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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.
As a Mac user, I could not care less about FavIcons in Safari, partly because I don't use them and mostly because other, better options exist for web browsing on OSX (Chrome, Opera, FF, et al). Icons make the tabs easier to identify, but to me the title typically does too.
One thing I will never understand is the people who open 50+ tabs in a single window and then complain about legibility. I don't understand leaving that many tabs open, but if you're going to come back hours later to do so you might as well stash them in a new window and minimize it.
I've discovered that Chrome simply works for me better, so I switched. Some sites would not work with Safari (e.g. my bank's bill pay).
For those of us who like to keep a lot of tabs open there is Tree Style Tab: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-...
Never looked back. Whenever I try to use someone else's browser I cringe at the terrible idea of putting the tabs at the top.
*Channeling Steve Jobs* A web browser is an experience. It needs clarity. It needs consistency. It needs to be beautiful. The toolbar area of Safari is beautiful. Notice the clean monochromatic appearance. Notice the lines, the pristine appearance, the unblemished look. It's perfect. It's sterling. It's absolute perfection. To introduce favicons would smear it with excrement. It would disturb its Zen tranquility. It would besmirch its purity. Yes, the Safari web browser, a thing of beauty is a joy forever.
Show me the whole URL! Believe it or not Apple, it is useful. It's almost like they purposely turning off power users.
You may find this useful, Mr. Power User...
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
Can we please not say this too loudly, otherwise Mozilla will realize there's an aspect of Chrome they're not copying, and copy it.
Firefox has a minimum size for all tabs. If there are too many tabs open, it'll just change the tab bar so it scrolls. This works perfectly. Combined with using Favicons, it means it's very easy to find open tabs.
Chrome... doesn't. I've seen it get to the point that it doesn't even have room to show the Favicons yet.
Both Apple and Google need to look at Firefox here. Tabs are not perfect, but Firefox is doing it the right way.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
favicon.ico, retrieved by default by Internet Explorer and now most major browsers (short for Favorites Icon) and before tabs was used to put an icon on favorites shortcuts and desktop web shortcuts. Go ahead and use Internet Explorer to retrieve http://domain.com/ and shortly thereafter, check your web server logs to see a request to http://domain.com/favicon.ico - this behavior seems to be default in most browsers now. It also serves as the sole identifier on tabs on browsers with too many tabs open to show title text, which is the point of the story post.
Since the early days, support has been added to HTML to set its location/format manually with <link rel="shortcut icon" href="">.
Apple decided to completely forego the existing HTML, and then defines <link rel="apple-touch-icon"> to define the image that appears when you make a web page a shortcut on your phone/tablet home screen.
You realise you're full of shit, right? Walk into pretty much any major tech company and you'll find huge numbers of people using Apple's laptops, because they're pretty awesome development machines.
If only there was a button in Safari you could click, and it would show you a thumbnail of all your open tabs that would be extremely helpful.
Extra points if it even lets you click a little "X" to close certain tabs!
That would be a lot more helpful than a tiny favicon....
But nah, having a ton of favicons that give you no context as to the content of the page is way more useful....
"If it ain't broke, it doesn't have enough features yet"
Because Safari is significantly faster and significantly better on the battery. It's not really even close.
So, let me get this straight. A user of a proprietary browser is unhappy about a basic feature that has been missing for the past 15 years, yet he CONTINUES to use said piece of shit proprietary browser all this time? Really? If you're not happy with the product, STOP using it. It couldn't get any simpler. The fact that their is not one, but TWO vastly superior, open-source browsers out there should be a clue that you're on the losing team. John Gruber is an idiot.
Agreed completely.
There are even three ways to get to this tab overview:
1) pinch to zoom out, as you've mentioned
2) the little button in the top right of the default toolbar
3) cmd-shift-\
How much easier can it get? I get the info I need when I need it.. and when I don't need it there's no clutter.
Even if these favicons (which seem like silly noise to me.. but to each their own) were important to me.. they wouldn't be important enough to switch to Chrome. Good god. I can't even set all new tabs to show a blank page in chrome without an extension. No thanks.
I actually hate this icon mania, especially in IDEs.
Most icons are random coloured bollocks which I don't care to memorize.
OTOH I'm a 'whole word / half sentence' reader. Scanning a bunch of tabs takes no time.
Then again I also use AppleScript(s), just google for FindTab AppleScript.
And finally, stop implying that your usage of a computer is in any way professional when you can not adapt to its features. Hint: more windows (e.g. one per search) and less tabs, e.g. one per search result.
What really is anoying in all browsers that the windows menu display the title of the window with the URL added to the right. I want At least the domain first. It takes ages to find the single window that is displaying slashdot.org (but well that is why I got a FindTab-script :P )
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Oh, using tabs "correctly" requires using the mouse to drag the drag the right edge of the tab to the left? You're right, I guess I've been wrong this entire time, since that makes no fucking sense at all, and would be a huge pain to do for ever single tab. And who needs to be able to actually see the title, am I right?
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."
Apple knows what you need. Shut up!
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