Safari bottom bar business
Apple has recently revealed the new features of iOS 15 at WWDC21, among them the bottom address bar. Finally!
If you’re a designer, you’ve probably seen an illustration like the one below in one form or another. Since people’s hands and mobile phones differ in size, it just gives you a general sense of what’s reachable, but the point is, the area at the top of the screen where address bars usually reside is always considered a no-go zone for our thumbs.
It doesn’t really take a designer to know that there’s no way you can comfortably use a mobile browser with just one hand. And yet, for no other reason than: “welp, it’s always been this way”, we’ve been stuck contorting our palms in unspeakable ways, trying to reach the address bar with our stubby thumbs. If that’s not a bad user experience, I don’t know what is.
So why did it take so long? I believe this is a testament to how hard it is to get people to accept any kind of change, even if it’s a change for the better. If there’s one company with enough pull to introduce a big change like this, convince everyone that it’s good for them and have the competition follow suit, it’s Apple.
As expected, there’s already some push-back out there. Macworld’s Jason Cross begins his piece by boldly stating that “nobody asked for an address bar at the bottom of the screen,” and then goes on to argue that it’s a bad idea to move the address bar to the bottom, because “it does more than just defy convention — it’s entirely different from all the browsers ever used by a billion people going back…forever.”
Nobody asked for an address bar at the bottom of the screen. — Macworld
While Jason is correct in saying that it defies convention, I fail to see how that is a bad thing. There were a few outliers that allowed users to move the address bar to the bottom of the window. One of them was Opera before the switch to Google’s Blink rendering engine back in 2013. Its spiritual successor, Vivaldi — currently only available for desktop platforms and Android — features the same level of customizability.
Most importantly though it was Microsoft’s attempt at carving out a piece of the mobile operating system market, the Windows Phone, that brought us the first prominent mobile browser with the address bar at the very bottom of the screen, where it was nice and reachable. The rest of the operating seemed even more alien than the address bar placement, people did not like it, and so, as of 2015, Windows Phone is no more.
Microsoft wasn’t the only company to toy with the idea of moving the address bar to the bottom. A couple of years ago Google made the feature optional as one of its Chrome experiments. The feature is no longer available, which leads me to believe it wasn’t a user favorite either.
One could argue though that creating such differences between mobile and desktop interfaces goes against what many companies, including Apple, have been trying to do. Which is — bridging the gap between desktop and mobile, and in the case of Apple, making the ecosystem coherent to a point where switching from a MacBook to an iPhone is relatively smooth and painless, even for less tech-savvy individuals.
Then again, maybe that’s a bit of a technological dead end that we’ve run ourselves into. It doesn’t make much of a difference whether the address bar sits at the top or bottom of the screen on devices used with both hands such as the iPad or laptops/desktops, since the interaction with the content on the screen is done through the use of an external controller like a mouse or a trackpad. In case of mobile devices however there are use cases that make the controls at the top of the window somewhat problematic or impossible at times.
Personally I believe that some compromises need to be made, as it is only natural that we look for ways to adapt our software interfaces to the context in which they’re being used. There are still quite a few things that you won’t be able to comfortably do when using the phone with just one hand, but I think that rethinking the way we use the browser is a good first step.
