Yours Truly on Rene Ritchie’s Show Talking About iOS 15 Safari

Rene Ritchie:

At WWDC 2021, Apple unveiled new interface designs for Safari on Mac, iPad, and iPhone. They’re all radical but none as in-your-face radical as the iOS 15 version for the iPhone, which pulls the address bar to the bottom and hides a ton of controls behind a menu-hamburger button.

We recorded this before today’s release of the third developer betas for iOS 15 and MacOS 12 Monterey, but it all holds up. The good news is that today’s betas show that Apple has taken criticism of the new Safari UI designs seriously — on MacOS, Safari once again defaults to showing the tab bar as a discrete UI element in the window, with one URL address bar. (Similar changes are coming for iPadOS, but didn’t make it for today’s beta.) The iOS changes today aren’t as significant, but, having talked to folks at Apple, there are a lot of changes and refinements still to come as summer progresses. I feel good about what I’ve heard.

(Something I missed in my critique of the Safari 15 betas two weeks ago: you can long-press on the domain name to the left of the “···” button in the floating toolbar to bring up a contextual menu. That contextual menu contains a Share item, and today’s beta 3 adds a Reload item (screenshot). I still say Share and Reload are both important enough that they should be exposed as top-level buttons, but knowing that this long-press menu exists is a great tip if you’re already using the betas.)

★ Wednesday, 14 July 2021