23 ms·

I vehemently disagree that vertical space used is negligible. Due to standard aspect ratios, the vertical space of the display is at a premium. 1920*1080 means

I vehemently disagree that vertical space used is negligible. Due to standard aspect ratios, the vertical space of the display is at a premium. 1920*1080 means you have 840 less vertical pixels than horizontal - it makes a lot of sense to me to try to reclaim some of that space for actual content instead of widgets.

reflectiv 5y ago
This is basically what I tell people when they ask me why I put my start menu and task bar on the left side of the screen.
- daniel_reetz 5y ago
  Wow. I hadn't thought of it this way, and I even go as far as using a second monitor in portrait mode.
  - beebeepka 5y ago
    I have been doing this ever since 16:9 became a thing, and have converted several people to this simple solution. Canonical had the right idea with Unity which not many people are willing to acknowledge
    - mixmastamyk 5y ago
      The Windows task bar has been movable since 95 I believe. I know because I moved it to the top in the old days. With Mate I keep the main panel on the left as well, however some widgets were not happy in vertical orientation until a few years ago.
- maxwell 5y ago
  You don't hide the start menu and task bar?
  - zamadatix 5y ago
    A lot get frustrated with the slide but if you disable animations the autohide becomes instant too.
    - banana_giraffe 5y ago
      For what it's worth, you don't need to disable all animations to stop this, just the menu ones. https://superuser.com/a/1644831 https://superuser.com/a/1644831
      - zamadatix 5y ago
        That's actually a fantastic tip, thanks!
  - slver 5y ago
    Hiding it usually works. Unfortunately on Windows there's this annoying slide-out animation that slows you down. It happens even if you disable UI animation. On top of that sometimes the bar doesn't show up at all when specific windows are maximized. Which means you need to press the start button to get it out. At some point one figures "f this shit, just toggle off auto-hide". I do autohide in macOS on laptops tho.
- ziml77 5y ago
  I find that horizontal space to many times be more constrained. If I toss and IDE and browser window side-by-side so I can code while looking at docs I need to at least close the vertical tabs on my browser to have a sane amount of space left for content. Usually also collapse one of the sidebars in the IDE to get a decent width for the code.
  - read_if_gay_ 5y ago
    Clearly horizontal space is going to be more constrained than vertical space if you put two windows next to each other horizontally, as you're going from 16:9 to 8:9. But if you stacked them vertically, well obviously vertical space would be even more constrained than that, to the point where it's so useless you don't even think about doing it. So this is an argument for vertical space being more scarce than horizontal space actually.
  - michaelmrose 5y ago
    Maybe all non page UI ought to auto hide until a key is pressed for your use case.
- bscphil 5y ago
  Exactly. Which to me is why the parent complaint is a bit silly. If vertical space is at such a premium on Mac laptops supposedly, why then does the default Apple UI [1] consume such an enormous amount of vertical space? This is many, many pixels more space than on Windows, where you only have the taskbar at the bottom. Apple's dock is much larger than the taskbar, in addition to having a global bar on the top! So I conclude that Apple's designers are in fact not attempting to maximize vertical space, or at least that to the extent they do care about this, they're willing to make absurd compromises in apps like Safari while not fixing the glaring issue with the overall UI. [1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/98/MacOS_Monterey_Desktop.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/98/MacOS_Montere...
  - mixmastamyk 5y ago
    MacBooks have 16:10 screens, not 16:9, so there is a bit more room. I still hide the dock however.
- sys_64738 5y ago
  Do you use Mac laptop apps in fullscreen mode? That's what I do so the dock auto-hides. I do however keep the start menu on the right for Windows.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
sergiomattei 5y ago
On a MBP 13 inch, vertical space like this is a premium as well.
pourred 5y ago
Yet one obvious UI change on Big Sur is they added pointless padding to windows and menus.
- bluthru 5y ago
  The top part of Safari's UI (above the tabs) is about 54 points. There's no reason for it to be above 44 and it could be even less.
coffeefirst 5y ago
Right, everyone had the exactly opposite complaint about Firefox. Safari 15's design is so odd I'll have no idea what to make of it until I can actually test it out.
mahoho 5y ago
But the tradeoff here isn't between a few dozen pixels vertically and a few dozen horizontally. It's 28 vertical pixels in exchange for cutting the horizontal space for the address bar and tab bar each in half, roughly.
- read_if_gay_ 5y ago
  Who really needs an address bar spanning the entire width of their screen? If you run into an URL that long then it's highly unlikely to contain useful information anyway. Or do you regularly notice yourself scanning through 400 characters of query string gibberish and thinking "that information was so useful that I always need all of it on screen"?
  - aniforprez 5y ago
    You don't. But why use that space to put the tab bar which DOES require the entire width? Chrome's and Firefox's compromise seems good enough where they stuff everything else to the right and left of the address bar except tabs. This Safari change is just awful
    - read_if_gay_ 5y ago
      Tab groups are Apple’s solution to having less space for tabs. As a casual Tree Style Tabs user I can see them really working better than one giant mess of tabs.
      - zarzavat 5y ago
        Honest question. How are people using tabs such that they would want to organise them? Most of my tabs have lifetimes of seconds to minutes and there is no order in the chaos to be found.
        Tempest1981 5y ago
        I keep 2 browser windows, each with 10+ tabs. One is those with short lifetimes, as you mention. The other is a "reminder list" of things I want to defer for a few hours.
yxhuvud 5y ago
Which is why it makes it so strange that no browser designers seem to get that the way to go is to stack tabs in a vertical list instead of horizontally. It would use more space but the space is in less demand so it wouldn't matter anyhow. So until the browser designers get a clue I will be stuck with Firefox and the Treestyle tabs plugin which is the least horrible solution for people that use a lot of tabs.
- techpression 5y ago
  Vivaldi does what you’re asking for, natively without plugins.
- kitsunesoba 5y ago
  I've tried tree style tabs a few times but it always ends up being too much. The implementations of vertical tabs I've liked best so far are OmniWeb's (perhaps one of the original vertical tab browsers), Edge's, and Firefox with Tab Center Redux and custom CSS to hide Firefox's frustrating mandatory sidebar header.
- seritools 5y ago
  I know of at least Edge and Vivaldi that do it. Granted, it seems that nobody at the Edge team thought of actually giving the vertical space used by the horizontal tab bar back once you flip to vertical tabs mode, but the feature itself is there.
- freediver 5y ago
  If you are on Mac and want to try a new WebKit based browser, Orion comes with native vertical tabs. https://browser.kagi.com https://browser.kagi.com
  - kitsunesoba 5y ago
    Just so you're aware, I believe the form validation on your beta signup sheet is messed up. I'm unable to submit the form under Safari and Chrome.
- apple4ever 5y ago
barrkel 5y ago
This is why tree-style tabs make sense. It puts the tabs on a sidebar, where their content can be read, and leaves maximum vertical space for the actual page content.
Bud 5y ago
Things like the tab bar and the reload button are not mere "widgets"; they are the core UI elements. They are the single most important part of the app. This is simply a bad call. I'm all for saving vertical space whenever possible. But this is a bad call.
- montroser 5y ago
  The single most important part of the app is the content. I would be interested to see a version where the tabs and url bar roll up to one line if you have the space (few tabs, large monitor), but wrap to two if you don't (lots of tabs, small monitor).
  - thirdlamp 5y ago
    I’ve been using a vertical tab bar on the left in Firefox for a while, offers many tabs and lots of vertical space
  - bitsoda 5y ago
    To a certain extent. If you show too much content at the expense of navigation you simply make your app harder to use. There’s a sweet spot in the UX bell curve and I feel like the new Safari missed the mark. Although, the iOS version looks like an upgrade for one handed use.
- Asmod4n 5y ago
  Can’t remember the Mac OS X Release when Apple removed the dedicated reload button from Safari. Was it 10.6?
  - martimarkov 5y ago
    I'm on Big Sur and have it on my Safari?
    - apple4ever 5y ago
      It was a separate button on the toolbar, not right next to the address bar (which if you misclick you end up editing the URL instead of reloading). And it was Safari 4, released in 2008!
ksec 5y ago
I dont agree with getting rid of "widget", but I do agree vertical space are very limited. Your example of 1080P will be on a 16:9 Screen or iMac. MacBook uses 16:10, but even that, vertical space are still at premium. Once you have Dock at the bottom, and all web design has another layer of navigation at the top, you are quickly looking at 480 out of 1600 gone [1]. That is 30% of my vertical screen space. Leaving effectively 2560 x 1120 for content at Aspect Ratio of ~21:9 ultra wide. I would have used Full Screen Option if I could have Tab Bar showing instead of Address bar + Tab Bar. And Safari for some reason has strange GPU / CPU usage problem with full screen usage which hasn't been addressed for years. May be instead of software design, hardware should have adopted to it. Microsoft Surface Laptop has a 3:2 Aspect Ratio. On the same MacBook Pro 13.3", that would have been an additional 120 pixel. Another point worth mentioning, the Big Sur redesign actually have the Safari ( and macOS )Toolbar "thicker" as in taking more vertical space. [1] I tend to hide the Dock Bar, without the Dock it is only 340 of vertical space.
- zamadatix 5y ago
  More than aspect ratio or physical pixels the real metric is "inches of screen space". You can put 8k in a 13" laptop but if you want to read the window title and url bar and dock you're still eating the same amount of physical real estate as if it were a 1080p laptop. You can change the aspect ratio sure but outside of desktop setups the space constraint is already in depth so all you're doing is chopping off width that wasn't a problem while keeping the same depth profile. I.e. very few are buying a 13" laptop because 15" is too wide rather than too deep.
sbierwagen 5y ago
>1920*1080 Worse than that, high end PCs are going to ultrawide monitors. I'm on 3440x1440 right now, and 3840x1200/5120x1440 panels are dropping in price. Of course, you almost never fullscreen a browser window on a monitor like that, but it is what the OS would default to.
imbnwa 5y ago
Does anyone else not just use spatial browsing on OS X with Safari? Its the best browser for that. I almost never use the tab bar but will have multiple windows open and I can just three-finger swipe down on my touchpad to get exposé for all my open Safari windows and can visually identify a page versus the sliver of nothing Chrome for example gives you with tons of tabs open
Diesel555 5y ago
I agree. I'm running the new OS. There were some UI changes that frustrated me. But when I thought about why I was frustrated, the reason was simply because the UI was new and my old habit patterns didn't work. When I took the time to learn the new UI, I liked it more. The event was a learning experience in why people hate change. It takes effort to realize the benefit (if there is one), otherwise without the effort just frustration (unless the change is bad).
vishwajeetv 5y ago
Yes. One of the first thing I do when I set up a new Mac for myself is to move the bottom dock to the right side. Then the vertical space feels much more comfortable. This is applicable for both 15 inch and 13 inch macbook pros.

reflectiv 5y ago

This is basically what I tell people when they ask me why I put my start menu and task bar on the left side of the screen.

daniel_reetz 5y ago
Wow. I hadn't thought of it this way, and I even go as far as using a second monitor in portrait mode.
- beebeepka 5y ago
  I have been doing this ever since 16:9 became a thing, and have converted several people to this simple solution. Canonical had the right idea with Unity which not many people are willing to acknowledge
  - mixmastamyk 5y ago
    The Windows task bar has been movable since 95 I believe. I know because I moved it to the top in the old days. With Mate I keep the main panel on the left as well, however some widgets were not happy in vertical orientation until a few years ago.
maxwell 5y ago
You don't hide the start menu and task bar?
- zamadatix 5y ago
  A lot get frustrated with the slide but if you disable animations the autohide becomes instant too.
  - banana_giraffe 5y ago
    For what it's worth, you don't need to disable all animations to stop this, just the menu ones. https://superuser.com/a/1644831 https://superuser.com/a/1644831
    - zamadatix 5y ago
      That's actually a fantastic tip, thanks!
- slver 5y ago
  Hiding it usually works. Unfortunately on Windows there's this annoying slide-out animation that slows you down. It happens even if you disable UI animation. On top of that sometimes the bar doesn't show up at all when specific windows are maximized. Which means you need to press the start button to get it out. At some point one figures "f this shit, just toggle off auto-hide". I do autohide in macOS on laptops tho.
ziml77 5y ago
I find that horizontal space to many times be more constrained. If I toss and IDE and browser window side-by-side so I can code while looking at docs I need to at least close the vertical tabs on my browser to have a sane amount of space left for content. Usually also collapse one of the sidebars in the IDE to get a decent width for the code.
- read_if_gay_ 5y ago
  Clearly horizontal space is going to be more constrained than vertical space if you put two windows next to each other horizontally, as you're going from 16:9 to 8:9. But if you stacked them vertically, well obviously vertical space would be even more constrained than that, to the point where it's so useless you don't even think about doing it. So this is an argument for vertical space being more scarce than horizontal space actually.
- michaelmrose 5y ago
  Maybe all non page UI ought to auto hide until a key is pressed for your use case.
bscphil 5y ago
Exactly. Which to me is why the parent complaint is a bit silly. If vertical space is at such a premium on Mac laptops supposedly, why then does the default Apple UI [1] consume such an enormous amount of vertical space? This is many, many pixels more space than on Windows, where you only have the taskbar at the bottom. Apple's dock is much larger than the taskbar, in addition to having a global bar on the top! So I conclude that Apple's designers are in fact not attempting to maximize vertical space, or at least that to the extent they do care about this, they're willing to make absurd compromises in apps like Safari while not fixing the glaring issue with the overall UI. [1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/98/MacOS_Monterey_Desktop.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/98/MacOS_Montere...
- mixmastamyk 5y ago
  MacBooks have 16:10 screens, not 16:9, so there is a bit more room. I still hide the dock however.
sys_64738 5y ago
Do you use Mac laptop apps in fullscreen mode? That's what I do so the dock auto-hides. I do however keep the start menu on the right for Windows.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

sergiomattei 5y ago

On a MBP 13 inch, vertical space like this is a premium as well.

pourred 5y ago

Yet one obvious UI change on Big Sur is they added pointless padding to windows and menus.

bluthru 5y ago
The top part of Safari's UI (above the tabs) is about 54 points. There's no reason for it to be above 44 and it could be even less.

coffeefirst 5y ago

Right, everyone had the exactly opposite complaint about Firefox. Safari 15's design is so odd I'll have no idea what to make of it until I can actually test it out.

mahoho 5y ago

But the tradeoff here isn't between a few dozen pixels vertically and a few dozen horizontally. It's 28 vertical pixels in exchange for cutting the horizontal space for the address bar and tab bar each in half, roughly.

read_if_gay_ 5y ago
Who really needs an address bar spanning the entire width of their screen? If you run into an URL that long then it's highly unlikely to contain useful information anyway. Or do you regularly notice yourself scanning through 400 characters of query string gibberish and thinking "that information was so useful that I always need all of it on screen"?
- aniforprez 5y ago
  You don't. But why use that space to put the tab bar which DOES require the entire width? Chrome's and Firefox's compromise seems good enough where they stuff everything else to the right and left of the address bar except tabs. This Safari change is just awful
  - read_if_gay_ 5y ago
    Tab groups are Apple’s solution to having less space for tabs. As a casual Tree Style Tabs user I can see them really working better than one giant mess of tabs.
    - zarzavat 5y ago
      Honest question. How are people using tabs such that they would want to organise them? Most of my tabs have lifetimes of seconds to minutes and there is no order in the chaos to be found.
      - Tempest1981 5y ago
        I keep 2 browser windows, each with 10+ tabs. One is those with short lifetimes, as you mention. The other is a "reminder list" of things I want to defer for a few hours.

yxhuvud 5y ago

Which is why it makes it so strange that no browser designers seem to get that the way to go is to stack tabs in a vertical list instead of horizontally. It would use more space but the space is in less demand so it wouldn't matter anyhow. So until the browser designers get a clue I will be stuck with Firefox and the Treestyle tabs plugin which is the least horrible solution for people that use a lot of tabs.

techpression 5y ago
Vivaldi does what you’re asking for, natively without plugins.
kitsunesoba 5y ago
I've tried tree style tabs a few times but it always ends up being too much. The implementations of vertical tabs I've liked best so far are OmniWeb's (perhaps one of the original vertical tab browsers), Edge's, and Firefox with Tab Center Redux and custom CSS to hide Firefox's frustrating mandatory sidebar header.
seritools 5y ago
I know of at least Edge and Vivaldi that do it. Granted, it seems that nobody at the Edge team thought of actually giving the vertical space used by the horizontal tab bar back once you flip to vertical tabs mode, but the feature itself is there.
freediver 5y ago
If you are on Mac and want to try a new WebKit based browser, Orion comes with native vertical tabs. https://browser.kagi.com https://browser.kagi.com
- kitsunesoba 5y ago
  Just so you're aware, I believe the form validation on your beta signup sheet is messed up. I'm unable to submit the form under Safari and Chrome.
apple4ever 5y ago

barrkel 5y ago

This is why tree-style tabs make sense. It puts the tabs on a sidebar, where their content can be read, and leaves maximum vertical space for the actual page content.

Bud 5y ago

Things like the tab bar and the reload button are not mere "widgets"; they are the core UI elements. They are the single most important part of the app. This is simply a bad call. I'm all for saving vertical space whenever possible. But this is a bad call.

montroser 5y ago
The single most important part of the app is the content. I would be interested to see a version where the tabs and url bar roll up to one line if you have the space (few tabs, large monitor), but wrap to two if you don't (lots of tabs, small monitor).
- thirdlamp 5y ago
  I’ve been using a vertical tab bar on the left in Firefox for a while, offers many tabs and lots of vertical space
- bitsoda 5y ago
  To a certain extent. If you show too much content at the expense of navigation you simply make your app harder to use. There’s a sweet spot in the UX bell curve and I feel like the new Safari missed the mark. Although, the iOS version looks like an upgrade for one handed use.
Asmod4n 5y ago
Can’t remember the Mac OS X Release when Apple removed the dedicated reload button from Safari. Was it 10.6?
- martimarkov 5y ago
  I'm on Big Sur and have it on my Safari?
  - apple4ever 5y ago
    It was a separate button on the toolbar, not right next to the address bar (which if you misclick you end up editing the URL instead of reloading). And it was Safari 4, released in 2008!

ksec 5y ago

I dont agree with getting rid of "widget", but I do agree vertical space are very limited. Your example of 1080P will be on a 16:9 Screen or iMac. MacBook uses 16:10, but even that, vertical space are still at premium. Once you have Dock at the bottom, and all web design has another layer of navigation at the top, you are quickly looking at 480 out of 1600 gone [1]. That is 30% of my vertical screen space. Leaving effectively 2560 x 1120 for content at Aspect Ratio of ~21:9 ultra wide. I would have used Full Screen Option if I could have Tab Bar showing instead of Address bar + Tab Bar. And Safari for some reason has strange GPU / CPU usage problem with full screen usage which hasn't been addressed for years. May be instead of software design, hardware should have adopted to it. Microsoft Surface Laptop has a 3:2 Aspect Ratio. On the same MacBook Pro 13.3", that would have been an additional 120 pixel. Another point worth mentioning, the Big Sur redesign actually have the Safari ( and macOS )Toolbar "thicker" as in taking more vertical space. [1] I tend to hide the Dock Bar, without the Dock it is only 340 of vertical space.

zamadatix 5y ago
More than aspect ratio or physical pixels the real metric is "inches of screen space". You can put 8k in a 13" laptop but if you want to read the window title and url bar and dock you're still eating the same amount of physical real estate as if it were a 1080p laptop. You can change the aspect ratio sure but outside of desktop setups the space constraint is already in depth so all you're doing is chopping off width that wasn't a problem while keeping the same depth profile. I.e. very few are buying a 13" laptop because 15" is too wide rather than too deep.

sbierwagen 5y ago

>1920*1080 Worse than that, high end PCs are going to ultrawide monitors. I'm on 3440x1440 right now, and 3840x1200/5120x1440 panels are dropping in price. Of course, you almost never fullscreen a browser window on a monitor like that, but it is what the OS would default to.

imbnwa 5y ago

Does anyone else not just use spatial browsing on OS X with Safari? Its the best browser for that. I almost never use the tab bar but will have multiple windows open and I can just three-finger swipe down on my touchpad to get exposé for all my open Safari windows and can visually identify a page versus the sliver of nothing Chrome for example gives you with tons of tabs open

Diesel555 5y ago

I agree. I'm running the new OS. There were some UI changes that frustrated me. But when I thought about why I was frustrated, the reason was simply because the UI was new and my old habit patterns didn't work. When I took the time to learn the new UI, I liked it more. The event was a learning experience in why people hate change. It takes effort to realize the benefit (if there is one), otherwise without the effort just frustration (unless the change is bad).

vishwajeetv 5y ago

Yes. One of the first thing I do when I set up a new Mac for myself is to move the bottom dock to the right side. Then the vertical space feels much more comfortable. This is applicable for both 15 inch and 13 inch macbook pros.