13 ms·

17 features

202 points by nacs 10y ago

brian_herman 10y ago
Safari Web Technology preview not the one that is in macOS Sierra currently.
- brian_herman 10y ago
  Though that still is a good thing.
nunez 10y ago
Awesome!
ggregoire 10y ago
Honnest question for Safari users: why Safari? I don't really know Safari. I used Chrome on Windows and iOS, and when I moved to OSX I naturally continued with Chrome. And the dev tools are really great.
- wnevets 10y ago
  Im guessing for a large number, its the same reason people still use Microsoft's browser. It's the default and it's good enough.
  - 4ad 10y ago
    You're guessing wrong. I am using Safari because I like Safari the most.
    - wnevets 10y ago
      I didn't say every Safari user, how does your comment prove my comment wrong?
- striking 10y ago
  Battery life. Chrome absolutely obliterates my MBP's battery. edit: this is the same reason I have for hating Electron apps so much.
  - ggregoire 10y ago
    One of my friend who is travelling moved from Chrome to Opera (!) for the battery life reason.
    - eridius 10y ago
      Opera uses Blink now, so I wouldn't expect it to be much better than Chrome.
      - s_kilk 10y ago
        Opera would surely have less built-in botnet than Chrome, maybe that accounts for the lower power consumption ;)
        JustSomeNobody 10y ago
        Were you being sarcastic? I can't tell.
      - gsnedders 10y ago
        Opera's done a lot of work on power consumption and not all of it has as of yet been upstreamed, AFAIK.
- jg 10y ago
  It seems to be a little better for battery life than Chrome. On my aging MacBook Air, every little bit helps.
- evilduck 10y ago
  Because historically on OSX, Safari offered roughly an extra hour and a half of battery life over Chrome.
- SG- 10y ago
  battery life/CPU usage.
- 4ad 10y ago
  Safari on macOS is the only browser on this planet that implements color management correctly. Safari gives me at least three hours of autonomy on my laptop. Chrome burns CPU like crazy. Not to mention that on Youtube (a Google site) 1080p video uses 1% CPU in Safari while 720p video in Chrome (a Google browser) manages to use 80% CPU. Safari is the only browser that can do ad blocking without javascript extensions. Why not Safari?
  - lojack 10y ago
    > Safari on macOS is the only browser on this planet that implements color management correctly. This is one of those things that I almost never noticed until I was working with a site that was using one specific color of orange that was dramatically different from what I had in photoshop. It usually isn't something that concerns me too much, but I was adding the ability for content editors to select primary colors of pages (think a super advanced, easy to use CMS), and with the images selected it was painfully obvious. Took me hours of tweaking settings in photoshop and comparing it to various browsers to finally give up and accept that color management in browsers is broken.
  - Jerry2 10y ago
    >Not to mention that on Youtube (a Google site) 1080p video uses 1% CPU in Safari while 720p video in Chrome (a Google browser) manages to use 80% CPU. This is because Google/YouTube is pushing VP9 streams when they detect that you're using Chrome. It saves them few megs on bandwidth (over H.264) but you suffer for it because VP9 is not hardware accelerated so it chews through your CPU and makes your system less responsive. YouTube/Google also doesn't allow you to set your preference for H.264. It's irresponsible for Google to waste so much electricity for everyone who uses Chrome.
    - dragonwriter 10y ago
      > This is because Google/YouTube is pushing VP9 streams when they detect that you're using Chrome. It saves them few megs on bandwidth (over H.264) but you suffer for it because VP9 is not hardware accelerated VP9 can be hardware accelerated, and AFAIK current Chrome supports hardware acceleration for VP9 with hardware that supports it.
- barumrho 10y ago
  (Not sure how to format this) - Battery life - Bookmark syncing and continuity (opening tabs from any of your other devices) - Content blocker API (so that ad blocker extension doesn't see all of the content) - Not having browsing history sent to Google I use Chrome for Flash content and Facebook.
  - witty_username 10y ago
    I have not heard of Chrome sending browser history without my consent. Source?
  - Oletros 10y ago
    > - Bookmark syncing and continuity (opening tabs from any of your other devices) Is it not the same with Chrome?
- schmidtc 10y ago
  Hot keys for Bookmarks in Favorites Bars (Command+Option+N).
- eridius 10y ago
  Many reasons. Among those I care about: * It's a lot more power-efficient than any other browser. * In my experience, it's often faster than Chrome. * It follows platform conventions. I still get weirded out by Chrome cramming everything into that ⋮ button. * It syncs history, favorites, and open tabs over iCloud to Safari on my phone. It also supports Handoff. * It's not made by Google, a company that I prefer to give as little personal information as possible to. And more generally, it's just more enjoyable to use.
  - petemill 10y ago
    FYI chrome on macOS supports handoff too
    - eridius 10y ago
      Huh, I didn't realize that. Of course, I rarely use Chrome (usually only when I need Flash, which is thankfully almost never). I assume when going iOS -> macOS it hands the URL to your default web browser?
      - leadingthenet 10y ago
        No, it only works between Chrome on Desktop and Chrome on iOS, and in my experience it's nowhere near as seamless as the one baked into Safari.
        eridius 10y ago
        Apparently it actually works going from Desktop Chrome -> iOS Safari. I don't have Chrome installed on my iPhone, but if I have Chrome active on my desktop, Handoff will open the page in Safari.
        netheril96 10y ago
        It works both ways.
      - cpmsmith 10y ago
- joeflow 10y ago
  I tend to try and use Safari when I'm at home just surfing the web or checking email because of battery life. If I'm not plugged in I will use Safari over Chrome. When I'm actually working I tend to use Chrome just because I enjoy the experience and have all the plugins I enjoy using there. Generally I am also plugged into a wall outlet when actively working in a browser (I'm primarily a frontend developer). I just got the new tMBP 13" and have been making it a habit to use Safari over Chrome on it. It's a pretty noticeable different so far. I'm going to try and record some usage information over the next few weeks and see how much of a difference it really makes. In general though it appears that with Safari and general browsing I can get the advertised 10 hours or so. If I start using chrome (even just browsing) it turns to 7 or so hours.
  - 4ad 10y ago
    > If I start using chrome (even just browsing) it turns to 7 or so hours. And if you start youtube (even 480p), it drops to 3 hours with Chrome, while still getting the 10 hours with Safari.
- fredsir 10y ago
  More power efficient which is key because I use a laptop all the time, and often on battery power. It fits better with macOS conventions compared to Chrome and Firefox. It's faster. Safari content blockers (I use 1Blocker) seems to not slow down page loading at all compared to conventional ad-blockers on both Safari and Chrome, which does. I used Chrome on Mac for years. Then Safari became better, and then it kept getting better with the addition of the Safari Developer Preview[1]. It's not even funny anymore how far behind Chrome is compared to Safari when it comes to UI and UX. [1]: https://developer.apple.com/safari/technology-preview/ https://developer.apple.com/safari/technology-preview/
  - Alex3917 10y ago
    The power efficiency isn't even close. The 2016 MBP battery lasts about 10 hours running Safari versus 3 hours running Chrome. I've never particularly liked Safari, but I'm close to switching myself because Chrome is such a disaster. From the energy impact tab on the Activity Monitor: Chrome: 43 Safari: 0.3
    - fredsir 10y ago
      It's great, right? :)
    - reacharavindh 10y ago
      +1. I use Safari for everything work, personal stuff like banking and news. Chrome incognito for you know what.
      - Aldo_MX 10y ago
        Purchasing secret presents, the use case incognito was designed for ;)
        JorgeGT 10y ago
        You joke, but if you make the mistake of looking at a possible present in a non-incognito window, Amazon ads will now obnoxiously feature said present in all websites that you visit...
- masterleep 10y ago
  Chrome looks really ugly, like it was designed by a programmer.
- mstade 10y ago
  I used Chrome before but gave Safari another go about a year and a half ago, haven't looked back since and now Safari is my main browser on macOS. I only open Chrome when I need to test something, or come across a site that puts up a screen saying nothing but Chrome is supported (regardless of whether or not it works.) My main reason for switching is efficiency. Safari is blazing fast, and reasonably memory efficient as far as browsers go even with 100+ tabs. Chrome would deplete my memory even with only a moderate amount of tabs open. Also Safari seems much more power efficient.
- shawkinaw 10y ago
  Nicer looking, faster (feeling, at least), iCloud Keychain.
- mikey_p 10y ago
  Battery, reliability, memory usage, are all part of the reason I use Safari. I've found Chrome to be fairly unstable. We had a case last year with our corporate website relaunch, where a single user reported that our site was crashing Chrome for them and we probably had 60 or 70 people try to unsuccessfully recreate the bug, we tried Browserstack and Sauce to try and had no luck. Another time we had a few users report incorrect fonts and traced that to a bad build of Chrome that was out for a week or so and the users that updated that week had broken fonts until they updated again. Then there was the time one of our analytics suites broke when tracking certain links on our site since the request body to their service contained 'cgi-bin' in it, they blackholed the tracking request, and their (rather poor quality) script blocked the page until the request returned - no timeout set at all. This would completely lock Chrome for 10+ minutes when Safari would force a timeout after 20 seconds or so. All those stories make it clear to me that the most stable option is Safari. p.s. Not to mention the number of sites I run into now that only work in Chrome because the developers can't be bothered to do cross browser testing. Chrome is like the new Internet Explorer at this point.
- joeblau 10y ago
  I was a Web Dev for about a decade and I swore by Firefox (started using at 0.6) and then later I switched to Chrome. Recently I've been solely focused on mobile application development and I don't really need most of the development tools that Chrome offers (even though Safari has most of them). At the end of the day, I just need a fast browser without bloat to go here, stack overflow, google, web-based documentation sites, github, product hunt, designer news, youtube and a few other sites. Chrome is extremely bloated and resource intense on macOS. Each subsequent tab you open linearly increase your CPU and memory Usage. I need CPU cycles to build code, not load gifs from a website that I have in the background. Safari has way better memory and CPU management than any other browser on macOS. The only thing I use Chrome for are websites that require Flash since it's built in. I just had my friend who uses Chrome take a screenshot of his Activity monitor - He has one "Google Chrome Helper" that's using more resources than my entire Safari browsing experience - http://imgur.com/pMHkKsz http://imgur.com/pMHkKsz
- JustSomeNobody 10y ago
  It's efficient. It's fast. I don't use plugins (for ads I use GasMask). Bookmarks and tabs sync with my iPhone.
- MBCook 10y ago
  Why not? It's incredibly efficient, fast, follows the standard OS X design guidelines, doesn't spy on me constantly. It's what Chrome was BUILT FROM (later they forked). The only thing Chrome seems to offer is a big plugin ecosystem (which I've never cared about, the one or two I care about exist for Safari) and the fact it's the same browser on other OSes which doesn't matter to me. It's often the little things. I like being able to use AirDrop and Handoff with my phone/iPad. I like having a native print dialog (who the hell thought THAT was a good idea?). I like my laptop not trying to melt it's self when I open a few pages. If you were stuck on Windows when FF was nearly dead and Chrome and IE were your only choices I get why people chose it. If you were on a Mac at the time I've never seen the appeal.
- untog 10y ago
  For me, it feels a lot faster, and drains power a lot slower. I agree that the dev tools are poor. But I've gotten into the habit of running a "dev" browser and a "user" browser, so Safari works out great - I do dev work in Chrome, and when it (infrequently) crashes, I don't lose my personal stuff.
- interpol_p 10y ago
  I find it faster and more power efficient. It also fits with the rest of macOS much better than Chrome. Many long time Mac users are fussy about app consistency. For example, initially Chrome and Firefox didn't even support text services in their rendering areas — stuff like the system-wide dictionary lookup. That the developers of these browsers ignored what made macOS unique really put me off. (As did hitting the dictionary shortcut on my keyboard when reading and not getting a result.) One feature I use a lot in Safari is the reader view. Pressing a button turns a page into a consistently rendered and better-typeset version which focuses on the content only. It even collates multi-page content into a single page. I'm sure there are extensions on Chrome which do this (perhaps it even does it natively now?). But Apple's treatment of this feature makes me feel that they prioritise the same things about the web that I do: text and links. Everything else is just noise because I spend 95% of my time on the web reading. Chrome still does not feel like a first class citizen of macOS. I'm not sure it even saved website passwords in your Keychain, though maybe this has changed. Edit: oh I also like Safari's gesture based controls better when browsing with a trackpad. For example when you swipe to go back to the previous page, the entire page slides over and you can peek at the previous page underneath the "stack." You don't even need to trigger the actual back action to read content from the previous page if you naturally let your fingers rest mid-gesture. Last time I tried Chrome the "go back" gesture displayed a large, ugly arrow overlay on the left edge of the page. It did not correlate 1:1 with the position of my fingers. It did not show me the previous page's content until I completed the gesture, then it reloaded the previous page. I really did not like this.
  - leadingthenet 10y ago
    All of your points still remain true to this day, however Firefox does indeed have a reader view which works pretty nicely. No Keychain integration is an issue for me as well.
  - Jerry2 10y ago
    >One feature I use a lot in Safari is the reader view. This is one of the primary reasons why I used Safari when on Mac. Reader view is instantaneous and works really well on almost every site. You can also customize fonts/colors etc which means you can always read article in distraction-free mode and read them that best suits your eyes. I am now using Linux most of the time (MBP got stolen, didn't buy a new one yet) and I miss Reader view the most. It's a HUGE timesaver.
- lobster_johnson 10y ago
  Safari has always been faster and less resource-hungry than the competition on OS X/macOS. (The competition here meaning mostly Chrome and Firefox; before Opera migrated to use Chrome's renderer/engine, it was also similarly lightweight.) To me, Safari also feels more like a native app. I still use Chrome for development, because Safari's development tools are next to completely useless. I don't even know why they bother.
- kccqzy 10y ago
  The dev tools are indeed better on chrome. Which is why I mainly develop in Chrome. But just for casual reading? Safari is much better.
- ttepasse 10y ago
  I don't like the chrome of Chrome. Safari looks like it belongs here. Chrome does not. Also: • The resources thing. I often use Safari windows with 100+ open tabs. • I like Safari's tabs implementation better: new tabs go to the far right. In the past all browsers with tabs did that, now Safari seems to be the last holdout while the others seem to put new tabs to the right of the opening tab. I can understand the logic there but I find it unusable without a tree-like visualization like some Firefox extensions. If there is a browser which had this natively I'd be tempted. I still miss OmniWeb. Safari's ⌘W-behavior for the new tab now jumps back to the tab which opened the newly closed tab. I really hope that isn't a hint of bad days to come. Why this heavy focus on tabs? I basically use my default browser window as a LIFO stack of tabs to read. It works great for me, thirteen years and counting. I don't want that to change. • When Safari went through its bad time, the WebKit2 area, I was tempted. Another detail which held me at the time: Safaris Pinch to Zoom on the trackpad was superior to everything else elsewhere. It still is but Firefox and Chrome at least but a little bit work into it.
  - makecheck 10y ago
    While they don’t really list it as an official product anymore, to this day they produce test builds of OmniWeb 6.0: http://omnistaging.omnigroup.com/omniweb/ http://omnistaging.omnigroup.com/omniweb/
- rconti 10y ago
  Chrome is ugly. Chrome forces tabs on you (the real estate is wasted whether or not you believe in tabs; I don't, I think it's the sign of a failed window manager). Chrome is slow. I use Chrome every day because all of my work stuff on my work laptop goes in Chrome, and all of my personal stuff goes in Safari, because that's what I like the best and use at home. Separate browsers mean separate session tokens for work vs personal gmail.
- comex 10y ago
  Chrome on iOS is really Safari when it comes to rendering engine, which is what the current news is about...
- draw_down 10y ago
  Trackpad gestures, mostly. It's better on battery life too. But for development I use Chrome, I agree its dev tools are better than Safari's. (And Firefox's, which are really unfortunate.) EDIT: Forgot the reading mode. That one is really important.
- nobleach 10y ago
  if you're an iPhone user, you get one choice Mobile Safari... or a webkitWebView that is Safari. Yes, you can install other browsers, but they are only allowed to use Safari's rendering engine.
- vbezhenar 10y ago
  For me Safari works good enough, so I don't have many reasons to switch. Chrome development tools are marginally better, so it's still installed and I use it for some heavy JavaScript development, but outside of this I prefer Safari. Funny enough, I had to use Windows 10 for a short time, and Edge was actually not that bad. I remember IE being the terrible product and everyone used some other browser. Now Edge is usable and there's no much reason to install Chrome there as well.
- DavideNL 10y ago
  i also use Safari on my Macbook; Firefox sucks because it still doesn't support the smooth "pinch to zoom", which Safari and Chromium have had for years. To me zooming seems such a basic functionality which is used so often, it feels like driving a car without rear mirrors or something... Chromium/Chrome = Google, which i avoid due to lack of privacy. One of the things i dislike in Safari is the lack of many extensions/addons which Chromium/Firefox do have. I wonder why this functionality is missing ?
- ctolkien 10y ago
  >I used Chrome on Windows and iOS Chrome on IOS is really Safari under the covers.
starik36 10y ago
Can I use lists Safari as not supporting WebRTC. I thought that was part of the spec. http://caniuse.com/#search=webrtc http://caniuse.com/#search=webrtc
- TheAceOfHearts 10y ago
  WebRTC is a browser spec, it's not part of ECMAScript the language. That's what this submission is referring to.
- mstade 10y ago
  Not the ES spec; one is JavaScript the language, the other (WebRTC) is part of the browser ecosystem.
franciscop 10y ago
At the same time, right now it's relly backwards[1]. Luckily the shelf-life of Safari is much shorter than others, so we'll be able to use fetch() natively without polyfills soon-ish if you target modern browsers. [1] http://caniuse.com/#feat=fetch http://caniuse.com/#feat=fetch
- sotojuan 10y ago
  This is the important list. I don't care about ES2015 or more—we'll always use Babel. I care about Service Workers and WebRTC more.
  - CoryG89 10y ago
    Even if you use Babel your users will still benefit from less polyfill.
  - TheAceOfHearts 10y ago
    We'll use babel for builds. Most development will be happening on modern browsers, so being able to reduce compilation requirements improves your iteration cycle and it makes it much easier to debug. Source maps have lots of issues. Compare debugging async/await usage between the compiled and native version. If you're working on a larger project, compilation times start becoming a huge pain. Cutting down on the number of transformations reduces development latency.
    - untog 10y ago
      Of course, all of this is true. It makes the life of a developer marginally easier. Unless there are edge cases where Babel and browser-native functionality differs. Either way, WebRTC and Service Workers would allow us to expose totally new functionality to users. Huge difference.
  - shellac 10y ago
    I wish someone would come up with something better than webrtc. It's such a mess, and appears to be impossible to standardise.
anovikov 10y ago
Now add WebRTC and it will be fine :)
- MBCook 10y ago
  There are numerous comments like this and they ALWAYS come up on Safari posts. Why exactly do so many people care?
  - feross 10y ago
    People want to use Hangouts and Skype in their browsers, WebTorrent (https://webtorrent.io/ https://webtorrent.io/), and file sending services like https://dropub.com/ https://dropub.com/, to name just a few
    - MBCook 10y ago
      Hangouts/Skype don't surprise me much. Didn't realize you could use it for torrents. Personally I'm heavy in the native app camp instead of trying to turn everything into webpages, so I guess that explains why I don't really know what this feature is and haven't been waiting for it. Thanks
lionheart 10y ago
If only it supported WebRTC like even Edge does. I'm running a WebRTC startup and its killing me that Safari and Mobile Safari don't support it at all.
- timdeneau 10y ago
  Well, at least it's in development: https://webkit.org/status/ https://webkit.org/status/
johnhenry 10y ago
Post like these bother me because they lack context. Sure, the claim in the title is true, (and will remain true, unless something goes terribly wrong at Apple) but by the very nature of the linked resource, at some point it won't tell you whether or not the claim is valid.
- coldtea 10y ago
  >but by the very nature of the linked resource, at some point it won't tell you whether or not the claim is valid. What are you talking about? The linked resource is a JS feature matrix that shows how each browser does against those 2015/16/17 features, and it shows exactly what Safari tip passes.
  - johnhenry 10y ago
    When other browsers/engines reach compliance, it will be impossible to tell that Safari was "first".
    - coldtea 10y ago
      So? The post is meant for immediate consumption.
- cooper12 10y ago
  I mean the title is the whole context. If you're worried about the table not being static, one can ideally refer to an archive [0] (just saved it) or since this is an open source project that is version controlled, the specific revision [1] displayed. [0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20161208203812/http://kangax.github.io/compat-table/es2016plus/ https://web.archive.org/web/20161208203812/http://kangax.git... [1]: https://github.com/kangax/compat-table/blob/559825d41e7b8773d8c466d3c5bb00535b7b23b6/es2016plus/index.html https://github.com/kangax/compat-table/blob/559825d41e7b8773...
  - johnhenry 10y ago
    I wouldn't say that I'm "worried", but the title states a fact that will likely, at some point, not be supported by the given link.
untog 10y ago
This is great, but I wish Apple pushed out updates to Safari (particularly on iOS) more frequently - as it is, we might not see this on phones until September 2017. Not to mention WebRTC, Service Workers... you can't polyfill them like you can ES2015.
nfriedly 10y ago
Does it support JS Modules? (I don't think the kangax compatibility table has a test for that, but the last time I looked, no browser supported it yet.)
- yusukesuzuki 10y ago
  The compat table does not include the modules (See the rationale here[1]). But STP19 supports the modules. [1]: https://github.com/kangax/compat-table/issues/316#issuecomment-252433401 https://github.com/kangax/compat-table/issues/316#issuecomme...
malekpour 10y ago
It is supporting ES2015/16/17 completely but its ES5 support is 99%. All other major browsers have 100% support ES5 for years. http://kangax.github.io/compat-table/es5/#test-Miscellaneous http://kangax.github.io/compat-table/es5/#test-Miscellaneous
- wux 10y ago
  Unless I'm mistaken, the same resource shows Chrome 55/56/57 is also at 99%? I'd be curious if a JavaScript guru could give a little more context about the significance of that last 1%: namely, for Safari, "enumerable properties can be shadowed by non-enumerables," and for Chrome, "Array.prototype.sort: compareFn must be function or undefined."

202 points by nacs 10y ago

brian_herman 10y ago

Safari Web Technology preview not the one that is in macOS Sierra currently.

brian_herman 10y ago
Though that still is a good thing.

nunez 10y ago

Awesome!

ggregoire 10y ago

Honnest question for Safari users: why Safari? I don't really know Safari. I used Chrome on Windows and iOS, and when I moved to OSX I naturally continued with Chrome. And the dev tools are really great.

wnevets 10y ago
Im guessing for a large number, its the same reason people still use Microsoft's browser. It's the default and it's good enough.
- 4ad 10y ago
  You're guessing wrong. I am using Safari because I like Safari the most.
  - wnevets 10y ago
    I didn't say every Safari user, how does your comment prove my comment wrong?
striking 10y ago
Battery life. Chrome absolutely obliterates my MBP's battery. edit: this is the same reason I have for hating Electron apps so much.
- ggregoire 10y ago
  One of my friend who is travelling moved from Chrome to Opera (!) for the battery life reason.
  - eridius 10y ago
    Opera uses Blink now, so I wouldn't expect it to be much better than Chrome.
    - s_kilk 10y ago
      Opera would surely have less built-in botnet than Chrome, maybe that accounts for the lower power consumption ;)
      - JustSomeNobody 10y ago
        Were you being sarcastic? I can't tell.
    - gsnedders 10y ago
      Opera's done a lot of work on power consumption and not all of it has as of yet been upstreamed, AFAIK.
jg 10y ago
It seems to be a little better for battery life than Chrome. On my aging MacBook Air, every little bit helps.
evilduck 10y ago
Because historically on OSX, Safari offered roughly an extra hour and a half of battery life over Chrome.
SG- 10y ago
battery life/CPU usage.
4ad 10y ago
Safari on macOS is the only browser on this planet that implements color management correctly. Safari gives me at least three hours of autonomy on my laptop. Chrome burns CPU like crazy. Not to mention that on Youtube (a Google site) 1080p video uses 1% CPU in Safari while 720p video in Chrome (a Google browser) manages to use 80% CPU. Safari is the only browser that can do ad blocking without javascript extensions. Why not Safari?
- lojack 10y ago
  > Safari on macOS is the only browser on this planet that implements color management correctly. This is one of those things that I almost never noticed until I was working with a site that was using one specific color of orange that was dramatically different from what I had in photoshop. It usually isn't something that concerns me too much, but I was adding the ability for content editors to select primary colors of pages (think a super advanced, easy to use CMS), and with the images selected it was painfully obvious. Took me hours of tweaking settings in photoshop and comparing it to various browsers to finally give up and accept that color management in browsers is broken.
- Jerry2 10y ago
  >Not to mention that on Youtube (a Google site) 1080p video uses 1% CPU in Safari while 720p video in Chrome (a Google browser) manages to use 80% CPU. This is because Google/YouTube is pushing VP9 streams when they detect that you're using Chrome. It saves them few megs on bandwidth (over H.264) but you suffer for it because VP9 is not hardware accelerated so it chews through your CPU and makes your system less responsive. YouTube/Google also doesn't allow you to set your preference for H.264. It's irresponsible for Google to waste so much electricity for everyone who uses Chrome.
  - dragonwriter 10y ago
    > This is because Google/YouTube is pushing VP9 streams when they detect that you're using Chrome. It saves them few megs on bandwidth (over H.264) but you suffer for it because VP9 is not hardware accelerated VP9 can be hardware accelerated, and AFAIK current Chrome supports hardware acceleration for VP9 with hardware that supports it.
barumrho 10y ago
(Not sure how to format this) - Battery life - Bookmark syncing and continuity (opening tabs from any of your other devices) - Content blocker API (so that ad blocker extension doesn't see all of the content) - Not having browsing history sent to Google I use Chrome for Flash content and Facebook.
- witty_username 10y ago
  I have not heard of Chrome sending browser history without my consent. Source?
- Oletros 10y ago
  > - Bookmark syncing and continuity (opening tabs from any of your other devices) Is it not the same with Chrome?
schmidtc 10y ago
Hot keys for Bookmarks in Favorites Bars (Command+Option+N).
eridius 10y ago
Many reasons. Among those I care about: * It's a lot more power-efficient than any other browser. * In my experience, it's often faster than Chrome. * It follows platform conventions. I still get weirded out by Chrome cramming everything into that ⋮ button. * It syncs history, favorites, and open tabs over iCloud to Safari on my phone. It also supports Handoff. * It's not made by Google, a company that I prefer to give as little personal information as possible to. And more generally, it's just more enjoyable to use.
- petemill 10y ago
  FYI chrome on macOS supports handoff too
  - eridius 10y ago
    Huh, I didn't realize that. Of course, I rarely use Chrome (usually only when I need Flash, which is thankfully almost never). I assume when going iOS -> macOS it hands the URL to your default web browser?
    - leadingthenet 10y ago
      No, it only works between Chrome on Desktop and Chrome on iOS, and in my experience it's nowhere near as seamless as the one baked into Safari.
      - eridius 10y ago
        Apparently it actually works going from Desktop Chrome -> iOS Safari. I don't have Chrome installed on my iPhone, but if I have Chrome active on my desktop, Handoff will open the page in Safari.
      - netheril96 10y ago
        It works both ways.
    - cpmsmith 10y ago
joeflow 10y ago
I tend to try and use Safari when I'm at home just surfing the web or checking email because of battery life. If I'm not plugged in I will use Safari over Chrome. When I'm actually working I tend to use Chrome just because I enjoy the experience and have all the plugins I enjoy using there. Generally I am also plugged into a wall outlet when actively working in a browser (I'm primarily a frontend developer). I just got the new tMBP 13" and have been making it a habit to use Safari over Chrome on it. It's a pretty noticeable different so far. I'm going to try and record some usage information over the next few weeks and see how much of a difference it really makes. In general though it appears that with Safari and general browsing I can get the advertised 10 hours or so. If I start using chrome (even just browsing) it turns to 7 or so hours.
- 4ad 10y ago
  > If I start using chrome (even just browsing) it turns to 7 or so hours. And if you start youtube (even 480p), it drops to 3 hours with Chrome, while still getting the 10 hours with Safari.
fredsir 10y ago
More power efficient which is key because I use a laptop all the time, and often on battery power. It fits better with macOS conventions compared to Chrome and Firefox. It's faster. Safari content blockers (I use 1Blocker) seems to not slow down page loading at all compared to conventional ad-blockers on both Safari and Chrome, which does. I used Chrome on Mac for years. Then Safari became better, and then it kept getting better with the addition of the Safari Developer Preview[1]. It's not even funny anymore how far behind Chrome is compared to Safari when it comes to UI and UX. [1]: https://developer.apple.com/safari/technology-preview/ https://developer.apple.com/safari/technology-preview/
- Alex3917 10y ago
  The power efficiency isn't even close. The 2016 MBP battery lasts about 10 hours running Safari versus 3 hours running Chrome. I've never particularly liked Safari, but I'm close to switching myself because Chrome is such a disaster. From the energy impact tab on the Activity Monitor: Chrome: 43 Safari: 0.3
  - fredsir 10y ago
    It's great, right? :)
  - reacharavindh 10y ago
    +1. I use Safari for everything work, personal stuff like banking and news. Chrome incognito for you know what.
    - Aldo_MX 10y ago
      Purchasing secret presents, the use case incognito was designed for ;)
      - JorgeGT 10y ago
        You joke, but if you make the mistake of looking at a possible present in a non-incognito window, Amazon ads will now obnoxiously feature said present in all websites that you visit...
masterleep 10y ago
Chrome looks really ugly, like it was designed by a programmer.
mstade 10y ago
I used Chrome before but gave Safari another go about a year and a half ago, haven't looked back since and now Safari is my main browser on macOS. I only open Chrome when I need to test something, or come across a site that puts up a screen saying nothing but Chrome is supported (regardless of whether or not it works.) My main reason for switching is efficiency. Safari is blazing fast, and reasonably memory efficient as far as browsers go even with 100+ tabs. Chrome would deplete my memory even with only a moderate amount of tabs open. Also Safari seems much more power efficient.
shawkinaw 10y ago
Nicer looking, faster (feeling, at least), iCloud Keychain.
mikey_p 10y ago
Battery, reliability, memory usage, are all part of the reason I use Safari. I've found Chrome to be fairly unstable. We had a case last year with our corporate website relaunch, where a single user reported that our site was crashing Chrome for them and we probably had 60 or 70 people try to unsuccessfully recreate the bug, we tried Browserstack and Sauce to try and had no luck. Another time we had a few users report incorrect fonts and traced that to a bad build of Chrome that was out for a week or so and the users that updated that week had broken fonts until they updated again. Then there was the time one of our analytics suites broke when tracking certain links on our site since the request body to their service contained 'cgi-bin' in it, they blackholed the tracking request, and their (rather poor quality) script blocked the page until the request returned - no timeout set at all. This would completely lock Chrome for 10+ minutes when Safari would force a timeout after 20 seconds or so. All those stories make it clear to me that the most stable option is Safari. p.s. Not to mention the number of sites I run into now that only work in Chrome because the developers can't be bothered to do cross browser testing. Chrome is like the new Internet Explorer at this point.
joeblau 10y ago
I was a Web Dev for about a decade and I swore by Firefox (started using at 0.6) and then later I switched to Chrome. Recently I've been solely focused on mobile application development and I don't really need most of the development tools that Chrome offers (even though Safari has most of them). At the end of the day, I just need a fast browser without bloat to go here, stack overflow, google, web-based documentation sites, github, product hunt, designer news, youtube and a few other sites. Chrome is extremely bloated and resource intense on macOS. Each subsequent tab you open linearly increase your CPU and memory Usage. I need CPU cycles to build code, not load gifs from a website that I have in the background. Safari has way better memory and CPU management than any other browser on macOS. The only thing I use Chrome for are websites that require Flash since it's built in. I just had my friend who uses Chrome take a screenshot of his Activity monitor - He has one "Google Chrome Helper" that's using more resources than my entire Safari browsing experience - http://imgur.com/pMHkKsz http://imgur.com/pMHkKsz
JustSomeNobody 10y ago
It's efficient. It's fast. I don't use plugins (for ads I use GasMask). Bookmarks and tabs sync with my iPhone.
MBCook 10y ago
Why not? It's incredibly efficient, fast, follows the standard OS X design guidelines, doesn't spy on me constantly. It's what Chrome was BUILT FROM (later they forked). The only thing Chrome seems to offer is a big plugin ecosystem (which I've never cared about, the one or two I care about exist for Safari) and the fact it's the same browser on other OSes which doesn't matter to me. It's often the little things. I like being able to use AirDrop and Handoff with my phone/iPad. I like having a native print dialog (who the hell thought THAT was a good idea?). I like my laptop not trying to melt it's self when I open a few pages. If you were stuck on Windows when FF was nearly dead and Chrome and IE were your only choices I get why people chose it. If you were on a Mac at the time I've never seen the appeal.
untog 10y ago
For me, it feels a lot faster, and drains power a lot slower. I agree that the dev tools are poor. But I've gotten into the habit of running a "dev" browser and a "user" browser, so Safari works out great - I do dev work in Chrome, and when it (infrequently) crashes, I don't lose my personal stuff.
interpol_p 10y ago
I find it faster and more power efficient. It also fits with the rest of macOS much better than Chrome. Many long time Mac users are fussy about app consistency. For example, initially Chrome and Firefox didn't even support text services in their rendering areas — stuff like the system-wide dictionary lookup. That the developers of these browsers ignored what made macOS unique really put me off. (As did hitting the dictionary shortcut on my keyboard when reading and not getting a result.) One feature I use a lot in Safari is the reader view. Pressing a button turns a page into a consistently rendered and better-typeset version which focuses on the content only. It even collates multi-page content into a single page. I'm sure there are extensions on Chrome which do this (perhaps it even does it natively now?). But Apple's treatment of this feature makes me feel that they prioritise the same things about the web that I do: text and links. Everything else is just noise because I spend 95% of my time on the web reading. Chrome still does not feel like a first class citizen of macOS. I'm not sure it even saved website passwords in your Keychain, though maybe this has changed. Edit: oh I also like Safari's gesture based controls better when browsing with a trackpad. For example when you swipe to go back to the previous page, the entire page slides over and you can peek at the previous page underneath the "stack." You don't even need to trigger the actual back action to read content from the previous page if you naturally let your fingers rest mid-gesture. Last time I tried Chrome the "go back" gesture displayed a large, ugly arrow overlay on the left edge of the page. It did not correlate 1:1 with the position of my fingers. It did not show me the previous page's content until I completed the gesture, then it reloaded the previous page. I really did not like this.
- leadingthenet 10y ago
  All of your points still remain true to this day, however Firefox does indeed have a reader view which works pretty nicely. No Keychain integration is an issue for me as well.
- Jerry2 10y ago
  >One feature I use a lot in Safari is the reader view. This is one of the primary reasons why I used Safari when on Mac. Reader view is instantaneous and works really well on almost every site. You can also customize fonts/colors etc which means you can always read article in distraction-free mode and read them that best suits your eyes. I am now using Linux most of the time (MBP got stolen, didn't buy a new one yet) and I miss Reader view the most. It's a HUGE timesaver.
lobster_johnson 10y ago
Safari has always been faster and less resource-hungry than the competition on OS X/macOS. (The competition here meaning mostly Chrome and Firefox; before Opera migrated to use Chrome's renderer/engine, it was also similarly lightweight.) To me, Safari also feels more like a native app. I still use Chrome for development, because Safari's development tools are next to completely useless. I don't even know why they bother.
kccqzy 10y ago
The dev tools are indeed better on chrome. Which is why I mainly develop in Chrome. But just for casual reading? Safari is much better.
ttepasse 10y ago
I don't like the chrome of Chrome. Safari looks like it belongs here. Chrome does not. Also: • The resources thing. I often use Safari windows with 100+ open tabs. • I like Safari's tabs implementation better: new tabs go to the far right. In the past all browsers with tabs did that, now Safari seems to be the last holdout while the others seem to put new tabs to the right of the opening tab. I can understand the logic there but I find it unusable without a tree-like visualization like some Firefox extensions. If there is a browser which had this natively I'd be tempted. I still miss OmniWeb. Safari's ⌘W-behavior for the new tab now jumps back to the tab which opened the newly closed tab. I really hope that isn't a hint of bad days to come. Why this heavy focus on tabs? I basically use my default browser window as a LIFO stack of tabs to read. It works great for me, thirteen years and counting. I don't want that to change. • When Safari went through its bad time, the WebKit2 area, I was tempted. Another detail which held me at the time: Safaris Pinch to Zoom on the trackpad was superior to everything else elsewhere. It still is but Firefox and Chrome at least but a little bit work into it.
- makecheck 10y ago
  While they don’t really list it as an official product anymore, to this day they produce test builds of OmniWeb 6.0: http://omnistaging.omnigroup.com/omniweb/ http://omnistaging.omnigroup.com/omniweb/
rconti 10y ago
Chrome is ugly. Chrome forces tabs on you (the real estate is wasted whether or not you believe in tabs; I don't, I think it's the sign of a failed window manager). Chrome is slow. I use Chrome every day because all of my work stuff on my work laptop goes in Chrome, and all of my personal stuff goes in Safari, because that's what I like the best and use at home. Separate browsers mean separate session tokens for work vs personal gmail.
comex 10y ago
Chrome on iOS is really Safari when it comes to rendering engine, which is what the current news is about...
draw_down 10y ago
Trackpad gestures, mostly. It's better on battery life too. But for development I use Chrome, I agree its dev tools are better than Safari's. (And Firefox's, which are really unfortunate.) EDIT: Forgot the reading mode. That one is really important.
nobleach 10y ago
if you're an iPhone user, you get one choice Mobile Safari... or a webkitWebView that is Safari. Yes, you can install other browsers, but they are only allowed to use Safari's rendering engine.
vbezhenar 10y ago
For me Safari works good enough, so I don't have many reasons to switch. Chrome development tools are marginally better, so it's still installed and I use it for some heavy JavaScript development, but outside of this I prefer Safari. Funny enough, I had to use Windows 10 for a short time, and Edge was actually not that bad. I remember IE being the terrible product and everyone used some other browser. Now Edge is usable and there's no much reason to install Chrome there as well.
DavideNL 10y ago
i also use Safari on my Macbook; Firefox sucks because it still doesn't support the smooth "pinch to zoom", which Safari and Chromium have had for years. To me zooming seems such a basic functionality which is used so often, it feels like driving a car without rear mirrors or something... Chromium/Chrome = Google, which i avoid due to lack of privacy. One of the things i dislike in Safari is the lack of many extensions/addons which Chromium/Firefox do have. I wonder why this functionality is missing ?
ctolkien 10y ago
>I used Chrome on Windows and iOS Chrome on IOS is really Safari under the covers.

starik36 10y ago

Can I use lists Safari as not supporting WebRTC. I thought that was part of the spec. http://caniuse.com/#search=webrtc http://caniuse.com/#search=webrtc

TheAceOfHearts 10y ago
WebRTC is a browser spec, it's not part of ECMAScript the language. That's what this submission is referring to.
mstade 10y ago
Not the ES spec; one is JavaScript the language, the other (WebRTC) is part of the browser ecosystem.

franciscop 10y ago

At the same time, right now it's relly backwards[1]. Luckily the shelf-life of Safari is much shorter than others, so we'll be able to use fetch() natively without polyfills soon-ish if you target modern browsers. [1] http://caniuse.com/#feat=fetch http://caniuse.com/#feat=fetch

sotojuan 10y ago
This is the important list. I don't care about ES2015 or more—we'll always use Babel. I care about Service Workers and WebRTC more.
- CoryG89 10y ago
  Even if you use Babel your users will still benefit from less polyfill.
- TheAceOfHearts 10y ago
  We'll use babel for builds. Most development will be happening on modern browsers, so being able to reduce compilation requirements improves your iteration cycle and it makes it much easier to debug. Source maps have lots of issues. Compare debugging async/await usage between the compiled and native version. If you're working on a larger project, compilation times start becoming a huge pain. Cutting down on the number of transformations reduces development latency.
  - untog 10y ago
    Of course, all of this is true. It makes the life of a developer marginally easier. Unless there are edge cases where Babel and browser-native functionality differs. Either way, WebRTC and Service Workers would allow us to expose totally new functionality to users. Huge difference.
- shellac 10y ago
  I wish someone would come up with something better than webrtc. It's such a mess, and appears to be impossible to standardise.

anovikov 10y ago

Now add WebRTC and it will be fine :)

MBCook 10y ago
There are numerous comments like this and they ALWAYS come up on Safari posts. Why exactly do so many people care?
- feross 10y ago
  People want to use Hangouts and Skype in their browsers, WebTorrent (https://webtorrent.io/ https://webtorrent.io/), and file sending services like https://dropub.com/ https://dropub.com/, to name just a few
  - MBCook 10y ago
    Hangouts/Skype don't surprise me much. Didn't realize you could use it for torrents. Personally I'm heavy in the native app camp instead of trying to turn everything into webpages, so I guess that explains why I don't really know what this feature is and haven't been waiting for it. Thanks

lionheart 10y ago

If only it supported WebRTC like even Edge does. I'm running a WebRTC startup and its killing me that Safari and Mobile Safari don't support it at all.

timdeneau 10y ago
Well, at least it's in development: https://webkit.org/status/ https://webkit.org/status/

johnhenry 10y ago

Post like these bother me because they lack context. Sure, the claim in the title is true, (and will remain true, unless something goes terribly wrong at Apple) but by the very nature of the linked resource, at some point it won't tell you whether or not the claim is valid.

coldtea 10y ago
>but by the very nature of the linked resource, at some point it won't tell you whether or not the claim is valid. What are you talking about? The linked resource is a JS feature matrix that shows how each browser does against those 2015/16/17 features, and it shows exactly what Safari tip passes.
- johnhenry 10y ago
  When other browsers/engines reach compliance, it will be impossible to tell that Safari was "first".
  - coldtea 10y ago
    So? The post is meant for immediate consumption.
cooper12 10y ago
I mean the title is the whole context. If you're worried about the table not being static, one can ideally refer to an archive [0] (just saved it) or since this is an open source project that is version controlled, the specific revision [1] displayed. [0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20161208203812/http://kangax.github.io/compat-table/es2016plus/ https://web.archive.org/web/20161208203812/http://kangax.git... [1]: https://github.com/kangax/compat-table/blob/559825d41e7b8773d8c466d3c5bb00535b7b23b6/es2016plus/index.html https://github.com/kangax/compat-table/blob/559825d41e7b8773...
- johnhenry 10y ago
  I wouldn't say that I'm "worried", but the title states a fact that will likely, at some point, not be supported by the given link.

untog 10y ago

This is great, but I wish Apple pushed out updates to Safari (particularly on iOS) more frequently - as it is, we might not see this on phones until September 2017. Not to mention WebRTC, Service Workers... you can't polyfill them like you can ES2015.

nfriedly 10y ago

Does it support JS Modules? (I don't think the kangax compatibility table has a test for that, but the last time I looked, no browser supported it yet.)

yusukesuzuki 10y ago
The compat table does not include the modules (See the rationale here[1]). But STP19 supports the modules. [1]: https://github.com/kangax/compat-table/issues/316#issuecomment-252433401 https://github.com/kangax/compat-table/issues/316#issuecomme...

malekpour 10y ago

It is supporting ES2015/16/17 completely but its ES5 support is 99%. All other major browsers have 100% support ES5 for years. http://kangax.github.io/compat-table/es5/#test-Miscellaneous http://kangax.github.io/compat-table/es5/#test-Miscellaneous

wux 10y ago
Unless I'm mistaken, the same resource shows Chrome 55/56/57 is also at 99%? I'd be curious if a JavaScript guru could give a little more context about the significance of that last 1%: namely, for Safari, "enumerable properties can be shadowed by non-enumerables," and for Chrome, "Array.prototype.sort: compareFn must be function or undefined."