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Safari Should Display Favicons in Its Tabs (daringfireball.net)
Favicon -- or its lack thereof, to be precise -- has remained one of the longest running issues Safari users have complained about. For those of you who don't use Safari, just have a look at this mess I had earlier today when I was using Safari on a MacBook. There's no way I can just have a look at the tabs and make any sense of them. John Gruber, writing for DaringFireball: The gist of it is two-fold: (1) there are some people who strongly prefer to see favicons in tabs even when they don't have a ton of tabs open, simply because they prefer identifying tabs graphically rather than by the text of the page title; and (2) for people who do have a ton of tabs open, favicons are the only way to identify tabs. With many tabs open, there's really nothing subjective about it: Chrome's tabs are more usable because they show favicons. [...] Once Safari gets to a dozen or so tabs in a window, the left-most tabs are literally unidentifiable because they don't even show a single character of the tab title. They're just blank. I, as a decade-plus-long dedicated Safari user, am jealous of the usability and visual clarity of Chrome with a dozen or more tabs open. And I can see why dedicated Chrome users would consider Safari's tab design a non-starter to switching. I don't know what the argument is against showing favicons in Safari's tabs, but I can only presume that it's because some contingent within Apple thinks it would spoil the monochromatic aesthetic of Safari's toolbar area. [...] And it's highly debatable whether Safari's existing no-favicon tabs actually do look better. The feedback I've heard from Chrome users who won't even try Safari because it doesn't show favicons isn't just from developers -- it's from designers too. To me, the argument that Safari's tab bar should remain text-only is like arguing that MacOS should change its Command-Tab switcher and Dock from showing icons to showing only the names of applications. The Mac has been famous ever since 1984 for placing more visual significance on icons than on names. The Mac attracts visual thinkers and its design encourages visual thinking. So I think Safari's text-only tab bar isn't just wrong in general, it's particularly wrong on the Mac.
Quite - if Apple thinks Favicons make things look a mess, and aren't terribly useful (they're mostly the same for a lot of pages on the same site, or for many sites that just don't have one), then let them come up with an alternative way of quickly seeing what tabs are. Oh wait - they did - pinch to zoom out, to see all the tabs arrayed in front of you, which is way easier than looking at favicons.
At some point late in Steve Job's reign, Apple seemed to have purged all the UX expertise, instead allowing graphic designers and developers to do what thy will. In the past, actual usability testing had been used to defined documented user interface standards, and Apple's user interface group was top notch. I've been a Mac user since 1984, an UX designer in the '90-'00's , and have disappointedly watched this roller coaster going from "insanely great" to the "one sheet of glass" designer bullshit of late.
Safari started going downhill as iOS became dominant. Favicons are just part of the problem. In Safari, the Window tab, which lists all open browser windows, used to be sorted spatially. Frontmost browser windows were listed first. This placed windows you were currently using at the top of the list. Several years ago, some idiot decided to change this list to sort order to alphabetical, probably without realizing the original utility. How the %#$@ am I supposed to know what some web page is titled? Page title often changes within a site as the user navigates between pages, so with alpha title sort, the site position on the windows list arbitrarily changes.
Without spatial organization finding one of the dozen pages open in Safari is as difficult as finding an app somewhere on the many app pages in iOS, or trying to find an app to launch on the Watch cluster of similar round icons. It's a cognitive disaster, which reduces usefulness and place form far above function.
This is the decline which has brought us a "professional" laptop whose primary design criteria seem to have been "thinner" and "lighter", instead of the dozen other criteria which actual heavy-daily-users desire.
Ugh. Bring back "insanely great".
Now get off my lawn. Argh.
"You have liberated me from thought."