How to change Safari tabs back to stacked iOS 15

I've owned an iphone all the way through the years/models from the 3g to the one i have now..

This iOS 15 is the worst downgrade they have ever made to the mobile side of apple devices. I hate the stupid big web page box stacks, the old safari rolling tabs were superb!

Come on Apple, sort this out....

I totally agree with everyone here. Put the tabs back to the way they were in safari before the 15.2 update. Couple that with the fact I cannot pair car play with my car anymore because of IOS 15.2 and I’m considering taking back all 4 iphone 13 pro Max’s back to T-Mobile and getting 4 new Samsung phones. Apples engineers are losing it.

As @Beerstar and others note from a position of technical knowledge on HCI and UX (User eXperience) design, the tab changes are objectively poorer at performing the same job (i.e. not just subjective 'do not like the change' but objective 'do this for a living and the change is harder to use'). There is plenty of feedback through the middle part of last year (2021) which indicated objection to the new layout proposals but that didn't manifest in the releases. Perhaps Apple does not see Safari/browser choice as a market differentiator. Safari looking more like the other equivalents for market presence or user portability or future code maintenance may be more important than considering the usability of the Apple option.

This feels counter-intuitive given that Apple in general and iPhones in particular have usually focused on user experience being exemplary, but it is difficult to identify other non-UX rationales for Apple making this change on tabs - why expend effort on redevelopment and user education/impact plus create dissatisfaction in a part of the existing user base for an objectively inferior UI/UX?

Regardless of the reason, Apple's direction of travel on browser appears to be 'go with the crowd' even if that is a worse UX.

I hate it and it’s been ruining my week. I feel unorganized and I want to throw my phone at the wall. I also hate that my “favorites” and reading list are in oldest to newest order, making it a disaster to retrieve any new relevant information I want to access.

I hate having to look up how to change things because I’m a.d.d and I just want it to work hahahaa

I just tried landscape and my open tabs still appear as tiles instead of a stack. So user unfriendly. The stack allowed for quick review of open tabs. Please allow the option to switch back. I only updated a few hours ago and immediately came searching for a solution. Sadly, none to be found.

In response to Claylala

Turning the phone sideways to landscape position does not give me the stacked view of web pages. All it does is make the tiles smaller so more appear on the page. It’s a bit better but not as efficient and easy as the stacked view.

I forgot to mention that I cannot pair CarPlay anymore. Whereas my old iPhone 11 Pro Max paired & synced flawlessly with my 2010 VW Jetta. Now it asks for a code displayed on my cars radio. My cars radio is not setup for this. What idiot engineer decided to not only screw up Safari with the tiled vs tabbed webpages, but screw up the functionality of CarPlay. Apple? These phones are GONE this week in exchange for Samsung units. That’s $4800 worth of phones I’m giving back. Buh bye Apple.

It's been months and I have yet to see a fix for this cumbersome, ill-advised change. I tend to have a lot of open tabs for writing projects and general research, and for me tile view has made Safari so awkward I consider it unusable. Can't see anything because the tiles are too small. I have closed tabs by accident multiple times. it's infuriating. I've owned iPhones from the first model and this is one of the most frustrating, pointless changes I can recall.

I just downloaded Opera because it has stacked view tabs, though it's not as smooth and efficient as Safari's used to be. It'll do, though. Hopefully Apple will come to its senses and un-fix what wasn't broken. Tile view could've just been an option, but no.

I do a lot of research at home using Apple devices and STACKED Tabs of website views are critical for finding research studies with complex titles. The spread out display was also fairly convenient WHEN THEY WERE ALL TOGETHER & I could SEE ALL of them.

I’m disgusted & furious w/ what I see as Apple’s arrogance, taking MY website tabs and randomly dumping them into their STUPID USELESS ‘TAB GROUPS’ on my iPad & MAC. I wasted hours of precious time trying to make ‘tab groups’ work for me. The next phone & laptop & desktop will NOT be Apple.

it says “70 tabs”, as if it is indirectly complaining, unable to manage all the tabs that I have opened.

also, it scrolls to top on restart, so I have to scroll down 70 tabs to reach the most recent and resume work.

This is bad design by Apple.

I just downloaded the new ios update today hoping that they will listen to the many people who wants the stacked open tabs view and bring it back again but nope, still the tile google copycat one. It's so frustrating. If there is a way to change it to the stacked view, please let me know.

Alas, it seems like we're stuck with it unless we change browsers. I moved to Opera, which does stacked-view tabs, and I made sure to let the company know why I switched to their platform. Very happy with it now that I've had time to familiarize. Took me hours to transfer all my open tabs and my favorites, but I'm done with Safari unless stacked-view tabs return. Especially because of Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Adobe, I'm sick to death of forced changes to basic features and functions that worked well and made sense.

As a side note: I'm also finding that I've become very impatient with familiar, reliable things being suddenly upended since the pandemic threw life into chaos. Just leave things alone if they're not broken. Our phones have meant more to us than ever over the past year-plus, and Apple might be smarter at this particular moment to NOT constantly tinker with them just for the heck of it.

I have a fort of dyslexia that has to do with saccadic dysfunction of the eye. The new tab display is extremely difficult for my eye to scan. The stacked form was easier to scroll through as well. This is terrible please make it an option to revert. This is why I don’t use chrome app.

Thanks for the advice, but unfortunately, it did not fix the issue. This new update made the safari design utterly atrocious and a larger issue to navigate compared to the old one. If apple updates with an option to switch between both styles that would be most helpful

Curious to know how your effort at adaptation worked out for you. Are you happy (enough) with it?

As I've said a couple of times on this topic, I said "screw it" and switched my browser to Opera. No regrets.