5 ms·

Is Apple going to do anything about Safari (on my 2021 16" M1 Pro) hitting 200 points in BrowserBench, while Chrome hits 299? Sure, Safari battery life is great

by avazhi 5y ago

Is Apple going to do anything about Safari (on my 2021 16" M1 Pro) hitting 200 points in BrowserBench, while Chrome hits 299? Sure, Safari battery life is great, but the browser is slow, buggy (refreshes the page when I back a page half the time; can't speed up videos without audio distortion; typing into the search bar is laggy and I on a daily basis arrow down to select a previously used URL, hit enter, and then find that Safari moved my selection up or down, almost like it had to sync or something). I try really hard to love Safari, I really do, but it's just a shitshow outside of battery life. Also, Brave is consistently 20-30 points below vanilla Chrome on BrowserBench? Any ideas why? And finally, and this is pretty egregious, but the 1Password browser extension is a 20-30% (yes) performance hit (on the BrowserBench benchmark) on any Chromium based browser that I use, and on Firefox. What the fuck, AgileBits? See for yourself: https://browserbench.org/Speedometer2.0/ https://browserbench.org/Speedometer2.0/

ezfe 5y ago
Well, on my M1 MacBook Air Safari hits 275, whereas Edge is 246 Safari: https://i.imgur.com/LcPD5eE.png https://i.imgur.com/LcPD5eE.png Edge: https://i.imgur.com/eWhgSuU.png https://i.imgur.com/eWhgSuU.png
- avazhi 5y ago
  what extensions do you have?
  - Sidnicious 5y ago
    Not the OP, but this is super cool as a way to measure extensions' performance impact (in a super limited way, admittedly). For me… Chrome 99.0.4844.51: - 1Password + µBlock Origin: 277 ± 2.9 - No extensions: 303 ± 5.1 (9% faster) Safari 15.3: - 1Password: 251 ± 2.6 - No extensions: 280.5 ± 2.6 (11% faster)
    - sp332 5y ago
      Wow, LastPass on Win10 Firefox cuts my performance in half there.
  - ezfe 5y ago
    On Safari, just Wipr. On Edge, I've got Netflix Party. I don't think 1Password is enabled in either of them.
- barkerja 5y ago
  I got 110. Your score is quite the improvement over Safari (15.4) on my late-2019 Intel (i9 2.4) 16" MacBook Pro.
adam_arthur 5y ago
Legit the only reason I don't use iPhone is due to being forced to use Safari (or Safari rendering engine wrapped)
- skavi 5y ago
  Safari on iPhone is by far the fastest mobile browsing experience you can get. Are there extensions or web features you need that Safari doesn’t have?
  - neuronic 5y ago
    Personally I don't use Safari because among my Apple devices there is also a Windows desktop unit and I do enjoy myself browser sync across devices. So Firefox it is... Otherwise I would have switched to Safari when extensions finally became a thing.
  - agust 5y ago
    Not sure about the fastest, but definitely the most buggy web experience you can get, unfortunately.
  - strix_varius 5y ago
    It's hard to take this comment in good faith given the state of Safari and Apple's monopolistic policies around Webkit on iOS, but: https://open-web-advocacy.org/files/OWA%20-%20Bringing%20Competition%20to%20Walled%20Gardens%20-%20v1.0.pdf https://open-web-advocacy.org/files/OWA%20-%20Bringing%20Com...
  - avazhi 5y ago
    Safari on my iPhone is basically unusable. Refreshes the page constantly; swipe back a page and it refreshes; scroll down long enough and it refreshes. Then there's Reddit - crashes constantly, literally will not load comments. It does this with and without extensions.
    - mushyhammer 5y ago
      Sounds like you’re on an old phone? I did have RAM issues on the 11 Pro that unloaded every app as soon as I opened the camera, but otherwise tabs did not unload that often. Reddit is its shitshow and I ended up installing Apollo. This is not Safari’s fault.
nwienert 5y ago
Safari FUD tires me more than any other because it's so consistent and yet consistently wrong (usually driven by feelings from ~2+ years ago). Here's both, no plugins, latest versions: https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/12100/158299113-a0665fcf-4676-4298-b98b-87d77e213e71.png https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/12100/158299113-a0... Chrome opens and closes slower, resizes slower, opens tabs slower, closes tabs slower, restores a closed tab slower, goes back/forward slower, stutters as it scrolls... and feels non-native in so many ways. Not to mention the constant addition of bloat and privacy invasive features. Safari is nearly an order of magnitude better IMO on a Mac, it's not even close.
- avazhi 5y ago
  It's definitely down in a large part to plug-ins. Things like Dark Reader I can understand, but I have no idea why 1Password would cause a 30% performance drop on a site that I don't even have a PW for. My point still stands about going back a page and arrowing up/down the URL bar to select something and having it swap at the last second. Those behaviours are peculiar to Safari and they're really inexplicable from a user perspective. Whether it's related or not, the mobile version of Safari is even worse - going back a page refreshes 95% of the time, when it shouldn't given the amount of RAM iPhones have had for the past 5+ years. The Chromium stuttering on M1 Macs is definitely a problem and I wish Google would get to fixing it.
marricks 5y ago
I have none of those problems on my M1 MacBook Air using Safari. I know no clue what extensions you're using or voxel based games you're running in browser but safari opens, closes, resizes, and runs websites in a far nicer way and cleaner way. I've never seen a search box stutter. Chrome basically owns the web outside of Mac though, so perhaps you're using some services that favor it. Or the search bar that sitters is Google's and it's been known to have some Oopsies[1] [1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/former-mozilla-exec-google-has-sabotaged-firefox-for-years/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/former-mozilla-exec-google-has...
- avazhi 5y ago
  1Password, Wipr, Dark Reader, StopTheMadness. That's about it. As for the affected websites, Lexis Advance, Westlaw, WSJ, NYT, the Economist, Ars Technica, Wired, Hacker News all display this behaviour. It's a Safari problem. For whatever it's worth to others, in the past few hours I managed to download Orion and while I've got a very small sample size thus far, it's been basically perfect experience thus far. Really gotta wonder how the 2 trillion dollar company's browser team is getting outgunned by the 2 man team or whatever that Orion has.
saithir 5y ago
> typing into the search bar is laggy and I on a daily basis arrow down to select a previously used URL, hit enter, and then find that Safari moved my selection up or down I had this. It went away when I stopped using the tab groups. It's a shame because I _liked_ the tab groups, but I like not being annoyed by a stupid search bar bug more.

by avazhi 5y ago

ezfe 5y ago

Well, on my M1 MacBook Air Safari hits 275, whereas Edge is 246 Safari: https://i.imgur.com/LcPD5eE.png https://i.imgur.com/LcPD5eE.png Edge: https://i.imgur.com/eWhgSuU.png https://i.imgur.com/eWhgSuU.png

avazhi 5y ago
what extensions do you have?
- Sidnicious 5y ago
  Not the OP, but this is super cool as a way to measure extensions' performance impact (in a super limited way, admittedly). For me… Chrome 99.0.4844.51: - 1Password + µBlock Origin: 277 ± 2.9 - No extensions: 303 ± 5.1 (9% faster) Safari 15.3: - 1Password: 251 ± 2.6 - No extensions: 280.5 ± 2.6 (11% faster)
  - sp332 5y ago
    Wow, LastPass on Win10 Firefox cuts my performance in half there.
- ezfe 5y ago
  On Safari, just Wipr. On Edge, I've got Netflix Party. I don't think 1Password is enabled in either of them.
barkerja 5y ago
I got 110. Your score is quite the improvement over Safari (15.4) on my late-2019 Intel (i9 2.4) 16" MacBook Pro.

adam_arthur 5y ago

Legit the only reason I don't use iPhone is due to being forced to use Safari (or Safari rendering engine wrapped)

skavi 5y ago
Safari on iPhone is by far the fastest mobile browsing experience you can get. Are there extensions or web features you need that Safari doesn’t have?
- neuronic 5y ago
  Personally I don't use Safari because among my Apple devices there is also a Windows desktop unit and I do enjoy myself browser sync across devices. So Firefox it is... Otherwise I would have switched to Safari when extensions finally became a thing.
- agust 5y ago
  Not sure about the fastest, but definitely the most buggy web experience you can get, unfortunately.
- strix_varius 5y ago
  It's hard to take this comment in good faith given the state of Safari and Apple's monopolistic policies around Webkit on iOS, but: https://open-web-advocacy.org/files/OWA%20-%20Bringing%20Competition%20to%20Walled%20Gardens%20-%20v1.0.pdf https://open-web-advocacy.org/files/OWA%20-%20Bringing%20Com...
- avazhi 5y ago
  Safari on my iPhone is basically unusable. Refreshes the page constantly; swipe back a page and it refreshes; scroll down long enough and it refreshes. Then there's Reddit - crashes constantly, literally will not load comments. It does this with and without extensions.
  - mushyhammer 5y ago
    Sounds like you’re on an old phone? I did have RAM issues on the 11 Pro that unloaded every app as soon as I opened the camera, but otherwise tabs did not unload that often. Reddit is its shitshow and I ended up installing Apollo. This is not Safari’s fault.

nwienert 5y ago

Safari FUD tires me more than any other because it's so consistent and yet consistently wrong (usually driven by feelings from ~2+ years ago). Here's both, no plugins, latest versions: https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/12100/158299113-a0665fcf-4676-4298-b98b-87d77e213e71.png https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/12100/158299113-a0... Chrome opens and closes slower, resizes slower, opens tabs slower, closes tabs slower, restores a closed tab slower, goes back/forward slower, stutters as it scrolls... and feels non-native in so many ways. Not to mention the constant addition of bloat and privacy invasive features. Safari is nearly an order of magnitude better IMO on a Mac, it's not even close.

avazhi 5y ago
It's definitely down in a large part to plug-ins. Things like Dark Reader I can understand, but I have no idea why 1Password would cause a 30% performance drop on a site that I don't even have a PW for. My point still stands about going back a page and arrowing up/down the URL bar to select something and having it swap at the last second. Those behaviours are peculiar to Safari and they're really inexplicable from a user perspective. Whether it's related or not, the mobile version of Safari is even worse - going back a page refreshes 95% of the time, when it shouldn't given the amount of RAM iPhones have had for the past 5+ years. The Chromium stuttering on M1 Macs is definitely a problem and I wish Google would get to fixing it.

marricks 5y ago

I have none of those problems on my M1 MacBook Air using Safari. I know no clue what extensions you're using or voxel based games you're running in browser but safari opens, closes, resizes, and runs websites in a far nicer way and cleaner way. I've never seen a search box stutter. Chrome basically owns the web outside of Mac though, so perhaps you're using some services that favor it. Or the search bar that sitters is Google's and it's been known to have some Oopsies[1] [1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/former-mozilla-exec-google-has-sabotaged-firefox-for-years/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/former-mozilla-exec-google-has...

avazhi 5y ago
1Password, Wipr, Dark Reader, StopTheMadness. That's about it. As for the affected websites, Lexis Advance, Westlaw, WSJ, NYT, the Economist, Ars Technica, Wired, Hacker News all display this behaviour. It's a Safari problem. For whatever it's worth to others, in the past few hours I managed to download Orion and while I've got a very small sample size thus far, it's been basically perfect experience thus far. Really gotta wonder how the 2 trillion dollar company's browser team is getting outgunned by the 2 man team or whatever that Orion has.

saithir 5y ago

> typing into the search bar is laggy and I on a daily basis arrow down to select a previously used URL, hit enter, and then find that Safari moved my selection up or down I had this. It went away when I stopped using the tab groups. It's a shame because I _liked_ the tab groups, but I like not being annoyed by a stupid search bar bug more.