There’s not much Apple’s rivals would want to steal from Safari 15 — it’s not exactly the company’s finest (or most popular) browser update. But in true Samsung style, the South Korean firm found one thing worth swiping for its own mobile devices.
The latest version of the Samsung Internet browser gives Galaxy smartphone users the ability to shift the address bar to the bottom of the screen, making it a little more accessible — especially during one-handed use.
Samsung steals Safari’s movable address bar
Apple actually reversed a lot of the changes it originally planned for Safari 15 — especially on Mac — following the many, many complaints it received from beta testers. But not every Safari change looked like the result of a hungover design meeting.
Many Apple fans welcomed the new ability to shift Safari’s address bar to the bottom of the screen on iPhone. And once you get used to it, reaching up to the top of the display to enter a URL seems completely unintuitive.
It seems Samsung also liked this particular Safari 15 tweak. The company just integrated the same functionality into its own Samsung Internet browser for Android smartphones and tablets with a new “address bar position” option.
By default, the address bar continues to reside at the top of the screen in Samsung Internet. But if you go into the settings menu after installing the browser’s latest beta update, you will find an option to move it to the bottom.
https://twitter.com/dcseifert/status/1455711773802258437
Apple wasn’t the first
It should be pointed out that Apple wasn’t the first to move the mobile browser’s address bar to the bottom of the screen. Other software-makers experimented with (or implemented) this change in the past, including Google with some versions of Chrome.
But it does seem somewhat suspicious that Samsung made the change just weeks after Apple rolled out iOS 15 with its redesigned Safari interface.
