#MAC OS 11 BIG SUR ANDROID#
#MAC OS 11 BIG SUR MAC#

If you have a lot of tabs open, like I do most of the time, it no longer squishes the tabs on the right side and the left side, making you mouse over them to expand them - which used to drive me insane. It now shows the favicon logo for the website, by default, which makes it easier to identify your open tabs. The way Safari handles tabs in Big Sur is the biggest improvement of all, and the one thing that's likely to make me use this browser a lot more. You can select or add a background image and you can choose the elements you want on your Start Page, including bookmarks, saved articles to read later and open tabs from Safari on your iPhone or iPad. Apple has included a brand-new Start Page that's highly customizable. But the real improvements are in usability and privacy. If anything, the speed of loading pages is even faster. Thankfully, the Apple web browser makes a huge leap forward in Big Sur. Safari has lagged behind, however, in features like tab management and user interface. There are a number of browsers likeĪnd Brave that are much more privacy-friendly for consumers, but I've liked the speed of Safari in recent MacOS releases. Like many people, I've had naturalĬoncerns since Google's whole business is built around farming our data. I was a longtime Chrome user until the last few years, when Chrome started getting slow and hogging a lot of power and RAM. I'm talking about Safari, since so much of what all of us do happens through the web.

Fortunately, in Big Sur, it's also the thing that brings the biggest and best improvements for everyday use. But let's talk about the one new thing you're likely to use the most right now. So that's the look and feel, the features being imported from iOS and the stuff that's likely to make future Macs even more powerful and friendly to use. Screenshot by Jason Hiner/CNET The main event: Safari Both Apple and third-party app makers will need to make a lot more widgets for this to be really interesting. Even in their static state, there aren't many widgets to try at the start. Again, I'd expect this kind of widget expansion is likely on Apple's roadmap. For example, I'd love an Apple Music or Spotify widget where you could play or pause, skip forward and back and even flip between playlists or pin two or three of your favorite stations. Ideally, they'll eventually be much more functional. If you click them, they simply open the app they're associated with. Another drawback to Widgets is they're mostly just visual bits of information. But I bet we'll see that in a future release.

#MAC OS 11 BIG SUR MAC#

Sadly, you can't drop the Big Sur versions of Widgets onto the desktop on Mac, which is a bummer because your Mac has a lot more desktop real estate where you could do interesting stuff with them.

#MAC OS 11 BIG SUR ANDROID#

Widgets have already made a splash in iOS 14: You can now place them on the iPhone home screen for the first time (something Android phones have been doing for over a decade). The other big feature imported from iOS is Widgets, which you access by actually clicking on the clock in the upper right corner of the screen. The version in Big Sur is also in the upper right-hand corner, and you access it by clicking the slider icon next to the clock. This is a favorite in iOS, which allows you to swipe down from the upper right corner for easy access to airplane mode, volume, brightness, Wi-Fi, the flashlight and a bunch other buttons that you can customize. iOS imports: Control Center and Widgetsīig Sur also brings over two features from iOS that will make a lot of people happy, if they use both a Mac with an iPhone or iPad. My only problem when I do this is that I keep looking for the clock in the upper right-hand corner (even when I'm wearing a watch and could easily check that). In fact, if you auto-hide both the Dock and the Menu Bar, you can have a super clean desktop. The Menu Bar is more translucent, too, and it's easier than ever to make it auto-hide using the new Dock & Menu Bar section in Settings. The Finder is redesigned and is also more see-through with new, simpler (and flatter) icons. The dock is now more translucent and floats like the dock on the iPhone and iPad.

Mac os 11 big sur