From a usability perspective, every single thing about Safari 15’s tabs is a regression. Everything. It’s a tab design that can only please users who do not use tabs heavily; whereas the old tab design scaled gracefully from “I only open a few tabs at a time” all the way to “I have hundreds of tabs open across multiple windows”. That’s a disgrace. The Safari team literally invented the standard for how tabs work on MacOS. The tabs that are now available in the Finder, Terminal, and optionally in all document-based Mac apps are derived from the design and implementation of Safari’s tabs. Now, Apple has thrown away Safari’s tab design — a tab design that was not just best-of-platform, but arguably best-in-the-whole-damn-world — and replaced it with a design that is both inferior in the abstract, and utterly inconsistent with the standard tabs across the rest of MacOS.
The skin-deep “looks cool, ship it” nature of Safari 15’s tab design is like a fictional UI from a movie or TV show, like Westworld’s foldable tablets or Tony Stark’s systems from Iron Man, where looking cool is the entirety of the design spec. Something designed not by UI designers but by graphic designers, with no thought whatsoever to the affordances, consistencies, and visual hierarchies essential to actual usability. Just what looks cool. This new tab design shows a complete disregard for the familiarity users have with Safari’s existing tab design. Apple never has been and should not be a company that avoids change at all cost. But proper change — change that breaks users’ habits and expectations — is only justifiable when it’s an improvement. 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.
Of course, I realized that things would only get more ridiculous as October neared, because my calories burned would be ever farther off the necessary pace.
If you’re running iOS 15 or iPadOS 15 and have experienced these bugs, you should update right away.
With the current implementation, if your wallet is stolen it’s likely never getting back to you. The new MagSafe wallet’s Find My features are designed for when you lose or forget it, not when someone steals it.
If you’re like me—a Gmail user who wants a real Mac app, and ideally one that’s a better fit to Gmail than Apple Mail—I strongly recommend that you try Mimestream.
Today, many of those same companies—including Apple, Amazon, Walmart, Nike, Target, and dozens of others—are funding efforts to kill the Democratic reconciliation bill, which contains significant climate provisions that would allow the U.S. to meet its Paris Agreement goals.
This campaign is a quieter one. The companies are financing it through their membership fees in pro-business trade groups such as the Business Roundtable, a coalition of CEOs that lobbies for corporate-friendly policy.
It's Saturday. Time for me to update all my devices to the latest operating systems.
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Thanks for reading.