My opinion on this would be that out of existing implementations, Safari 15 compact tabs are the best. They look elegant, function similarly to iOS tabs and save space.
As far as I understand, the only issue the dev team has with the Safari implementation is that only a small portion of the URL is visible, as per Vlad's post https://orionfeedback.org/d/92-compact-tabs/45. Orion's early adopters are presumably fairly opinionated power users, so appealing to everyone could only be done through deep customization, but as far as the general case goes, I think the URL bar is generally fairly unimportant for the following reasons:
- Examining the URL is useful for ensuring you're not visiting a scam page, e.g.
wlkipedia.net
when you were looking for wikipedia.org
. Even a tiny URL bar, like the one in Vlad's screenshot, is big enough to examine the base URL which is enough virtually all of the time.
- One might want to identify the subpage they're on by examining the URL, but it's generally better to just look at the page title. Consider an arbitrary AP article:
https://apnews.com/article/science-australia-a9bdf5ada0b5fcf7b9b9b4689808295a
. The URL provides very little info. All that I know is that it is related to science and Australia. The tab's title on the other hand is "World’s largest plant is a vast seagrass meadow in Australia | AP News" which, if I had multiple tabs open, would let me identify the one I'm looking for immediately and easily. Safari 15 compact tabs have a setting to make titles always visible, which I find to be the optimal solution for this scenario. Screenshot:
- A user might want to occasionally perform URL manipulation, but in the vast majority of the cases, it's a simple one, restricted to the beginning to the URL, such as changing
reddit.com/[..]
to old.reddit.com/[..]
, so again, a tiny URL bar would do.
In addition to all the above, I believe it would be possible to have the best of both worlds by:
- Growing the URL bar to say, half the horizontal screen size, once the user clicks on it i.e. highlights the URL i.e. starts editing the URL.
- Making it so that scrolling sideways with 2 fingers on a trackpad while hovering mouse over the URL moves the URL, allowing the user to read it easily even with a tiny URL bar. This one might interfere with scrolling a long tab bar, as the same gesture is used for scrolling a tab bar when there are too many tabs to fit them in the bar all at once.
- Removing some of the icons, which - as Vlad pointed out - can take up a third of the URL bar space. In particular, reader icon is contextual only so doesn't usually appear anyway. Refresh can be tucked under the more options icon as most users use the hotkey anyway. Padlock is kinda useless and iirc Chrome has begun experimenting with removing it. I believe it would be far more useful to instead have a red, unlocked padlock on http sites and no icon for https sites.
And in the rare case that the user is performing a task that simply requires the full URL to be visible at all times, such as certain kinds of web development or pentesting, they could simply:
- Opt out of the compact tab view
or
- Switch to the vertical tab sidebar mode
In conclusion, I believe that both the mockup Vlad posted (https://orionfeedback.org/d/92-compact-tabs/51) and the IE9 interface (https://orionfeedback.org/d/92-compact-tabs/59) which he cited as a rough goal, would be a far worse option than the Safari 15 compact tabs for all but very specific workflows. While it would be great to see this available as an additional option, I personally would much prefer to have more tabs fit the tab bar at once than have more of any specific tab's URL visible.