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Vlad Thank you for listening to the users and developing the best browser for mac.

Most notable thing about Safari compact tabs (address inside tabs) is the similarity of it with mobile Safari (iPhone). In my opinion, Apple's approach in risking with such radical UX change would be guided by mobile-first approach, as most people in the ecosystem are mobile users and would feel home with compact tabs rather than having the tabs below address bar. Also, it saves space, even with the top and bottom padding.

This could be the reason behind more people liking and expecting compact tabs "as is" in Orion instead of the IE9 UX you guys are currently aiming for.

    8 days later

    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:

    1. 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.
    2. 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.
    3. 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:

    1. Opt out of the compact tab view

    or

    1. 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.

      Here is our first go at Compact tabs idea. Our main idea is to remove 'jumping' around with address bar like Safari does it and instead have a fixed address bar while preserving space saving.

      We are showing the worst case scenario here, where the user also has a lot of toolbar buttons. I am sure we missed something so please keep the comments going.

        Miav Great feedback, lets us know what you think of the propsoed solution above.

            Vlad I’ll be honest, as much as I’d prefer the address bar inside the tab (I really, really love the way the safari team did this) I think this is a decent compromise. I can’t wait to start using it!

                Given the amount of upvotes and apparent intersest I was hoping for more feedback 🙂

                Vlad I think that a compact mode in a browser is primarily about tradeoffs. You get more real space to show the actual page, but you need to give up some functionality of the top bar. When only 5 tabs are open, then your proposed solution is the perfect compromise, you get a static, visible URL bar and you can read titles of all your tabs too.
                But quite often I have more tabs open. Because many of them have the same base URL, I can't differentiate them just by the icon so I check the setting to always show tab titles. In Safari that gives me 8 visible tabs on my Macbook Air.
                I find this good enough. It lets me have a couple of github repos open, some docs and some stackoverflow pages.
                Your proposed solution takes up about over a quarter of that space. I shrunk my Safari window to "simulate" it.
                I get at most 6 visible tabs, which would be a serious hit to quckly switching to the tab I need. In return I can see more of the URL of the page of my currently active tab and I have URL bar that doesn't move around.
                As per my previous post, I very rarely need to examine the URL past the TLD, so I gain negligible value here. And if my workflow did involve frequent URL viewing or editing, I still wouldn't be able to see the full URL in the bar you proposed for many webpages.
                Safari, with its hybrid tab/url, let's me see 24 characters of the URL in this instance:

                In your example, the URL shown is 16 characters long and the bar could probably fit twice as many, so 32. A 33% improvement over Safari (also, in your demo, 8 characters, so around a quarter of the URL bar, is taken up by the https://. Seems redundant given I can see the lock icon. Safari does not show it.). The website I'm on right now, https://orionfeedback.org/d/92-compact-tabs/82 is 46 characters, so I couldn't see the number of the reply, which is at the end of the URL, in either case.
                The other benefit of your proposed solution is that the URL bar stays in one place as opposed to jiggling all over the tab bar. It's certainly nicer having it be static, but it's really not a big deal for me since I almost never click on it anyway, just CMD+W, CMD+T and enter the URL like that.

                So yeah, your proposed solution does look really slick and I'm sure a lot of people would love it, but for me and other people with similar workflows, it makes a much worse tradeoff compared to the Safari 15 implementation when it comes to productivity.

                    Miav Thanks for feedback

                    but for me and other people with similar workflows, it makes a much worse tradeoff compared to the Safari 15 implementation when it comes to productivity.

                    To be sure can you articulate what exactly that tradeoff is?

                    • Miav replied to this.

                        Vlad
                        Safari 15:
                        +More tabs visible at once (with their titles)
                        -Moving URL bar that shows only around 24 characters

                        Orion proposed implementation:
                        +Static URL bar that shows around 32 characters
                        -Fewer tabs visible at once

                        Being able to quickly switch to the tab I want is important for my workflow, so having around 6 tabs visible instead of 8 is a major con.
                        Being able to see a URL past the TLD or being able to quickly click on the URL bar is not important to my workflow, so being able to see 33% more of the URL and having the URL bar be fixed in place is only a minor pro.

                        I hope that's clear enough, but I'd be happy to provide more feedback if needed!

                        • Vlad replied to this.

                            Miav Sounds good. Moving URL bar is actually against their own HIG, and address bar should be in fixed location. And in iOS it is always in the same position. Personally I have problems with moving bar as it creates motion sickness feeling. In our proposal the width of address bar and tab bars can be adjustible depending on number of tabs so I think that ultiamtely the solution will be both user friendly and productive.

                              Vlad

                              Hey!

                              First, responding to your mockups of compact tabs idea - it is definitely objectively better than Safari's solution, for the exact reason you described - addressbar not jumping around.

                              Second, maybe it is worth spending more time thinking about - why does Orion need compact tabs feature?

                              If the answer is "because Safari has it" - maybe it is not good enough reason.

                              If the answer is "to save precious vertical space by having only one top bar, not two", is "compact tab" the only solution? I have another idea, let me post it a bit later today, as a separate crazy feature suggestion :-)

                              And here is why I think compact tabs are not so compact after all:

                                  vladstudio your idea of "wasted space" seems to come from the spacing between the tabs, from side to side. But it is my understanding that the rest of us, when referring to "wasted space", are meaning from top to bottom. Looking in your screen shots at the top one from Safari, it becomes obvious what is meant when you compare it with the bottom screen shot, also Safari but using compact tabs. You'll observe that Safari with compact tabs is the most "compact" and has the least amount of "wasted space" in comparison to the others, when looking at the top to bottom spacing that is.

                                  Personally, for me, every one of the solutions you screen shot above is a significant improvement from the "hanging tabs" that Safari has (top screen shot). I know that's personal preference and all that.

                                  One of the reasons why I love this "compact tabs" idea is it gives even more canvas to the browser to show content, which is why I'm using the browser in the first place. Use as little space for the UI as is absolutely necessary.

                                      ajgraves

                                      yeah, these are two different kinds of wasted space we are talking about :-)

                                      It is true that in theory, compact tabs interface allows for more screen space for web content - simply because there is now only one interface bar, not two.

                                      The way Safari chose to design compact tabs, unfortunately, gives priority to looks, at cost of productivity. The white space between and inside tabs may look cool, but the number of visible tabs is the direct parameter of most people productivity when working in a browser, and this parameter suffers, especially on smaller screens (I'm typing this from M1 Air, hehe).

                                      Please make sure to take a look at a bold idea I described here, that solves the same problem but different way: https://orionfeedback.org/d/2435-magic-toolbar-that-disappears-on-scrolldown-appears-on-scrollup-or-tab-click/2

                                        vladstudio

                                        compact tabs are not so compact after all

                                        Generally, the objective of compact tabs in this instance is reducing the usage of vertical space, not horizontal. With that being said, Safati's compact tabs do not actually waste any more horizontal space than chrome does, in spite of the gap between the tabs.

                                        Both in case of chrome and safari compact, the actual gap between the titles of adjacent tabs is around 40px on a 16" MBP.

                                        Please make sure to take a look at a bold idea I described here

                                        This is already a feature in both Safari and Orion, under View -> Always Show Toolbar in Full Screen

                                            15 days later

                                            Vlad
                                            Personally I think this looks cool but something seems very off in the 1 tab view. it doesn't feel natural at all instead the UI for 1 tab should look like it currently does:
                                            if you have one tab you really want the url to be in the center. There is no point to have the tab and the url input seperate.

                                            actually the more I look at it the more I realize that this mockup looks best with many tabs open, maybe Orion can do it like safari does for tabs < 5 and then to the mock design you showed when there are many tabs

                                            • Vlad replied to this.

                                                TheUser1 The toolbar icons would be jumping from one place to another when you open second tab, and that is bad UX.

                                                  5 days later
                                                  10 days later

                                                  i really like compact tabs on safari, maybe you could make compact view tabs resizable. Even if not please add thi feature. i really like the features and customisability of this browser, more wouldnt hurt. even chrome tabs look better than Safari default tabs. only thing stopping me from switching completely

                                                  9 days later

                                                  ajgraves totally agree. I don’t understand the motivation to separate them. In my opinion, it seems more predicated on “browser tradition” as opposed to understanding the idea behind Apple’s change.

                                                  I think the philosophy is to think of tabs as the containers for web pages they are, and to put the controls directly on each of them. Not only saving space but reducing the unnecessary bloat of having two separate things.

                                                  I mentioned some of this earlier, but I really think this issue is identical to the separation between the search bar and address bar old browsers had. After a while: they realized they could easily be merged.

                                                      Orionic The motivation is to fix the UX, as Safari's implementation has the address bar jumping around which is a big omission and a no-no UX wise.