Compact tabs

Fortrikka in our suggestions address bar serves as address bar, it is not a tab (and I risk saying this, nor it should be in any sane approach to UX design)

Please implement this... I really loved the Cool Safari 16 UI.

But its not removed and still available as option. Safari is not my default browser, but together with with the sidebar is nice. Anyway tabs on left and extension support is still better. ;-)

Please implement this, I love the look and feel of the new compact tabs

Kumuditha We want to, but it will take a few weeks of work and we want to focus on smaller issues first.

+1

Added my vote to this. One of the things I didn't like about Safari was the tabs under the address/tool bar. When the latest Safari introduced the compact tabs feature, I loved it. It's very different, however I much prefer it to Safari's "hanging tabs" (which Orion uses also). I even prefer the way Firefox/Chrome implements tabs (above the address/tool bar, and small button-like appearance).

The downside to this is obviously it pulls you away from other, more critical features of the browser. That said, the form and function are important.

The toolbar in safari (osx) is innovative and one of the main reasons for using safari:
• combining tabs and URL fields
• matching toolbar color with website header color

Also, it takes less space, without losing information. I'd like to see something like this in Orion. Thanks!

Why not have the address/search bar, which sends me to what I want, be combined with the tab that contains the search/URL? Having one area display the URL, while another display a tab that ends up referencing the URL could be seen as unnecessary.

When browsers combined the search area with address bar, a similar thing happened there.

I also really like how the websites color the browser: if the browser is designed to exclusively display websites, then why should the browser contrast the websites so much? Similar principle a third time.

A few thoughts to consider

We are aiming for a layout similar to this https://orionfeedback.org/d/92-compact-tabs/59

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

2. 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.

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