This is not about easy. That way works of course, but it requires two taps. Before the Liquid Glassification of iOS, we could just jump to an arbitrary location with a single tap. That is now no longer possible.
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Funnily enough, today I fired up a good ol’ swivel screen iMac on 10.4 and… I like its version of glass buttons and scroll bars better than LiqGla!
Let me just say I absolutely love the Liquid Glass “Compact” interface for iPhone Safari. It’s even more compact than it used to be in 18 and before Liquid Glass. It allows me to maximize screen available for content, but through neat gesture support it still allows for very good productivity. The only option I’d like to see added is a setting to retain the regular pill rather than switch to the mini pill regardless of scrolling behavior.
Why is that you ask? Because the regular pill allows for so many great gestures which the mini pill does not. I don’t know if this is clear to everybody, but you can reach almost anywhere with just a gesture on the Safari pill. Swipe left on the pill to go to the last tab, swipe right on the pill to go to the next tab, and if there is no next tab, it will automagically open a new tab for you. Swipe up from the pill to go to the tab overview. Tap on the pill to see your Favorites page. I absolutely adore these gestures, it makes it so quick and simple to move around various tabs in iOS Safari.
But that is also where my additional settings request comes in. If you scroll around on a page (or you return to Safari and to a page that has been scrolled to somewhere) that pill is shrunk down to a mini pill, which is nice because it gives way to more content, but it’s also a pitfall. If you miss that pill has become mini pill and muscle memory has you use one these usual swipe gestures, you then get dumped out of Safari ending up with something you absolutely did not want. Swipe to the right will take you to last app, swipe up will take to you the springboard. These gestures are of course native to iOS and make sense, but they trigger because pill has been replaced by mini pill which is very easy to miss when you’re hastily tapping and swiping around iPhone Safari on a small screen (at least to me).
I get why Apple has the mini pill and how they switch from and to it is indeed smart, but I catch myself using Safari gestures on it far too often and then dumping myself where I didn’t want to go and breaking my whole flow. A simple option to retain the pill at all times would fix that for me.
[Edit: Of course a tap on mini pill will return it to pill state so that the gestures work, but that’s easy to miss considering the two pill states or not that very different in terms of appearance.]