23 ms·

Just want to put here that if you're using a Mac and haven't tried Safari recently, you're missing out. A few things: - Battery life is fantastic compared to C

• lern_too_spel 6y ago
  Safari privacy is a dumpster fire that has been ignored for more than a year now. https://www.imore.com/google-engineer-says-apples-intelligent-tracking-prevention-issue-has-not-been-fixed https://www.imore.com/google-engineer-says-apples-intelligen... Also, it doesn't support clearing data upon closing the browser if you're interested in that feature.
• izacus 6y ago
  Does it still have adblocking limitations? The same that Chrome wanted to implement?
  • nikomen 6y ago
    Yes, there's a few features of WebExtensions that Safari chose not to implement. I'm having a hard time finding the article and discussion about this. The missing features prevent ad blockers like uBlock Origin from working.
    • qz2 6y ago
      This was a complete deal breaker for me. Half the internet is unusable without a decent ad blocking implementation these days and a decent one is virtually impossible with the charred remains of the API they left behind. This was actually one of the (many) things that motivated me to migrate away from OSX.
      • jkelleyrtp 6y ago
        You're not going to find the same AdBlockers that Chrome/FF have, but you will find AdBlockers that _work_. I agree that ads make the web unusable, but I've been content with the various blockers I've tried on Safari, and there's more every day. I use ABP, but 1Blocker and Wipr look good, and Safari's got the first 30% of privacy/adblocking taken care of with their various privacy and reader features.
        • qz2 6y ago
          1Blocker is a rip off. Wipr doesn't work properly. ABP lets a lot of ads through. There is nothing that approaches uBlock at all.
          • tpush 6y ago
            > Wipr doesn't work properly. How does it not work properly? Been using it and am pretty satisfied so far.
          • therealmarv 6y ago
            try Adguard. It's the best one for this Apple interface for adblocking.
            • saagarjha 6y ago
              …which requires an Electron app to constantly be running for it to really work. Not great.
              • aledthemathguy 6y ago
                why does it work like this in macos? (meaning - it seems to be running an outside process to block ads, unlike in Chrome where the process is internal to the browser, is this correct? as a windows user i was puzzled by this when installing adguard
                • 6y ago
  • lstamour 6y ago
    It now supports WebExtensions like Firefox: https://www.wwdcnotes.com/notes/wwdc20/10665/ https://www.wwdcnotes.com/notes/wwdc20/10665/ That said, it prefers its existing adblock implementation over extensions that block network requests manually, as that functionality is disabled, I think? https://developer.apple.com/documentation/safariservices/safari_web_extensions/assessing_your_safari_web_extension_s_browser_compatibility https://developer.apple.com/documentation/safariservices/saf... Note also that the existing Safari adblock implementation is not subject to the hard limit of 30,000 rules that Chrome had announced in their V3 manifest format, as you can enable more rule sets to get around length limits. And now, on macOS Safari, you can add companion extensions that could monitor and modify the page after the fact if you need additional scripts to run, but at the cost of privacy and battery life... I personally use AdGuard, 1Blocker and (my favourite) Small Technology Foundation’s Better Blocker (formerly Ind.ie). I use all three of them (but without any companion extensions, for privacy) on both iOS and macOS and rarely see any ads except the occasional static image that sometimes slips through. edit: I reported the ads I did see and they’re gone now from the sites that had them. So yes, I see no current limitations with Apple’s adblocking system except that it doesn’t apply to other apps, just Safari or other apps using Safari.
    • saagarjha 6y ago
      WebKit has a 50K rule limit per extension.
      • least 6y ago
        AdGuard gets around this by running a different “extension” for different lists.
        • saagarjha 6y ago
          It's not a great workaround because then your exclusion rules don't work across lists.
          • hombre_fatal 6y ago
  • cactus2093 6y ago
    Honestly I've been finding ad blockers much less useful over time. Seems like every page I visit these days blocks the content until I disable it, if it's not an outright paywall. I think I spend more time disabling my ad blocker temporarily than I save by not loading ads in the first place. Do others find that ad blockers actually still work well? Meanwhile, reader mode in Safari will generally hide every ad on the page. It doesn't help with the privacy or battery life or security benefits that ad blockers provide, but in terms of just the user experience, at this point at least for me it's far superior to using an ad blocker. So I've been using safari more and more just for this. Edit: Why am I getting downvoted? I don't think I'm violating any guidelines or saying anything inflammatory here, just curious about other people's experiences using ad blockers.
    • irrational 6y ago
      I almost exclusively see that on News websites, but I don't visit those very often, so for the most part this doesn't affect me.
    • circularfoyers 6y ago
      Can you mention some websites that you can't view with uBlock Origin? I haven't seen any and I've been using it for as long as I can remember. Do you also have the Unbreak and Annoyances filter lists enabled?
    • ballenf 6y ago
      The downvotes are maybe because you replied to a question of “is xyz still broken?” with “you don’t really need xyz.” For me it was kind of an annoying place to make that point. Many people use of ad block really more to protect from the surveillance aspects of ads than their aesthetics. Ads on big sites don’t really look terrible.
      • hombre_fatal 6y ago
        I also find generalizations from such unlikely scenarios a bit annoying. You (poster above) have to consistently visit the worst sites on the internet, and so many that whitelisting doesnt suit you, to conclude the adblocking isn’t useful. If that really describes what you do online, then you need some self-awareness over how little you have in common with everyone else and then temper your epiphanies accordingly.
• devxpy 6y ago
  Ehm, push notifications?
  • kitsunesoba 6y ago
    Desktop Safari has had push notifications since like… 10.9 Mavericks. Only mobile Safari doesn't support them.
    • paulgb 6y ago
      I thought this too, but it seems Safari only supports the Notifications API for when a site is open, not Web Push for background notifications? https://caniuse.com/push-api https://caniuse.com/push-api
      • kitsunesoba 6y ago
        Wouldn't this be true for any browser? Unless other browsers leave daemons running at all times, which would be kinda creepy.
        • Spivak 6y ago
          Most desktop browsers don't run daemons but they do "soft close" for this feature to work. If you completely kill your browser then notifications and service workers stop working.
      • antew 6y ago
        For Safari specifically you have to use Apple's push notification service (APNS), which is a lot of hassle compared to web push. There is a ticket open for adding support into Safari, but it probably won't happen anytime soon. https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=182566 https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=182566
• whalesalad 6y ago
  I haven't upgraded from Mojave but I've also been daily driving Safari for the last few years. I gotta admit that in the butt dyno department everything feels significantly faster than any other browser. I made the switch when I realized how much more power efficient it is and haven't looked back. I only use FFX and Chrome for testing, although I tend to use FFX a lot for the developer tools and Vue integration. That being said, Safari has extremely polished dev tools that are highly capable.
  • Scarbutt 6y ago
    Are the firefox dev tools getting udpates? the last news about it was that the whole team got fired.
• leon_ 6y ago
  lack of ublock (or any other real adblocker) makes safari a non-starter for me. I've been using Safari from 2008 on up until they decided to kill addons. Then I moved to Firefox.
• InTheArena 6y ago
  I really need Firefox's container models. The battery life for Firefox is awful, but everything else seems great.
  • spurgu 6y ago
    Yeah I love containers and don't think I could go back to any browser without them ever again. On FF now after using Brave for ~2 years (and Chrome for ages before that). I haven't noticed any more battery drain compared to Chrome, but both are worse than Safari (or so I've heard).
    • jtdev 6y ago
      Containers in FF have made me so much more productive as a consultant. I’ve been considering trying to develop a “containers” extension for Safari, but I suspect that the requisite APIs are not available...
• minimaxir 6y ago
  For adblocking in Safari, I recommend Wipr. It's not free but it's very unintrusive.
• jb1991 6y ago
  I've been under the assumption that FF with its ABP, uBlock, and Privacy Badger extensions, as well as the included FF tracking protections were the toughest you can get. Is Safari is up to that level now?
  • fsociety 6y ago
    No, Safari is not bad at all but lack of third-party ad blockers hinders it.
    • saagarjha 6y ago
      Safari has many third-party adblockers.
      • josephcsible 6y ago
        It doesn't have uBlock Origin, and the ones that it does have aren't as good.
      • Scarbutt 6y ago
        Not one that can block youtube ads though.
        • saagarjha 6y ago
          Content blockers work fine in blocking YouTube ads.
        • bengale 6y ago
          Wipr seems to block YouTube ads for me.
        • robertoandred 6y ago
          This is a lie.
• pgib 6y ago
  The second the React and Redux Devtools extensions are available, I'm all in!
• heipei 6y ago
  I actually would use Safari on OS X if I still retained a way of syncing history / bookmarks / password with my Google account to my other Chrome instances on Android / Linux.
• wuunderbar 6y ago
  Sounds great. Only thing really holding me back is no Safari for Windows. I use Windows for about 20% of my screentime, and I'd like for my browser to be synced across every single device I use.
• dmitryminkovsky 6y ago
  Probably because they use unexposed, undocumented APIs, but non-hardware accelerated CSS animations that trigger repaints (width, top, etc) in Safari are much, much smoother than in Chrome and FF. They look almost as good as accelerated animations. Unfortunately I can't really commit to using Safari on desktop because they don't have good ad blocking extensions (please correct me if I'm wrong). Really like FF for this. But I really appreciate how Apple is committed to improving and highlighting Safari. After totalitarian regimes, browser engine monoculture is the greatest threat to Internet freedom I can think of.
  • wdb 6y ago
    I thought 1Blocker is quite a reasonable ad blocker for Safari: https://1blocker.com https://1blocker.com
    • harrygeez 6y ago
      I've tried few of the highest rated ones in App Store but they all break sites in different ways sadly. None of them really come close to uBlock
      • wdb 6y ago
        Even uBlock was blocking sites for me so that was expected behaviour :)
  • brundolf 6y ago
    They have AdblockPlus, which is what I use on Chrome anyway
  • thiht 6y ago
    I settled on AdGuard. It has a pretty good UI and works fairly well. I don't know if it's as good as uBlock Origin, but it feels like it.
• merb 6y ago
  the biggest gripe on my side was always the favbar which I put icons in, unfortunatly not on safari.... only icon mode is really bad there.
• devilduck 6y ago
  it really is very good but the way extensions works is keeping it from ever becoming my main from FF
• doomlaser 6y ago
  Besides its ad blocking limitations, I'm disappointed that Safari doesn't support WebGL 2 by default. It is the only one of the mainline browsers that doesn't. Firefox, Chrome, and even Edge have had it enabled for eons.
  • alwillis 6y ago
    I recall reading something from an Apple engineer about fixing something before enabling WebGL 2.0 by default. But it's only a click away: Develop > Experimental Features > WebGL 2.0
    • doomlaser 6y ago
      The problem persists when wanting to deploy something using webgl2, since the vast majority of Safari users will not have changed the default.
      • sroussey 6y ago
        This. Also, it’s more than one touch away on iPhone. And I’m not sure you can force it in a web view.
  • modeless 6y ago
    Good news: WebGL 2 support is now enabled by default in Safari Technology Preview, as of September. Please give it a try now before it goes out in a Safari release and file bugs if you see any issues.
• doitdoitdoit 6y ago
  As long as the Firefox Containers idea is not implemented I will be sticking with Firefox. It’s just one of those “no-shit” killer features that a browser touting its privacy-centricity cannot afford to not have
• trevorishere 6y ago
  The lack of integration with other services is why I don't use it. I stick to MSFT Edge which also has improved battery life over Chrome.
  • aledthemathguy 6y ago
    are you saying edge on macos is better than chrome on macos? curious about how this is even possible, considering google has been at this (meaning - developing chrome for macos) for more than a decade (i think)
    • trevorishere 6y ago
      Wont use Chrome because of the Google services. But given Edge is Chromium, they're benefiting from that development.
• mdoms 6y ago
  I'm a begrudging Mac user (work provides a computer) and there's absolutely no way I want to dig myself deeper into this terrible ecosystem. They already force me to create a throwaway Apple ID just to install particular pieces of free software.
• alwillis 6y ago
  It's noticeably faster on the same hardware in Big Sur than it was in Catalina.
• harrygeez 6y ago
  All of these are of course great but I remember I stopped using it because some JavaScript-heavy sites lagged on it. Also I need tab syncing with my Android phone and adblocking wasn't great on Safari
• jedberg 6y ago
  Every since the last few betas of Big Sur, I can't play Youtube videos in Safari anymore. It always gives a playback error. They all work fine if I copy the URL and load it in Chrome. Is this just me or anyone else?
  • brundolf 6y ago
    I think I've had issues before where YouTube refused to play videos at all while I had my AdBlocker blocking the ads. Not sure whether it was intentional.
  • angott 6y ago
    It was fixed in the first Release Candidate. Are you running the latest version?
    • jedberg 6y ago
      Ah no I didn't do last week's update yet. Haven't had a few hours to be without my computer. Thanks for the tip.
  • lijf 6y ago
    No, not just you, I’ve had the same problem, and I have youtube premium. Though it’s not consistent, sometimes it works, which makes me think that it might be related to some choice of the content creator.
    • uptown 6y ago
      YouTube premium you say? Grab yourself a free Stadia controller: https://stadia.google.com/SdFGljSduV5z https://stadia.google.com/SdFGljSduV5z
• brundolf 6y ago
  Yep, I've been using it for a couple years on my personal laptop and it's mostly great. And remember: your browser doesn't have to be open-source to chip away at the Chrome monopoly. Every website that sees an uptick in non-Chrome visits will have to adjust their product priorities accordingly.
• qubex 6y ago
  I started using the first Beta of Safari back when I was running OS X 10.2 ‘Jaguar’ and Internet Explorer was the default browser on the Mac. Basically I’ve been using Safari (desktop and mobile) for eighteen years in a row. I usually have Chrome on my machine too, for one reason or another, but I don’t think I fire it up more than a handful of times a year.
• irrational 6y ago
  Because of how bad Safari is on iOS I won't use it on MacOS out of pure fury at how Apple is holding back the mobile web.
• amativos 6y ago
  A few things that kept me from using Safari full time (instead of Chrome) last time I tried it: - On my 15" Macbook Pro (mid 2014), when you speed up videos in Safari the sound is distorted and weird, while in Chrome it sounds properly sped up. I use this a lot when watching educational videos. - Youtube videos max out at 1080p. - While there are decent ad blocking extensions, they're not as good as uBlock Origin. - Web pages are fast and smooth, but the browser UI doesn't consistently feel as quick and snappy as Chrome. - I once saw some rendering bugs when loading old reddit -- parts of the page were black. This was Safari 14.
  • steve_musk 6y ago
    With Big Sur safari now supports 4K YouTube videos
    • tpush 6y ago
      Anybody know if Safari software or hardware decodes VP9 or AV1 YouTube videos? If software, does it lead to fans blowing?
      • alwillis 6y ago
        VP9 videos run smoothly on Safari—no fans.
        • evanjd 6y ago
          Not just on Safari either, VP9 decoding is HW accelerated in Chrome on Big Sur (as of Chrome 86)
  • booblik 6y ago
    Good news for you then: the new Safari on Big Sur lets you play 4K HDR videos on youtube.
  • Uupis 6y ago
    uBlock Origin is glorious. Safari 14 has resolved an inconsistent, tedious bug I kept experiencing (most often on reddit): changing the URL query parameters in the address bar and hitting return immediately resulted in the page merely being reloaded. Had to wait a solid second or so before hitting return to have a decent chance of getting the correct page. But I've grown much, much too fond of this "No Javascript unless I say so, etc etc" experience to give it up without a substantial other benefit.
• ksec 6y ago
  It is great, but: 1. Just lost a few hundred Tabs from last session. Not the first time this has happened to me on Safari. ( Firefox used to have this problem as well, they implemented multiple LastSession.json to combat the problem and it is basically a thing of the past. ) 2. Fav Icons meant they are no longer showing the Tab Description once you have a dozen tabs as they will shrink to Icons Size. So you either have normal Tabs or Tabs with Fav Icons, not both. ( This is new in Safari 14 ) 3. Show Tab Overview will reload all the tabs, including those that were in idle / unload state. If you are a heavy tab user you should not do this. Having a hundred tabs reload will cause hundreds of GB of Data written to your SSD. Basically shortening its lifespan. 4. AFAIK ( I could be wrong ), Extensions still requires you to have an $99/ year developer account. Some of my favourite extensions are now either paid or can no longer be used. Apart from that, yes it is very good.
  • sefrost 6y ago
    In response to point 1, were you able to use History > Reopen All Windows from Last Session?
    • spullara 6y ago
      You can set this as the default as well.
    • ksec 6y ago
      Nope, it was blank, because the Plist files have nothing in it. And I cant rescue it either. In Firefox they make lastsession.json and lastoeesion.bak where .bak was a backup and could be restored from within UI setting. I think they also had the .bak zipped somewhere in case all things fails, you can manually restore some part of it. Although the frequency of that zip creation was something like daily so you still lose some part of tabs. There were additional guarantee they put in place so last session will never be overwritten again or blank out. But that was a very long time ago when I was still a heavy Firefox users and follows its development very closely. If I remember correctly those features development and debugging happened on Mozillazine.
  • enriquto 6y ago
• thiht 6y ago
  > - Actually decent dev tools (used to be terrible) As a daily user of Safari, I can't let you say that. The devtools suck. The network tools suck (why is it so hard to find the request payload??), the elements tools suck, there are basically no extensions (React, Redux, etc.). They are just horrible. As much as I try to use only Safari, I still fallback on Firefox Dev when I need some real devtools. I use it for the reasons you mention but it's a really bad browser. It's the only browser that still has consistent rendering issues in 2020: sometimes parts of the pages stay blank, CSS grid support has inconsistencies with other browsers, and some basic layouts fail only on Safari. Another one of my pet peeves with Safari is text selection. It's the worst I have ever seen: https://imgur.com/qC7amU1 https://imgur.com/qC7amU1 It has the potential to be good, but it's just not.
  • steve_adams_86 6y ago
    The network tools drive me insane. It's a major part of why I can't use the dev tools routinely.
  • ultrarunner 6y ago
    Yeah, the devtools have come a long way but there's still some friction there. At this point it might just be because I'm used to Chrome's and I just need a little exercise in mental plasticity. However, eventually I'd like to take a look at porting Vue devtools to Safari, if only for iOS. Maybe I'm just old enough to remember the bad old days, but browser bugs seem very few and far between. One I've found is Chrome's implementation of backdrop-filter is extremely buggy, while Safari works 100% of the time. Specifically it seems that two sibling elements cannot both specify a backdrop-filter in Chrome. I work on a rather large SPA and it has only one browser hack: a dummy div that works around Chrome (and thus Edge's) implementation.
    • girvo 6y ago
      The browser bugs/differences I run into these days aren’t surprising; they live at the edges with features that aren’t 100% complete usually, and I know that going in. Long gone are the days of surprising cross browser bugs, I’ve found
• ngrilly 6y ago
  I work and live in Sweden since one year, but I don't speak Swedish. For that reason, the one thing I miss in Safari and Firefox is the Google Translate integration in Chrome, on macOS and iOS. A life saver, honestly.
  • saagarjha 6y ago
    Safari added translation support this year, although the number of languages it supports is fairly small at the moment.
  • xodice 6y ago
    Safari has translation built in, at least in Safari 14.
    • ngrilly 6y ago
      Yes, but no Swedish yet as far as I know.
      • xodice 6y ago
        Ahhh, ok. Thanks for the info!
  • alwillis 6y ago
    Yeah, it's built-in to Safari now: https://support.apple.com/guide/safari/translate-a-webpage-beta-ibrw646b2ca2/14.0/mac/11.0 https://support.apple.com/guide/safari/translate-a-webpage-b...
    • ngrilly 6y ago
      Yes, but no Swedish yet as far as I know.
• mikewhy 6y ago
  And my favorite: - Pinned tabs are actually pinned tabs, not a small tab at the side of a single window that can still be easily closed
  • hombre_fatal 6y ago
    So many times I accidentally close my pinned tabs from cmd-w and then have to remember what they were, slowly remembering as I need them again which is why I’d have them pinned in the first place.
• jjd33 6y ago
  You have not tried FF dev tools.
• DevKoala 6y ago
  Safari is my favorite browser. It is only missing some sort of containers or personas functionality. Those features are really good in Chrome/Firefox.
  • greggman3 6y ago
    yes but of course it only runs on apple devices. I use all OSes so I prefer a browser that syncs across all of them
    • DevKoala 6y ago
      I get that. I stick to the Apple ecosystem and it all just works. I often think about building a Windows machine for games, but quickly lose interest.
• beached_whale 6y ago
  Prior to Big Sur I found that it stuttered one sites with scrolling, like Twitter. I would like to use it, but it got too annoying, Firefox is fine. This is on a 16" MB Pro with i9 and lots of ram. We'll see after I upgrade
• damnyou 6y ago
  * no tab syncing with Android or Windows or Linux * no uBlock Origin * further deepening an abusive relationship
• joejohnson 6y ago
  What is the best ad blocker / content blocker for Safari now?
• zabil 6y ago
  > - Native support for keychain + fingerprint Been using Safari for almost a year now, and this is one of my favourite features.
• sfblah 6y ago
  What's behind the battery life being so much better?
  • maigret 6y ago
    That’s because the M1 processor comes from a mobile heritage that’s always been focused on efficiency. The fact that they started an architecture decades after x86 allowed them to learn from its errors, remove its complexity and tune it for low energy usage. At least that’s my superficial understanding. There are probably good articles on that topic.
• 3327 6y ago
  Just want to put here the long term consequences of supporting closed ecosystem Apple: -A future of monolithic internet instead of a flourishing forrest. -Technological advances driven by singular forces - i.e ultra thin laptops. -The decimation of small but potentially impactful hardware innovation that my flourish one day. Don’t get me wrong - i write this post on a Mac, for the same reason you all use it. Much of the technology is now mature enough but Apple’s muscle and patent have now become an inhibiting force. Thus this is my last Mac, last iphone. hopefully this resonates with someone, and instead of picking holes in a 5 bullet point post you focus on the bigger message here. Because there is one.
  • hungrywolfinc 6y ago
    Seconded.
  • mlyle 6y ago
    You know, I waffle on this. I don't think Apple is big enough in computing (as opposed to mobile) to be such a scary monolithic force. I've been off Apple laptops for a few years, but I might go back soon. The new M1 is basically in the direction that I think computing should have gone a decade ago (RISC, increased integration into processor package, heterogeneous processing). Intel didn't succeed in taking us to such a great place, so I'm hoping Apple pushes things along. And, of course, AMD silicon is flourishing too, which is nice. Apple's been a far better steward of the internet and of computing than Intel had been-- perhaps mostly because of Apple's limited market share here.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
• laichzeit0 6y ago
  I mainly use Brave now, one killer feature is the “Open Private Tab with Tor”. That and Ad blocking out the box. Is Safari’s privacy any better than that?
• pkamb 6y ago
  You can still only open about 15 tabs, after which the Safari tab bar turns into a completely unusable horizontally-scrolling list. Chrome solved this a decade ago... just keep shrinking the tabs down to Favicon size or smaller. Safari just added Favicon images last year, and I don't even think they're visible by default. --- EDIT: Favicon-only compact tabs to have actually been changed/added in Safari 14 for Big Sur!? Which would actually probably push me to switch (and upgrade to Big Sur, even). > https://9to5mac.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2020/07/macOS-Big-Sur-Tabs.jpg https://9to5mac.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2020/07/macOS...
  • jkelleyrtp 6y ago
    My current tab bar on 10.15.7 with Safari 14, you don't even need to upgrade to Big Sur. Cmd + hover lets you preview a page or close it. https://i.imgur.com/NS6Zjd6.png https://i.imgur.com/NS6Zjd6.png
    • lilyball 6y ago
      Cmd doesn't do anything. The preview shows up on hover after a second.
      • coliveira 6y ago
        Cmd allows you to close the tab without activating it.
        • saagarjha 6y ago
          You should be able to do that too without holding down command.
  • Dylan16807 6y ago
    > Chrome solved this a decade ago... just keep shrinking the tabs down to Favicon size or smaller. Safari just added Favicon images last year, and I don't even think they're visible by default. Don't give them too much credit. For a very long time, the minimum size for chrome tabs resulted in them hiding the favicon, becoming a completely useless row of triangles. And to add insult to injury, the tabs were still big enough to show favicons if they wanted to.
• tomjen3 6y ago
  Does it have anything like Firefox containers and NoScript? The first is a must for privacy reasons and I would be very shocked if FF without javascript running didn't beat the pants of Safari with it for almost all sites.
• cle 6y ago
  What is it about Safari that leads to it performing better than the competitors, and why can't they seem to figure it out? Is it because Safari is using undocumented APIs that only Apple is allowed to use? If so, that's a deal breaker for me right there.
  • pat2man 6y ago
    It seems to me that Google assumes Chrome is the only app you have open. It is optimized for performance for the sites you have open, and it doesn't care about the performance of other apps you are using. This is in line with Google's revenue model. Safari on the other hand wants to make sure your whole computer is responsive, and has good battery life. If native apps work better than web apps that is fine. This is in line with Apple's revenue model.
• perfect_wave 6y ago
  Until I can wrong uBlock Origin on Safari I'm entirely unable to switch back.
• pier25 6y ago
  A lot of Apple users also have devices outside the Apple ecosystem. It really doesn't matter how good Safari is if you can't use it in your Android phone or Windows machine.
  • ViViDboarder 6y ago
    Yep. Not supported on Linux so I’m a Firefox user.
• akmarinov 6y ago
  The biggest thing from Chrome for me is multiple users to switch between home and work contexts - I don't think there's something like that on Safari?
• different_sort 6y ago
  I'm glad adblockers are back. I'm not sure if it ever truly left, but the moment there was a bit of resistance I was happy to jump ship to FF.
• samatman 6y ago
  My beef with macOS Safari (I use it) is simply that they don't render tab switching on the touch bar as favicons. I'm looking down on the touch bar, and it's an indecipherable blur of basically identical tiny renders of web pages. I've never once found it useful, and the tab view has favicons (finally), if the touch bar had them I would likely use touch bar switching fairly frequently. To be fair, no other browser does this obvious thing, either. I don't understand it.
• domano 6y ago
  Man, i just wish i could sync history across all devices between safari and chrome. This pulls me back to chrome every time, due to my android phone and windows gaming pc.
• arduinomancer 6y ago
  It's silly but I can't stand using Safari because the bookmarks bar doesn't show favicons.
• mi_lk 6y ago
  Anyone have recommendations for vim simulator plugins?
  • _nhynes 6y ago
    If you mean like Vimium, there's Vimari [https://github.com/televator-apps/vimari https://github.com/televator-apps/vimari].
• dchuk 6y ago
  I would love to use safari, but I am a big fan of having separate chrome windows for different google accounts (personal vs work) and I don't think safari can handle this.
  • spurgu 6y ago
    You should check out Firefox containers. Going back to Chrome and multiple profiles would feel so last century in comparison. In FF you can choose a specific container for each tab. The containers are color coded so you can easily which tab is in which container.
• Aldipower 6y ago
  Sorry, as someone who maintains and develops a web application, from my perspective Safari is the new Internet Explorer. I had to wrote so many workarounds for Safari now, it is just annoying. And you even can't write real bug reports for it! The worst was an incorrect daylight saving time handling which drove me nuts, because some users had problems with the application and some not.
• sweetlucipher 6y ago
  The latest Safari breaks many of the WebGL demos on Shadertoy where Chrome has zero issues. I haven't investigated the reason but that could affect more than just games. TensorflowJS relies on WebGL backend for heavy model weight lifting (lots of puns)
  • om2 6y ago
    Could you share which specific ones? In Safari 14 we changed our WebGL to be fully based on ANGLE, and that fixed more compact issues than it caused, but there may still be some bug tail which we are trying to clean up in updates.
    • greggman3 6y ago
      AFAIK Safari still has WebGL2 behind a flag which means many Shadertoy shaders will not run without enabling experimental features
    • sweetlucipher 6y ago
      Sorry for the very late reply. Contrary to the other response which I find baffling, it’s not a WebGL2 vs WebGL1 issue. Safari 14 on Catalina was able to render 4 out of the 6 shader demos on the Shadertoy homepage on a MacBook Pro 16 2020 with AMD Radeon 5600. Chrome was able to render all. Obviously, if it was a case of WebGL version support either all would run or none would run depending on the supported version. That comment really made no sense. Anyway, I had to return the MBP 16 as I wasn’t happy with it’s performance when the browser has to deal with multiple GPU contexts. I’m waiting for an M1 laptop and it won’t arrive till next month. My old MBP 15 does not have Catalina so it doesn’t have the latest Safari. Hope that helps.
• rsp1984 6y ago
  This is all nice and fine and I agree that it's become a very capable browser in many regards, but its lack of support for uBlock Origin is a complete deal breaker for me.
  • bengale 6y ago
    Wipr does a brilliant job.
• j0ej0ej0e 6y ago
  I deffo want to try this, but I'm torn because reddit enhancement suite is not supported
• bengale 6y ago
  Pinned tabs in safari are brilliant.
• beamatronic 6y ago
  Is there anyway to switch between two or three different Keychains?
• dekhn 6y ago
  I have absolutely zero interest in using a browser that is locked to a single platform. I move constantly between Windows and Linux (I don't have any Mac machines right now) and the idea of using a different browser on each platform seems crazy.
  • xnx 6y ago
    Agree. The beauty/power of the browser is to create a layer over the OS (Windows/Mac/Android) so that you don't need to care much about the OS.
  • reader_mode 6y ago
    I'm kind of in a same boat with switching (and I use an Android phone) but I use OSX primarily - still using Safari on MBP is a noticeably better experience than chrome or FF - fan noise alone is worth the switch.
  • iddqd 6y ago
    FWIW, iCloud syncs quite well with Firefox on Windows.
    • dekhn 6y ago
      is the idea here that my browsing state is synced, but I switch browsers? No, not what I want.
• acchow 6y ago
  Does one crashing tab crash them all?
• jrobn 6y ago
  I’ve always used safari. I have had no incentive to use another browser.
• k0stas 6y ago
  For me, not supporting uBlock Origin trumps every single advantage Safari may have.
• aembleton 6y ago
  Does it have Tree Style Tabs yet?
• voisin 6y ago
  > tab ordering situation What are you referring to? I have upgraded but haven’t noticed a difference.
• jiveturkey 6y ago
  loved safari for a long time now. people, especially the privacy focused set, do not give it enough credit. the showstopper for me is lack of profiles. you can effectively have 2 profiles, one for 'safari' and one for the dev or preview edition. there's a very expensive (>$10) cookie switcher extension that would have the ability to effectively create profiles, but the need for that has escaped them. i actively inquired maybe 18 months ago and they had no inkling to work on that. the other thing i like about recent chrome is the ability to have an extension only activate on click. this gives you a much higher assurance about it's safety.
• zerubeus 6y ago
  All this good, but I'm sorry, I can't breath without ublock origin
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• zoid_ 6y ago
  As far as I can see, there is literally no way to disable network caching via a toggle in the dev tools. This is a huge problem for me.
  • jkelleyrtp 6y ago
    Next to the trashcan on the top right of the network tab, there's a button, which when hovered, "ignores the resource cache when loading resources." I think this what you're referencing.
• Shank 6y ago
  > - Support for the WebExtensions standard means addons are trickling back into the ecosystem - I'm happy with my AdBlocker and Nightmode extensions The critical functionality required for uBlock Origin and other request-based ad-blockers is blocking using the WebRequest API, which isn't supported in WebExtensions in Safari [0]. [0]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/WebExtensions/API/webRequest https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/Web... [0]: https://github.com/mdn/browser-compat-data/blob/master/webextensions/api/webRequest.json#L24 https://github.com/mdn/browser-compat-data/blob/master/webex...
• SimeVidas 6y ago
  Does Safari sync user data across devices (MacBook, iPhone)? Browsing history, bookmarks, etc.
  • ljoshua 6y ago
    Not sure about browsing history, but it definitely does bookmarks, and with various other bits of iCloud will do things like passwords (iCloud Keychain) and such. Pretty instantaneous as well. Handoff works pretty well as a way to pop open tabs between a computer and an iPhone/iPad too.
  • bengale 6y ago
    Yes.
• m00x 6y ago
  > - Privacy seems to be top-notch How can you assess the privacy of the browser? Did you do tests to verify this?
• damm 6y ago
  and no USB Security key support like Yubikey for U2F/FIDO.
  • bengale 6y ago
    It has that now.
• vishnugupta 6y ago
  Can concur. Been exclusively on Safari ~6 months and I’ve gotten so used to it now that I feel crippled whenever I’m forced to use anything else. A few more good things - Credit/Debit Card store - I browse on iPhone as well as Mac. They tabs are visible on both devices, including book marks etc - The killer reader mode - Reading List: it’s replaced Pocket app for me. I think some of these aren’t new in the browser world but it’s just nice when I could use them without being hounded by a few thousand trackers.
• nextlevelwizard 6y ago
  Reason why I use Firefox is multiplatform support. On daily bases I use OS X, Windows, Linux, and iOS. It is nice to have browser history synced and being able to pull open tabs from one machine to another.
• Cthulhu_ 6y ago
  If I only used Safari for browsing the internets, I probably would, but I'm doing web development and right now I'm pretty invested in Chrome and its dev tools in that regard. That said, I do have to close the tab / restart after a few dozen reloads. I blame the 35 MB of JS that's being loaded, :/. (production version is 1/10th of that)
• mrmonkeyman 6y ago
  Why is this upvoted? It's nonsense.
• markogresak 6y ago
  I use Chrome/Brave only for work, so I started using Safari for the personal stuff to separate the history and open state, since I use the same device for both. I was using Safari 14 since the day it was released for macOS Catalina. The animations, for example when you open the link menu (cmd+L), make it sluggish. And that's on last year's 16" macbook pro without any heavy load, so it should not be slow. Dev tools have improved, but so has Chrome. They still have a long way to go. I'm a frontend developer so I use these tools daily and I still use Chrome only because of the superior developer experience. The touchid support is a neat feature, but 1password gets very close to it and I can use it in any browser. The only place where I was truly surprised with Safari was when you log to icloud.com, Apple pulls some 1st party magic there. I'm now using Firefox in place of Safari, it feels faster and snappier. Checks all the boxes listed in the parent and then some, except native fingerprint support. I wonder if Safari is somehow performing better on big sur. I will test it during the weekend when I upgrade.
• zulln 6y ago
  What adblocker is recommended?
• thefounder 6y ago
  Safari is the new IE. Now some people like it...less.
• Angostura 6y ago
  Just to mention that Safari 14 is available on earlier version on MacOS too - I'm running it on Mojave and it works very nicely.
• dancemethis 6y ago
  - Privacy seems to be top-notch It's baffling at best that you imply you believe this. It's proprietary software (so you can't prove it already at this point) from one of the most user-hostile companies in history, and one that at the bare minimum "was" involved in mass data gathering programs (example: PRISM), but everything points to "still is" and "will be" - not only for arbitrary governments but for its own pockets too.
  • Gorbzel 6y ago
    Completely unfounded speculation on your part does not make other’s beliefs baffling.
    • m00x 6y ago
      OP is making a claim that privacy is top notch with no proof. I don't really agree that we can automatically say it isn't because it's closed source, but it's pretty hard to confirm that it is without reading the source code.
• rmrfchik 6y ago
  I don't know how "privacy" and "https://sneak.berlin/20201112/your-computer-isnt-yours/ https://sneak.berlin/20201112/your-computer-isnt-yours/" can co-exists in one OS.
• rukshn 6y ago
  As much as I love Safari, I found that Zoom is not working properly on Safari
• ubermonkey 6y ago
  I absolutely quit on Chrome a couple years ago. It was SUCH a pig, and at the end of the day I wasn't happy using a Google browser, so I don't have it on anything. My main browser is Safari, and I'm very happy with it, but I do also run Firefox for some things. I enjoy some of its plugins more (eg, ForgetMeNot), but overall it's pretty clunky compared to Safari.
• losvedir 6y ago
  I periodically try out Safari, I guess I'll have to try it again. The last time, the thing that kept me from switching was inconsistent or confusing behavior around the URL bar auto-filling suggestions. When I focus on it and start typing it would fill in URLs with a lag, and so I'd try to navigate to a page, but just as I was about to hit Enter, it would auto-suggest some different path or set of parameters and then my Enter would navigate there instead. It also (I guess to appear speedy?) would always speculatively load the root page when I'm typing something. So if I'm trying to type in "localhost:4000/somepage", it would issue a request while I'm still typing that for "localhost:4000/", which would inevitably cause me confusion when developing by triggering breakpoints and stuff I wasn't intending.
• viridian 6y ago
  >- Actually decent dev tools (used to be terrible) As someone who has to support Safari, I can still say that both Chrome and Firefox are better by about an order of magnitude. They are bad enough that I've given up trying to debug safari specific issues in safari, and just proxy the behavior in firefox.
• lenkite 6y ago
  - Privacy seems to be top-notch This is a joke when your telemetry is sent unencrypted over the wire with no way to disable the same. Right now, Windows beats MacOS for privacy. At-least you can disable stuff on Windows with some effort.
• DavidSJ 6y ago
  Native support for keychain + fingerprint Not sure if they fixed this in Big Sur, but since Mavericks all the way through Catalina there's been a critical bug with Safari's use of the macOS keychain, such that if you don't use iCloud Keychain, then you cannot migrate your Local Items keychain (the one used by Safari) to another machine, even during a restore from a backup. Hence a loss, damage, or theft of your machine means the loss of all passwords saved by Safari. I posted about it here recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24626562 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24626562 I switched to Firefox for this reason. I can't afford to lose all my passwords.