Safari’s tab setup for Mac OS Monterey could not be more of an awful step backwards

Now I am running the new Safari within Big Sur in the Safari Technology Preview, and I am on an iMac Pro with a second 27″ monitor, so 2 27″ monitors running at 2560×1440. To me the new safari is only trying to save space, but doing it at the cost of usability.

This is current safari’s bar with 3 tabs
And Monterey’s Safari with 3 tabs, you already lose the title of the web site.
Current safari with 9 tabs
Monterey with 9 tabs, much less legible and even worse with no ICO files
Big Sur Safari with 15 tabs
Monterey with 15 tabs, already you can see tabs stacking on top of each other
And 18 tabs in Big Sur Safari

The tabs in Monterey become illegible and hard to find too quickly and all so the tab bar can take up less space. All well and good for a small screened laptops users, but useless for large displays! And even more useless for power users who have lots of plug ins which also take up space!

And you can’t even activate the old functionality in Safari, only the new tabs are available.

And this is Firefox with Tree Style tabs. They are always legible and you can have so many of them. Once again, maybe not so good for a small laptop, but for a big monitor it is essential. If only firefox would have a true dark mode and allow me to get rid of the light title bar at the top, but at least it means you can read the web site title. Still I wish I could turn the top tabs off and just have tree style tabs.

Of course there is also Vivaldi, which has tree style tabs built in. It is a gorgeous and fast browser, built on chrome, while I would prefer Firefox for it being a different engine and the most customizable browser.

And that isn’t even the worst of it. If you have Safari at default settings, when you switch tabs you get the tabs changing color based on the web site. For some web sites, it isn’t so bad, but for others…

Look how it changes, especially when it hits BBC news, this is completely distracting.

Luckily you can turn this off in advanced tabs.

Just make sure to check Never Use Background Color in Toolbar.

Gave the Vivaldi Browser a try and so far I really like it

After Mozilla’s wrongheaded announcement that they are giving up their whole plug in architecture for Chrome Style plug ins, I had been up in the air about what browser I want to use in the future. Sure Chrome is fast, but I hate that it is Google and everything you do is basically going through Google, which is the second reason I prefer Firefox, and though it was time to try some other options. Now I don’t like Safari much even with it’s newer features, and I never was a big Opera fan, especially of late, but on that count there is something newer, Vivaldi.

Vivaldi is a new browser from one of the founders of Opera that focuses on Power User features and customization and it has built in Tree Style Plug ins.

As you can see, Tree Style Tabs are on the left or right so they don’t take up precious vertical browsing space. I used to always use Tab Mix Plus to have multiple tab rows, but that takes up a lot of your vertical browsing space, and Tree Style seems a much more elegant solution on todays computers with wide screen displays.

So far it is a pretty impressive browser. It will import your Firefox Bookmarks, though it’s drag and drop bookmarks feature seems a little funky as it seems to reverse order of dragged folders. It has Sync across computings (or will soon), an adaptive interface that changes color based on the site you are on, it will have an e-mail client built in, and it is very fast.

It uses Opera and Chrome style plug ins, but only a handful are implemented as of yet, but this is a technology preview after all.

So far I am pretty impressed, and plan on continuing to use it, and when Firefox loses all the plug ins that I love, I just might have a replacement that is pretty darn good.

Mozilla Firfox is dumping it’s plug ins, moving to chrome style extensions

Ars Technica reports that Mozilla is dumping it’s plug ins in favor of Chrome Style Extensions. This will mean a more modern browser which is less likely to crash, but it means no more extensions that can deeply change the browser.

And it is it’s powerful plugin style that is why I have stuck with Mozilla even when Chrome was faster, so this might mean the end of me sticking with Mozilla. I use quite a few Moxilla extensions ever day, like Tab Mix Plus and download them all, and if they are gone, there goes my support and use of Mozilla. I personally have always been willing to have a little less stability to keep Mozillas awesome plug in support, so I think this is an awful idea!

Honestly I am going to give Vivaldi a try, it is a new browser for power users from one of the founders of the Opera browser. With Mozilla removing it’s most powerful features, a customizable alternative based on the same webkit engine as Chrome sounds like a great idea! ArsTechnica has a good look at it.