3 ms·

Real Firefox and Real Chrome. The iOS versions is just a wrapper around the painfully bad mobile Safari.

hombre_fatal 7y ago
I thought Safari had the best power to battery consumption ratio of all the browsers. I certainly notice it on desktop where I switched to Safari last year, but that's pretty massive on mobile. Safari seems to take this seriously instead of the race to the bottom on performance and resource consumption. I also like features like how Safari extensions are now 1st class apps and its declarative content blocker (1Blocker X being best in class imo). What makes Safari so bad in your eyes?
- Nextgrid 7y ago
  It does indeed win in terms of performance, however the situation in terms of add-ons is depressing. There’s basically no add-on API other than a very limited content blocking API (which doesn’t allow you to do powerful things like uBlock Origin can). (full disclosure: I am a happy Safari user, and the content blocking API is good enough that I tolerate it but I do miss uBlock for sure)
  - hombre_fatal 7y ago
    I added to my comment just as you responded but I ended up looking at the declarative content blocker as an upside after developing my own. Have you tried 1Blocker X? I haven't missed uBlock Origin when using Safari. Though I can certainly appreciate the power of an onRequest(req) at-runtime API that you definitely lose with declarative rules. But for example I have a script that can convert Adblock format rules (like Easylist) into content blocker rules.
    - Nextgrid 7y ago
      1Blocker X is a disaster, and I’m saying this as a customer of the original 1Blocker and an early adopter (pre-order) of 1Blocker X - it appears they’ve given up on updating their block lists and weren’t ever clear on where the lists were sourced from (I want EasyList and I kind of assumed that’s what they used but I could never be sure). I’m currently using AdGuard Pro instead which uses EasyList/EasyPrivacy and can import and convert (to the best of its abilities) uBlock-style lists. The problem with the declarative API is that 1) it’s just not as flexible as uBlock, especially in a world where billions are being poured into bypassing blockers and 2) each blocker extension is limited to 50k rules which is not enough (some apps work around this by registering multiple blocker extensions, but frankly this limitation is BS and should not exist to begin with) and 3) blockers don’t run with the browser, so you have to open the app every so often to update the blocking rules.
- lol768 7y ago
  >What makes Safari so bad in your eyes? The rendering engine is poor. It's probably the browser I have the most trouble with when doing frontend work. iframe scrolling is broken, it's historically suffered from some frustrating flexbox bugs (see https://github.com/philipwalton/flexbugs#flexbug-11 https://github.com/philipwalton/flexbugs#flexbug-11), its Can I use... score lags behind Firefox and Chrome. For a while, it didn't support service workers properly. I could go on.
LeoPanthera 7y ago
What makes it "painfully bad"?
sneak 7y ago
Please do not confuse MobileSafari, an application with features, and UIWebView/WKWebView, a rendering API.

I thought Safari had the best power to battery consumption ratio of all the browsers. I certainly notice it on desktop where I switched to Safari last year, but that's pretty massive on mobile. Safari seems to take this seriously instead of the race to the bottom on performance and resource consumption. I also like features like how Safari extensions are now 1st class apps and its declarative content blocker (1Blocker X being best in class imo). What makes Safari so bad in your eyes?

Nextgrid 7y ago
It does indeed win in terms of performance, however the situation in terms of add-ons is depressing. There’s basically no add-on API other than a very limited content blocking API (which doesn’t allow you to do powerful things like uBlock Origin can). (full disclosure: I am a happy Safari user, and the content blocking API is good enough that I tolerate it but I do miss uBlock for sure)
- hombre_fatal 7y ago
  I added to my comment just as you responded but I ended up looking at the declarative content blocker as an upside after developing my own. Have you tried 1Blocker X? I haven't missed uBlock Origin when using Safari. Though I can certainly appreciate the power of an onRequest(req) at-runtime API that you definitely lose with declarative rules. But for example I have a script that can convert Adblock format rules (like Easylist) into content blocker rules.
  - Nextgrid 7y ago
    1Blocker X is a disaster, and I’m saying this as a customer of the original 1Blocker and an early adopter (pre-order) of 1Blocker X - it appears they’ve given up on updating their block lists and weren’t ever clear on where the lists were sourced from (I want EasyList and I kind of assumed that’s what they used but I could never be sure). I’m currently using AdGuard Pro instead which uses EasyList/EasyPrivacy and can import and convert (to the best of its abilities) uBlock-style lists. The problem with the declarative API is that 1) it’s just not as flexible as uBlock, especially in a world where billions are being poured into bypassing blockers and 2) each blocker extension is limited to 50k rules which is not enough (some apps work around this by registering multiple blocker extensions, but frankly this limitation is BS and should not exist to begin with) and 3) blockers don’t run with the browser, so you have to open the app every so often to update the blocking rules.
lol768 7y ago
>What makes Safari so bad in your eyes? The rendering engine is poor. It's probably the browser I have the most trouble with when doing frontend work. iframe scrolling is broken, it's historically suffered from some frustrating flexbox bugs (see https://github.com/philipwalton/flexbugs#flexbug-11 https://github.com/philipwalton/flexbugs#flexbug-11), its Can I use... score lags behind Firefox and Chrome. For a while, it didn't support service workers properly. I could go on.

LeoPanthera 7y ago

What makes it "painfully bad"?

sneak 7y ago

Please do not confuse MobileSafari, an application with features, and UIWebView/WKWebView, a rendering API.