

However, if I open like a dozen tabs, the thumbnails get smaller and smaller. The thumbnail view enables you to always see what pages are open. Vivaldi allows you to set tab thumbnails on either side of the browser. Traditional Tab Structure in Google Chrome Vivaldi Thumbnail Tab Safari, unlike Chrome, has a Tab View feature, but even that didn’t help enough to manage and access tabs productively. After opening dozen or more tabs (as shown in the image below), the browsing experience becomes a hot mess. Though I liked how Safari synced bookmarks and pages to my other devices, it lacked many important extensions (e.g., ClickUp, Swipebasket ( reviewed here), Amazon Keyword Search) offered in Chrome.īut what Google Chrome didn’t solve for me is tab clutter issues.

Vivaldi Visual TabsĪnother reason I stopped using Safari was that I needed to use Google Chrome extensions for web development and other tasks. The following Workona graphic correctly shows the frustration I would experience using and managing tabs on Safari and Google Chrome. It can’t compete with what Vivaldi and Workona do for my productivity and workflow needs. Now I’m proud to say that Safari is a relic of the past. Far too often I couldn’t find tabs I had already opened, and I constantly had to go to the Safari bookmarks bar to re-open pages I frequently used. And recently I returned to the workspace Google extension, Workona, for managing my tabs, bookmarks, and projects.įor years I struggled to manage browser tabs.

But after much frustration with what Safari lacked, I switched first to Google Chrome, and then a few months later to the Chromium-based Vivaldi web browser.
#Safari tab suspender mac
Zhenyi also cautions that ActiveTab will not work reliably if you have so many tabs in a window that the tab bar becomes scrollable.ĪctiveTab is available for $1.99 on the Mac App Store, with no in-app purchases, no ads, and no tracking.Up until about six months ago, I was a longtime Safari web browser user.

There are eight colors to choose from, and the line below the tab can be customized to be between 1 and 7 pixels wide.Īs Zhenyi notes, the extension works best with the "Separate" tab layout selected and "Show color in tab bar" disabled in the Tab section of Safari's Preferences. Unfortunately for users who do not like the new design, Apple has not made any changes to the shading of tabs in either the Safari 15.1 beta or the latest version of the experimental Safari Technology Preview browser.įortunately however, developer Zhenyi Tan was inspired by John Gruber's Daring Fireball article about the issue and has since come up with a simple Safari extension called ActiveTab that provides a solution.ĪctiveTab simply makes it easier to spot the active tab in Safari on Mac by drawing a line underneath it. Safari 15 has faced a barrage of complaints about its controversial new design, and while Apple has listened to user feedback and reversed some changes or made them optional, many users still struggle to discern an active tab from a background tab on the Mac browser because of the inverted shading.
