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I'm with sleepyhead - what exactly is wrong with Safari? I'm a web developer and I use Safari almost exclusively. Hardware-accelerated (on OSX, anyway), good pe

I'm with sleepyhead - what exactly is wrong with Safari? I'm a web developer and I use Safari almost exclusively. Hardware-accelerated (on OSX, anyway), good performance, accurate rendering, no privacy intrusions.

Ygg2 13y ago
Does it run on Linux? Or Windows for starters?
- mccr8 13y ago
  No, it currently ships only on iOS and OSX.
  - Ygg2 13y ago
    That was kinda the point. It has no presence outside of Apple products. Even Opera uses Blink as base.
    - sleepyhead 13y ago
      Why is it a problem that you cannot use Safari on other platforms? The web was made to be used from many clients. I don't see the problem here.
- dagurp 13y ago
  http://support.apple.com/kb/dl1531 http://support.apple.com/kb/dl1531
kevingadd 13y ago
Safari's a joke. Only runs on mac, ships support for key platform features late (and ships subpar support when it comes to things like video/audio codecs), and delivers slower performance. I respect the JSC team a lot but Safari is an active hindrance to anyone trying to ship HTML5 games. It's just a poor-quality browser.
- millstone 13y ago
  Safari is fantastic. It sounds like you are coming from a web development direction, and are frustrated that Safari doesn't support the web APIs that you care about. As a software engineer, I can sympathize with that. But as a user, I prefer Safari, because I find that it prioritizes user experience over fidelity to the web page. Examples: 1. Safari was one of the first browsers to ship with a popup blocker 2. Safari defaults to blocking third party cookies 3. Safari Reader cuts out distracting ads and other crap, improving nearly every article. I click it whenever I can. 4. Safari Power Saver defeats annoying animations while saving battery life I love that Apple is able to deliver features like these, because their fortunes are not tied to advertising. I also strongly dispute that Safari is slower. For example, I visited cnn.com with Safari and Chrome, and attempted to scroll while the page loads. Safari scrolls responsively, while Chrome and Firefox stutter until the page finishes loading. Things like scrolling performance have a much bigger impact on how my browser feels than any JavaScript benchmark. It's true that some websites don't work well in Safari, especially HTML5 games. For pages where I want to see that stuff in action, I'll switch to Chrome. But frankly, most web pages are made more usable by disabling newer features. Chrome then becomes a poor man's opt-in.
  - jasonlotito 13y ago
    > I also strongly dispute that Safari is slower. I use Safari as my main browser for the reasons you mention, but it is slower. It just feels like a cumbersome dinosaur compared to FF or Chrome. And the navigating back flow is less than desirable. I find myself navigating too often to a blank page, or it just seems like Safari doesn't know what to do. Basically, it does everything great except for the actual browsing part.
  - kevingadd 13y ago
    Scroll latency has nothing to do with performance. You can achieve low scroll latency by doing scrolling and composition on a worker thread - which, IIRC, is more or less what OS X and iOS do, and is something Safari can take advantage of freely because it's not portable. If memory serves, recent builds of Firefox (on the non-release channels) are actually starting to roll out OMTC (off main thread compositing) which delivers the same sort of 'performance' you like about Safari, while keeping the perks of Firefox having a faster parser, faster JS runtime, and modern feature set. You are generally correct that latency is important, though. I don't know if the Chrome dev team prioritizes it much, but Mozilla recently started putting more effort into measuring and reducing latency in various parts of the browser (inattention had let latencies get pretty bad in some places.) Safari's fortunes aren't tied to advertising because Apple already extracted a payment for every user that runs Safari. They're free to do those things like disable cookies and bundle an ad blocker because they don't have to consider the desires of content creators or generate a revenue stream via their browser. It's the same set of tactics Microsoft was free to use with IE. It's impossible for Firefox or Chrome to offer similar features without directly undermining their revenue sources.

Ygg2 13y ago

Does it run on Linux? Or Windows for starters?

mccr8 13y ago
No, it currently ships only on iOS and OSX.
- Ygg2 13y ago
  That was kinda the point. It has no presence outside of Apple products. Even Opera uses Blink as base.
  - sleepyhead 13y ago
    Why is it a problem that you cannot use Safari on other platforms? The web was made to be used from many clients. I don't see the problem here.
dagurp 13y ago
http://support.apple.com/kb/dl1531 http://support.apple.com/kb/dl1531

kevingadd 13y ago

Safari's a joke. Only runs on mac, ships support for key platform features late (and ships subpar support when it comes to things like video/audio codecs), and delivers slower performance. I respect the JSC team a lot but Safari is an active hindrance to anyone trying to ship HTML5 games. It's just a poor-quality browser.

millstone 13y ago
Safari is fantastic. It sounds like you are coming from a web development direction, and are frustrated that Safari doesn't support the web APIs that you care about. As a software engineer, I can sympathize with that. But as a user, I prefer Safari, because I find that it prioritizes user experience over fidelity to the web page. Examples: 1. Safari was one of the first browsers to ship with a popup blocker 2. Safari defaults to blocking third party cookies 3. Safari Reader cuts out distracting ads and other crap, improving nearly every article. I click it whenever I can. 4. Safari Power Saver defeats annoying animations while saving battery life I love that Apple is able to deliver features like these, because their fortunes are not tied to advertising. I also strongly dispute that Safari is slower. For example, I visited cnn.com with Safari and Chrome, and attempted to scroll while the page loads. Safari scrolls responsively, while Chrome and Firefox stutter until the page finishes loading. Things like scrolling performance have a much bigger impact on how my browser feels than any JavaScript benchmark. It's true that some websites don't work well in Safari, especially HTML5 games. For pages where I want to see that stuff in action, I'll switch to Chrome. But frankly, most web pages are made more usable by disabling newer features. Chrome then becomes a poor man's opt-in.
- jasonlotito 13y ago
  > I also strongly dispute that Safari is slower. I use Safari as my main browser for the reasons you mention, but it is slower. It just feels like a cumbersome dinosaur compared to FF or Chrome. And the navigating back flow is less than desirable. I find myself navigating too often to a blank page, or it just seems like Safari doesn't know what to do. Basically, it does everything great except for the actual browsing part.
- kevingadd 13y ago
  Scroll latency has nothing to do with performance. You can achieve low scroll latency by doing scrolling and composition on a worker thread - which, IIRC, is more or less what OS X and iOS do, and is something Safari can take advantage of freely because it's not portable. If memory serves, recent builds of Firefox (on the non-release channels) are actually starting to roll out OMTC (off main thread compositing) which delivers the same sort of 'performance' you like about Safari, while keeping the perks of Firefox having a faster parser, faster JS runtime, and modern feature set. You are generally correct that latency is important, though. I don't know if the Chrome dev team prioritizes it much, but Mozilla recently started putting more effort into measuring and reducing latency in various parts of the browser (inattention had let latencies get pretty bad in some places.) Safari's fortunes aren't tied to advertising because Apple already extracted a payment for every user that runs Safari. They're free to do those things like disable cookies and bundle an ad blocker because they don't have to consider the desires of content creators or generate a revenue stream via their browser. It's the same set of tactics Microsoft was free to use with IE. It's impossible for Firefox or Chrome to offer similar features without directly undermining their revenue sources.