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Comment by perardi | Hacker News Reader

A bit of a tangent, but not that much:

I loathe the new Safari “tabs”, with as much scare as you can get in those scare quotes. But, I still can’t leave Safari be, as I appreciate the history and Keychain sync with my iOS devices.

It’s that tight macOS/iOS integration that makes me stay on Safari, along with the relatively lighter energy usage versus Chrome. This looks nice in terms of using native UIKit elements (probably, it’s just screenshots) and probably the system WebKit, but I would really miss password syncing.

(Yes, I know, there are innumerable password sync options, but Keychain sync really does “just work” between iOS and Mac.)

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The new Safari tabs are so bad that I’m sure they can’t stay that way for long. I was hoping I would get used to the broken active tab highlighting, but after a few days I’m still clicking the wrong tabs in the tab bar. I can’t believe it.

The compact layout may not be for everyone, but it plus turning on show full url in address bar, makes it obvious which tab is active.

With the tradeoff of not showing you the title of the active tab, if I'm remembering correctly?

I tried it for a bit before that annoyed me into switching to the taller layout, which is a visual downgrade from the previous design but at least has the same information visible.

You can disable them. I for one love the concept and hope they just refine it a little.

Here you go, someone 'fixed' the tab highlighting for you, and for only $2!

https://apps.apple.com/app/activetab/id1588852241?mt=12

(via John Gruber: "I don't know whether to laugh or cry")

Long term Safari fan here. The new tabs have terrible UX but what's worse is stability. Whoever is "at fault" there - don't try to use jira with the latest Safari as it will crash eventually.

It’s successfully pushed me to Firefox. I love safari and how gentle it is on the battery but I’d rather have 6 hours of functional browsing than 10 hours of dealing with Safari’s nonsense.

Yep. I'm seeing weird bugs with e.g. middle-click-to-open-link-in-new-tab doing what it should—but then replacing it with the blank-tab content a quarter second after I switch to the new tab.

I'm not used to Safari being buggy. It's part of why I've stuck with it for years.

I'm actually kind of loving the tab groups—it's a little weird to me that we have that and the concept of a window, still, and the two are separate, but whatever—but the tab UI itself is really, really bad.

What do you use for Adblock?

I prefer FF due to ublock and better floating videos / Picture in Picture

I use 1Blocker, a very mature ad blocking tool that just added JS-based blocking rules, and StopTheMadness is a popular tool for tweaking websites e.g. forcing videos up front, stopping auto play, and showing their controls. This allows macOS native PiP on most websites that don't usually support it.

> Keychain sync really does “just work” between iOS and Mac

FWIW so does Lastpass, in my experience :)

I haven't looked, but is there something stopping other browsers (say firefox) from integrating with keychain on the mac side other than maintainability/pride/whatever?

On iOS, Kagi is UIKit/SwiftUI and uses the system WebKit, yes. On macOS it's AppKit and ships a mildly forked WebKit to better support web extensions.

I hated them at first, forced myself to live with them and now I love them. So much more vertical space on the screen.

I think it depends on how may tabs you have at once. If you only have a handful of tabs, then compact mode works and gives you a small amount of extra vertical room. If you have more tabs though, they quickly get squeezed too much to be useful. Then it is horizontal space that becomes a premium. I prefer having the tabs and the address bar on separate lines to give the tabs their space and to give the address bar and the other icons in that are enough room to be useful. The idea that the content should be dominant is fine but I’m also using the browser features to interact with that content and don’t want to sacrifice the browser functionality.

The styling of the tabs as buttons and the reversed highlighting of the current tab are just broken UI for no apparent benefit other than someone thought it looked cool. (It doesn’t really).

Orion has Keychain sync (won't re-use your Safari keychain items obviously) and you can use Sign in with Apple

This can import your passwords from Safari 15 and then can sync with Kagi for iOS which is a bit of a help.

For me the biggest loss would be Apple Pay, and “Sign in with Apple” which is incredibly useful for signing up to services while maintaining some level of privacy.

Beta tester here, "Sign in with Apple" works in Orion

Yes, but the UI is not the worst new Safari feature: performance is severely degraded too.

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