

Try different browsers, try different windowing OSes, and you’ll see many different takes on tabs. And those tabs have always looked like tabs, because why would anyone want to make them look like anything other than tabs? There are certainly a lot of ways to style tabs in a UI.
OPEN A NEW TAB ON CHROME FOR MAC FOR MAC
Apart from that brief weeks-long stint when it debuted as a public beta in 2003, Safari for Mac has always had tabs. Safari actually debuted as a public beta in January 2003 without any support for tabbed browsing (which, humorously, I was OK with - the tab habit hadn’t gotten its grips on me yet), but within a few weeks it had tabs. 1 The design is counterintuitive: What sense does it make that no matter your settings, the active tab is rendered with less contrast between the tab title and the background than background tabs? The active tab should be the one that pops. I have to think, continuously, about something I have never had to think about since tabbed browsing became a thing almost 20 years ago. Thus, trying to use the new Safari 15 on Mac (and iPadOS 15, alas), I feel somewhat disoriented working within Safari.

Buttons do not work as a metaphor for multiple documents within a single window. And my brain is very much comfortable with the particular visual metaphor of tabs in a web browser window. Tabs that look like real-world tabs aren’t just a decorative style. These new “tabs” waste space because, like buttons, they’re spaced apart.

The “Separate” layout, with “Show color in tab bar” off, is the closest you can get to Safari’s previous tab design.

The most controversial Mac Safari changes shown at WWDC - compressing tabs and the URL location field into a single row at the top of each window, and coloring the entire window with the accent color of the currently frontmost web page - are settings that (thankfully) can be turned off in Safari’s Preferences window (under “Tabs”, natch). Safari 15 on iPad suffers similarly, but it’s the Mac version I’ll concentrate on here. Our long national iOS 15 Safari nightmare ended last month, praise be, but the lesser of the two bad Safari designs unveiled at WWDC persists and actually shipped: the new tabs in Safari 15 for Mac. The Tragedy of Safari 15 for Mac’s ‘Tabs’ Friday, 1 October 2021
