The new tab design in Safari 15 for macOS makes usability worse and shows a complete disregard for the familiarity users have with the previous tab design
Our long national iOS 15 Safari nightmare ended last month, praise be, but the lesser of the two bad Safari designs unveiled …
Against that backdrop, Daring Fireball's critique of Safari 15's macOS tab design — worse usability, disregard for learned familiarity — reads less like one blog's complaint and more like the closing argument in a campaign Apple was already losing.
First-order effects
Mac users upgrading to Safari 15 face a tab design that breaks years of muscle memory, with no setting to recover the old behavior — the exact friction the July betas had begun carving exemptions around.
Apple enters Monterey's final stretch facing a unified critic consensus spanning iOS and macOS coverage, leaving the company choosing between shipping a contested default or another reversal.
Second-order effects
Apple does reverse: the [[a:971924|Monterey release candidate restores the old tab design as the default and relabels the original redesign a 'Compact' option]] — converting the critique into shipped product policy within weeks.
The failed experiment validates the more conservative path rivals already took, notably Google's shelved bottom-URL Chrome redesign, making aggressive browser chrome overhauls harder to justify internally at every vendor.
Third-order effects
If the pattern holds, default browser interfaces stop being designer-imposed and become negotiated outcomes — bold redesigns ship as opt-in modes first, with familiar layouts retained as defaults until usage data proves otherwise.
Browser differentiation shifts further away from interface novelty toward engine-level features and privacy posture, since UI experiments now carry demonstrated recall risk across a base measured in the hundreds of millions.
The trend: Radical browser UI redesigns are being demoted from enforced defaults to opt-in modes, as Apple's Safari 15 reversal joins Google's abandoned Chrome overhaul in showing that user familiarity beats layout ambition.
Safari 15 tabs are so fucking terrible that I have to retweet this. The options to turn off the new “compact” tabs should fully revert to the v14 tab design. https://twitter.com/...
ME 15m AGO: So glad I'm not the kind of person who gets worked up about petty stuff like this... ME AFTER READING: I am offended beyond reason at Safari's new tab design, it's practically a war crime, the parties responsible should feel eternal shame. https://twitter.com/...
“Change for change's sake alone is masturbatory. That with Safari 15 it actually makes usability worse, solely for flamboyant cosmetic reasons, is downright perverse.” 💯 https://twitter.com/...
It feels like Apple has really decided that good design is out, and change for change's sake is in. Everything is just a little harder than it used to be on a Mac, all sorts of unnecessary friction introduced for no good reason. https://daringfireball.net/...
Here's story on technology that starts sounding annoyed but then slowly but surely moves into “I'm extremely angry” A damning review of the new Safari on iOS by @gruber. Extra credit for using “craptacular” and “masturbatory”: https://daringfireball.net/...
Another reason not to use Safari on Mac. Safari 15 sounds maddening, but I don't use it. I use Microsoft Edge because its vertical tabs make so much sense when you have lots of tabs open at once. Safari/Mac has always felt sloppy and half-assed to me. https://twitter.com/...
It is truly astonishing how bad the new Safari tabs are on Mac. @gruber calls it an own goal and he's exactly right. I'm baffled that this made it past any kind of design review. https://daringfireball.net/...
On the Safari 15 redesign: “Replacing an interface that doesn't require you to think at all with an interface that requires you to think — even a little — is a design sin of the first order. Designs should evolve over time in the other direction.” https://daringfireball.net/...