When I bought a new MacBook Pro last year, I was catching up to a new interface element that had been around for a while, but that I had never used: the TouchBar. This bar replaces the function keys with a set of dynamic “buttons,” allowing you to control certain things on your Mac. You can adjust volume and brightness, and different apps provide different virtual buttons on the bar.
There’s one app where it’s is really useless: Safari. On my MacBook Pro, with Safari frontmost, I have six tabs, but the TouchBar only shows two of them; that’s because the other four are “pinned tabs,” that are minimized at the left of the tab bar. There’s no way to use the TouchBar to access those tabs. (I’ve tried to scale the image so it looks about the same as what I see.)
And even if I did want to use the TouchBar to access different Safari tabs, there’s nothing on the TouchBar that helps me see what the tabs contain. Okay, I can see that the one on the left is Facebook, but what if I have a lot more tabs open?
I would have expected the TouchBar to display favicons, which would at least give a better idea of which sites are open in each tab. It’s clear that an option to do this would make it a lot more usable.