so sure how well that's sitting with an Orion user base that's so fond of the native macOS visuals and functionality.

As this thread reflects, opinions are very polarised and there won't be a consensus given our different workflows. But there doesn't have to be; this is not necessarily an either-or situation. Hopefully in a near future, if time and resources allow for it, we'll see both options implemented peacefully. A part of what makes Orion so unique is its customisation.

In my humble opinion, I would've reversed the implementation order and started with Safari's—widely tested, already familiar and very much expected by most—compact tabs. With its pros and cons, but putting Safari first. This could've been a solid starting point for an Orion alternative, tweaked, tested and adapted for those with more particular needs.

I don't want to pile on the nitpicking over implementation because I'm genuinely grateful to @Vlad and the entire team for listening to feedback, but sadly I am not a huge fan. I'm not entirely sure I understand the decision to link the URL bar to tabs — my first instinct upon loading was to just remove the URL bar to save horizontal space, but you can't remove it without removing the tabs with it. I don't reallyyy understand that to be honest.

I get that adopting Safari's method of replacing the active tab with a smaller URL bar would likely require more work than maybe folks on the team wanted to invest, but without that, it kinda misses the point. Here, you're saving a little bit of vertical space at the cost of a lot of horizontal space.

But that's just my opinion, I recognize that some users like the current implementation, and I want to emphasize that I appreciate that work was put in here. It's just not for me, personally.