Apple originally sold Safari 15’s unified tab bar as a way of saving space. When it became clear that defaulting to that design was, to put it mildly, problematic, they reverted to a redesigned separate tab bar that takes up more space than ever in both dimensions.
Safari 15 on Big Sur (left) vs Safari 14 on Mojave (right)
The thing is, saving space is a great goal for a UI! The vast majority of people using traditional computers are on laptops. Pretty much the entire computing world, excepting some professions, has converted to the equivalent of apartment living. Screen real estate is at a premium!
Unfortunately, the ultra minimalist design trend over the last 10 years has ignored this reality. Designers have steadily removed elements that can be used to create coherent, compact designs: borders, shadows, color, shading. All have been kicked to the designer shitlist.
We’re left with just a couple tools to convey hierarchy and structure: lots of negative space, and in some places, large header text.
This trend has eroded usable screen space. And like erosion, it has happened almost imperceptibly, through many small changes over the course of years. But the sum of the changes across the entire ecosystem of Mac apps has been that, simply put, I can fit noticeably less on screen today than 10 years ago.1 I used to regularly reference 2-3 windows simultaneously. These days, most apps and web pages require so much space that it’s one-at-a-time.2
When I saw Newsstand, the new RSS app for Mac OS 9, I found it a shocking reminder of how much information used to be conveyed, usably, in a small window.
I’m not suggesting that the primary goal of UI design should be to pack as much on screen as possible. Obviously design is a balancing act — usable hit targets vs. density, visual affordance vs. clutter, etc. But I do think that the pursuit of minimalism has caused us to ignore information density for too long.3
In short, while a redesigned Safari 15 for Mac can’t come quick enough, what I’m really wishing for is a broader shift away from minimalist extremism in UI design.
- To be fair, minimalist design is not the only factor here. Designers work on large screens, which often shields them from the effects of their work on normal screens. And of course the big one: touch devices require larger tap targets and spacing, and mobile design is understandably in the driver’s seat in general. ↩︎
- One of the advantages the Mac always had over Windows, dating back to the classic Mac OS days, was its windowing system. It encouraged having many windows on screen at once. Windows was so clunky that you were almost forced to maximize every window into full screen mode. Working on a Mac looks messy but feels fluid. Windows’s full screen & tiled layouts look tidy but feel rigid. ↩︎
- This is just one of a few maddening regressions that Apple has been leading the charge on when designing for, I have to stress, interaction. The evolution of Safari over the course of several versions of both macOS and the app itself is representative of a lot of Apple’s UI design in general. First color disappeared, then buttons, then pretty much any differentiation between different types of UI controls, then the differentiation between browser & content. It often feels like Apple approaches UI design as if they were designing a magazine. ↩︎