Where is Apple going with Safari 15? Websites are starting to look like apps

Browsers are now packing so many features that they hardly fit in one application. Apple’s Safari 15 might be a step towards a new way to experience browsers.

Among the new products and features presented at WWDC 2021, Apple presented a completely redesigned Safari, which will come with the Mac OS Monterey. The update introduces many changes in the design and is probably one of the biggest Safari updates to date.

I’m not going to go in-depth about the changes. If you’re interested, here’s a 33-minute-long video from Apple on how the design is going to impact UI and interaction design (it’s a lot). In this article, I want to focus on why I think these changes were made and where I think Apple is going with this new version of Safari.

Websites are starting to look like apps

In brief, one of the biggest changes in iOS was moving the URL bar to the bottom. This will allow you to swipe through tabs as you already with the multitasking bar.

The URL bar has been moved to the bottom of the screen.

On all of Apple’s OSs, the color of the URL bar (which now takes as little place as possible) will be customizable from HTML with a meta tag. This gives the impression of a full-screen, app-like experience. The purpose is exactly that: making websites look like apps.

Safari 15 on iPad. The URL bar and the status bar will automatically be set to the background color of the body element unless another color is specified in the meta tag.

Overall, it feels like the design is going towards a more immersive experience of browsing, one that makes you forget you’re using a browser. If you think about it, we’re spending more and more time in browsers as opposed to apps. Entire software suites used every day by professionals are now online. Even when they do have a standalone app, they’re often built on the same codebase as their web version.

This, coupled with the increasing compatibility between Mac OS and iPadOS, becomes really interesting. At the moment, when you navigate to a website for which an app is available and installed, you are asked whether you want to open the URL in the app or in the browser.

Clicking on a link in Safari for which an app is available triggers a prompt.

This creates an annoying extra step. So annoying there are tutorials on how to prevent this behavior, where one of the proposed solutions is uninstalling the app. Opening the related app is pointless if it’s developed with React Native, Flutter, or any other cross-platform development framework. My speculation is that this extra step will soon disappear and that browsers might become our homepage.

Instead of apps, we might just have favorites, and instead of having a multitasking view of the apps that are open, we might just have open tabs. Safari’s new grouping feature already looks very similar to a “new desktop” or “new home screen page” kind of feature.

Another possibility the new URL bar opens up is that web apps will smoothly transition to a native app when it is available. Without the URL bar at the top, the layout already looks like that of a native app so the transition might happen without the user even noticing. The URL bar might even stay on top of the app so that we don’t have to go back to Safari to keep browsing.

The reasons for building a native app are changing rapidly. Let’s quickly review them:

• Using functionality exclusive to native apps. More and more functionality is being added to browsers. It is true that innovation in HTML, CSS and JavaScript is proceeding slowly because nobody owns them. Apple has been especially slow in adopting features that all the other browsers support (google Safari is the new Internet Explorer). The web is definitely a place where Apple struggles to apply its business and design philosophy because it doesn’t own the underlying technology. This is why I think they might soon want to step in and build their own framework for the web, just like Facebook, Microsoft and Google are doing.
• Performance. This is not really a problem for traditional web apps, since resources on the client side typically abound, and server-side rendering is always an option. It might be a problem for apps that require a lot of GPU rendering on the client side. Apple is unlikely to settle for non-perfect efficiency and to tolerate web apps that weren’t specifically designed for their systems. This is another reason why I think they will come up with something in this area.
• Home screen visibility. This doesn’t matter that much since Apple introduced the App Library screen with iOS 14, and that feature always existed on Android. An app will be visible on the user’s homepage only if they pin it or they use it a lot (then it will show as one of the first apps on the App Library screen). However, statistics show that 21% of users abandon apps after just one use. The fact that a user installs your app is not a guarantee that they will come back.
• Sending push notifications. Browsers on desktop OSs, already allow websites to send push notifications. This feature however is still missing on iOS and iPadOS. In fact, some web apps only come as native apps to increase user engagement with push notifications. This is, as of now, probably the biggest reason for native apps to exist.

We can see that focus is shifting from apps to the web, and that the new Safari design might be a prelude to something bigger.

Extensions are on the rise

Apple is also finally bringing extensions to iPadOS and iOS. This gives a new incentive to a so-far underestimated market. In a world where browsers have an increasingly bigger role, extensions can impact our browsing in so many ways and are slowly becoming mainstream. We have seen a few browser extensions gain a lot of traction in the last few years, such as Grammarly, and I’m expecting to see more soon.

Safari extensions also require a developer license in order to be published. They go through the same process apps go through, and they also get published on the App Store. This means a good number of high-quality extensions that fully integrate with their app counterpart will be coming our way.

I might be reading too much into the changes introduced, but I like to think that someone at Apple has had this discussion. Beyond speculations, the fact that a lot of functionality we use every day is moving inside browsers still remains, as does the fact that Apple doesn’t particularly like using technology they didn’t design. The tension these two factors create definitely gives space to change, and we’ll just have to wait and see.

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