Apple has reworked much of Safari 15’s user interface as of today’s beta releases. Tabs have returned to their own row below the address bar, on the Mac at least:
The tabs look a little too much like touch targets on the Mac,1 but I can live with that given what we had in the first two betas, when Apple smashed together tabs and the address bar.
This is still the design used on the iPad, which is a real bummer:
(You can still turn off the whole website-tinting-the-browser-UI thing, thankfully.)
On the iPhone, the biggest change is that address bar now stays pinned at the bottom when the keyboard slides up. In the first two betas, it would jump up to the top of the screen in a truly meaningless fashion.
Safari 15 still isn’t perfect, but undoing the unification of the tab and address bars is a huge step in the right direction. I’m glad Apple took our feedback to heart.
- Also why are Favorites below the Tab bar? It just doesn’t make sense to separate tabs and their content. ↩