Before you read on… If you’re just wondering how to make Safari go back to the way it was before, refer back to the first subhead on this page (“The Gist.”)
The one commonality in the experience of every single person finishing up their iOS 15 review/overview/guide: we’ve all saved Safari for the very last minute. I am 99% certain the saga surrounding changes to Apple’s native web browser - along with my personal, reactionary gripes spewed along the past two months of iOS 15’s Developer Beta cycle - were the overwhelmingly affirming factors that led to me pursuing this very review.
Though I’ve disagreed with a lot of what John Gruber has had to say lately, his constructively critical post about “Safari 15” from early July became an important foothold of affirmation for my sanity as greater tech media went alarmingly quickly from shock to justification and then to celebration (one not-unpopular take I saw literally called Apple’s decisions “brave.”) I found this passage especially resonant:
One can only presume that Apple’s HI team thinks they’re reducing needless “clutter”, but what they’re doing is systematically removing the coherence between what apps look like and the functionality they offer.
"There always has to be something up our sleeve," said Apple CEO Tim Cook in an interview I happened to catch in a bait re-broadcast YouTube stream while writing this. I find it poignant, indeed, recalling my first experience with the new Safari in Dev Beta 1, this past July. I literally thought I'd opened the wrong app. Specifically, the entirely-redesigned interface I saw reminded me a lot of a (living) ghost of quaint browser concepts past...The general layout of an experimental app called Cake.
I won't bore you with any parallels, but I do enjoy the (very fantastic) mental image of Apple Devs huddled around good ole' Cake for inspiration. If you're wondering why I haven't actually named a single one of the changes I've been referring to, I thought I might present the entirety of the Safari section in the full iOS 15 features list sandwiched between a set of screenshots from iOS 14.8’s Safari and a set of the same locations in the browser as it stands in the iOS 15 Release Candidate.
I think the greatest catalyst for the emotional component of the controversy lies in the fact that it represents the first complete redesign in the entire, 18-year-long history of the software. Since Safari 1.0 Beta for Mac in the Spring of 2003
