Safari 15 Watch: Old Tabs Edition ⇥ sixcolors.com

Jason Snell:

It’s official: As of the latest macOS Monterey beta — version 12.0.1, which makes me wonder if they’ve locked version 12.0 on the new MacBook Pro models and everyone else will jump straight to 12.0.1 — Safari tabs have been reverted to their original “tab” appearance, instead of being a bunch of floating lozenges.

I share Snell’s sympathy for a team that obviously worked hard to try something new, but I am thrilled there is a choice between a more compact tab interface and one that actually looks like tabs. That is true for Monterey, it is true for iPadOS, and I imagine a new seed of Safari 15 will be released for Big Sur to complete the set.1

While the capsule layout shipped, I am glad to see that it was reverted. I wish that were done earlier, but the result is the same. Today is a good day.

  1. The Safari 15 build for Catalina has not received the “compact” layout, nor — thankfully — does it have the option to use the weird capsule tab format. ↥︎