Prevent Giant Tabs in Safari

Using Sierra 10.13.6

I suddenly noticed today that my safari browser has giant tabs

I am pretty sure that earlier I had fixed sized tabs and not the ones which run across my entire screen.

Fixed-width tabs were used up until Safari 4. Starting with either Safari 5 or 6 (I'm not sure which because I can't find a screenshot of Safari 5's tab bar), the style switched to full-width. Safari 6 was released alongside macOS Mountain Lion in 2012.

So, unless you just upgraded from a version of macOS earlier than Mountain Lion, your tabs have always been full-width.

Unfortunately, I don't know of a way to change the style back to fixed-width if that's what you prefer.

There's a SIMBL plugin called SafariStand with an option "Suppress Tab Bar Width" that nicely reverts the tab bar width back to a shorter size.

As Safari versions and MacOS versions increase, and introduce things like SIP and library validation, it gets more and more difficult to get SIMBL and this plugin in particular to install & work.

I've used it on El Capitan and Safari 10, and after that I haven't (yet) had the patience to try and get it installed/working.

The various forks for SafariStand that I've seen/been tracking:

https://github.com/hetima/SafariStand "Safari 8.0.x / OS X 10.10.x"

https://github.com/anakinsk/SafariStand "Safari 11, 10.1 & 10.0 on Yosemite, El Capitan, Sierra and High Sierra"

https://github.com/w0lfschild/SafariStand "Safari 12, 11, 10 on Yosemite, El Capitan, Sierra, High Sierra and Mojave"