8 ms·

It's so good to see Safari steadily making progress on being a decent browser.

by gabeidx 8mo ago

jen729w 8mo ago
I guess the snark is funny, so I'll bite. I've used Safari daily for … must be 20 years now? Every day, for everything, minus the odd exceptionally rare circumstance. And I couldn't tell you what the last one of those was, it was so long ago. I'm a web developer. I use its devtools constantly. People ask why do you use Safari and not Chrome and I think the question is backwards. Why, given how lovely Safari is, would you go and download Chrome? It's really ugly and doesn't look like any of the other apps on my Mac. When I do want other devtools, I vastly prefer Firefox's to Chrome's.
- troupo 8mo ago
  Safari's dev tools are infuriatingly cumbersome in comparison to Chrome. They go out of their way to make even the simplest actions hidden in multiple selects and popup menus. I even made a screencast of it: https://x.com/dmitriid/status/1711701552082079764 https://x.com/dmitriid/status/1711701552082079764 As a browser? I agree with you.
- pprotas 8mo ago
  I don’t think the common question is “Why not use Chrome instead of Safari?” but “Why use Safari?”
  - Y-bar 8mo ago
    I have colleagues who are annoyed that I use Firefox because in their world everything Chrome does is standard and browsers like Safari and Firefox are annoying outliers. No matter if something they have implemented in Chrome is _actually_ standard and no matter how proper to the spec non-Chrome browsers implement a feature they see it as a chore to support the spec rather than the Chrome browser. So, the "Why not use Chrome instead of Safari?” certainly happens.
  - raw_anon_1111 8mo ago
    Battery life.
- Boltgolt 8mo ago
  This is like being in the 2000s and saying "Why would I use anything but IE5, everything works with it" The market share is what makes those circumstances exceptionally rare. Meanwhile we're having to use safari specific fixes and refrain from using he newest standards just because of safari
  - dep_b 8mo ago
    It’s much easier to make stuff work with Safari first then last.
  - troupo 8mo ago
    Where "newest standars" are inevitably "Chrome-only non-standards". Safari is not just fine. It's more than fine: https://wpt.fyi/interop-2025?stable https://wpt.fyi/interop-2025?stable
    - realusername 8mo ago
      Safari's problem has never been the lack of supported standards, more that the support is buggy. You'll find that yes the feature is there but it throws a nonsense exception in a weird case and same in CSS. It's also the last non-evergreen browser so bugs take longer to fix than Firefox or Chrome, compounding the problem.
- seec 8mo ago
  The reason to use Chrome is better extension support, better/more useful functionalities (translation, favicon bookmarks, Google Lens), better autofill/autologin, and better performance for web apps generally. Another very useful property is being able to sync your Chrome profile on any computer, which comes in very handy when you need to do stuff on computers you do not own. Doing the same with Safari is possible but a hassle. I have used Safari since it replace Internet Explorer back in the days, then switched to Chrome a few years ago after a beta broke password syncing and AdBlocker Extensions for Safari were paid/not as good. Like much of Apple's software, it has strengths and looks good but is really lacking in many ways. It also locks you into the walled garden pretty tight, which can be annoying at times. Apple should go back to releasing a cross-platform version if they want to be taken seriously, in my opinion. In general, their incentive to build software solely for their platform is a double-edged sword because they can't manage to create hardware that can cover every need (especially for 3D/engineering), and it becomes very annoying to rely on it the moment you need to use another OS (either Windows or Linux). Another example is Apple Notes being decent, but using it in the web browser is basically a joke (might as well not exist).
  - KolmogorovComp 8mo ago
    > and better performance for web apps generally At which cost? Huge RAM footprint, deadly battery killer, slow start time. How often do you need heavy performance for web apps versus just browsing?
    - asvitkine 8mo ago
      https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/1fguko2/everyone_says_chrome_devastates_mac_battery_life/ https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/1fguko2/everyone_say...
      - hu3 8mo ago
        > In my 3-hour tests, Safari consumed 18.67% of my battery each time on average, and Chrome averaged 17.33% battery drain. That works out to about 9% less battery drain from Chrome than Safari. Yes, you read that right, I found Chrome was easier on my battery than Safari. With how much engineering was poured over V8, I don't doubt.
- manuelmoreale 8mo ago
  I'll join in saying I also daily Safari for generale usage (with only two extensions installed 1Blocker and Are.na) and I have basically zero issues. I also do dev work in Firefox + Safari. I use Firefox mainly because I prefer their dev tools to do frontend work. Chrome I almost never use. This insistence that Safari is the new IE is honestly baffling. Yes Safari is not perfect and yes Apple is Apple. Still, Safari is far from being a train wreck.
- jeroenhd 8mo ago
  I find Safari's devtools to be quite annoying, but to each their own. Firefox' dev tools still hold the crown for me. The lack of cross-platform support is also annoying to the point where I generally don't bother testing on Safari unless I'm absolutely forced to. Until Apple releases a Safari build for Windows and/or Linux, Safari users will just have to rely on Safari's compatibility with cross-platform browsers. The open source version of WebKit works fine as a user, but behaves differently from any official Safari releases, so as a web developer it's not really usable as a testing tool.
  - Zardoz84 8mo ago
    Orion , a web browser using the same engine that Safari, are to going to release a version for Linux. I'm expeting to get it so I could test stuff on something Safari like.
    - saagarjha 8mo ago
      I assume Orion will have the same issues as the open source build.
    - jeroenhd 8mo ago
      Orion doesn't have access to Apple's additions to Safari. WebKit exists but isn't similar enough to actually verify that everything works.
- jiehong 8mo ago
  > why do you use Safari and not Chrome To me, it's annoying people ask that question. It's like they ask why I use brand A of shoes and not B, but it's my choice and nobody would expect a monopoly from an Ad company to be a good thing. Social pressure is real, though.
- latexr 8mo ago
  I also use Safari as my main browser, but do have some gripes. The one that bites me every day is how I cannot pick an arbitrary search engine. The ones they have are very few and awful. One that bites me on occasion is the inability to selectively disable JavaScript per website. Another is the atrocious permissions management for extensions. On iOS you can’t even deny access to a specific website until you allow it once first. One that bites me rarely is AppleScript support being slightly worse than in Chromium, specifically there being no way (other than GUI automation) to make a new Private Window. One that hasn’t bitten me yet is the ugly pill-shaped tabs in Tahoe, together with the removal of the unified tab layout. The most frustrating part is these are very easy to fix. Note also that this isn’t an endorsement of Chromium, there’s a reason those browsers aren’t my main. Right now there isn’t a single web browser I like and that does everything I want acceptably. But Safari is the least bad.
  - sweetp 8mo ago
    I actually built a content blocker which gives the ability to selectively block javascript (or any data type for that matter) https://minim.sweetpproductions.com https://minim.sweetpproductions.com :)
    - latexr 8mo ago
      I meant natively. I don’t want an extension for this, though I have bought StopTheScript. Reason being that to selectively block JavaScript with an extension, I have to allow it on every website (meaning placing an inordinate amount of trust on the developer) then block the ones I don’t want. That’s completely backwards from what I want, which is to disable JavaScript by default and enable it on just a few websites.
- SunshineTheCat 8mo ago
  I agree with you on this one, I've never understood the fascination with Chrome. Safari has done a pretty good job of maintaining a clean and simple UI along with being reliable. If there was a downside I guess it would be in the realm of extensions/plugins where Chrome probably has a leg up. That's where I decided to make the jump to Brave. All the same Chrome extensions without the Google nonsense (and built in ad blocker). I still really like Safari though and would likely use it daily if it had a built-in ad blocker.
  - alemanek 8mo ago
    It isn’t free but 1Blocker works well across iOS and macOS devices for ad blocking. I am not affiliated with them; just have had it for the last 3 years.
- ksec 8mo ago
  >And I couldn't tell you what the last one of those was, it was so long ago. I encounter it on a weekly or monthly basis before Safari 18.0, but then subsequent release 18.2 along with latest 26.2 I finally have yet to encounter one. I am hoping they will shift a little more focus on multi Tab usage, less paging, address bar, and some other desktop browser features.
- gabeidx 8mo ago
  There was no snark in my comment, I genuinely think it's a good thing that Safari is becoming better every day. I am using Safari right now and have been using it as my main browser for a long time. Mind you I've been building for the web for 19 years at this point and I have seen it all. It's a sad state of affairs when one can't make a positive comment without triggering someone to look for the spice take hidden between the lines.
drawfloat 8mo ago
I wish they would fix the bug that has plagued testing against Safari for larger applications since day 1: the silent memory restart. At the very least give an error indicating why the page just refreshed so users/testers can report it, but it would honestly be best to just let a modern desktop browser use the available memory if desired.
- ljm 8mo ago
  This is probably the single most frustrating issue on iOS Safari, and the Reddit website triggers it all the time. It would be nice if Reddit wasn't a total hog that could barely load two separate pages without crashing from a memory leak, or allow you to navigate without breaking the back button completely, but it'd also be nice if Safari was more resilient to it.
nerdjon 8mo ago
I have never understood the complaints about Safari and at this point it feels more like parroting than anything grounded in facts. Unless I am using Windows (which I use for anything except gaming sparingly) Safari is my primary browser on my Mac and I stick with it on my iPhone and iPad. It does what I need it to do and I never have issues as a user. It works with the plugins I need it to work with (mostly 1Password). I am sure there are genuine issues with the browser just like with any software, but it is already past "decent" and does its job.
- jimmaswell 8mo ago
  As a web dev, Safari is like the new IE6 - it does everything slightly wrong and I have to sprinkle my code with special cases for it because too many people use it to ignore. This modal scrolls properly in Firefox and Chrome? Not Safari, better add a million extra css attributes and maybe even some JS for fun to deal with it. This CSS parses exactly the same in Firefox and Chrome? Not Safari, they decided to Think Different. My workplace's frontend codebase is absolutely polluted with /* Safari fix: ... */ https://www.google.com/search?q=examples%20of%20code%20that%20works%20everywhere%20except%20safari#ip=1 https://www.google.com/search?q=examples%20of%20code%20that%...
- gabeidx 8mo ago
  Decent is a positive adjective [0]. My comment was not a complaint, I am glad to see Safari improve. [0]: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/decent https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/decent

It's so good to see Safari steadily making progress on being a decent browser.

by gabeidx 8mo ago

It's so good to see Safari steadily making progress on being a decent browser.

I guess the snark is funny, so I'll bite. I've used Safari daily for … must be 20 years now? Every day, for everything, minus the odd exceptionally rare circumstance. And I couldn't tell you what the last one of those was, it was so long ago. I'm a web developer. I use its devtools constantly. People ask why do you use Safari and not Chrome and I think the question is backwards. Why, given how lovely Safari is, would you go and download Chrome? It's really ugly and doesn't look like any of the other apps on my Mac. When I do want other devtools, I vastly prefer Firefox's to Chrome's.

troupo 8mo ago
Safari's dev tools are infuriatingly cumbersome in comparison to Chrome. They go out of their way to make even the simplest actions hidden in multiple selects and popup menus. I even made a screencast of it: https://x.com/dmitriid/status/1711701552082079764 https://x.com/dmitriid/status/1711701552082079764 As a browser? I agree with you.
pprotas 8mo ago
I don’t think the common question is “Why not use Chrome instead of Safari?” but “Why use Safari?”
- Y-bar 8mo ago
  I have colleagues who are annoyed that I use Firefox because in their world everything Chrome does is standard and browsers like Safari and Firefox are annoying outliers. No matter if something they have implemented in Chrome is _actually_ standard and no matter how proper to the spec non-Chrome browsers implement a feature they see it as a chore to support the spec rather than the Chrome browser. So, the "Why not use Chrome instead of Safari?” certainly happens.
- raw_anon_1111 8mo ago
  Battery life.
Boltgolt 8mo ago
This is like being in the 2000s and saying "Why would I use anything but IE5, everything works with it" The market share is what makes those circumstances exceptionally rare. Meanwhile we're having to use safari specific fixes and refrain from using he newest standards just because of safari
- dep_b 8mo ago
  It’s much easier to make stuff work with Safari first then last.
- troupo 8mo ago
  Where "newest standars" are inevitably "Chrome-only non-standards". Safari is not just fine. It's more than fine: https://wpt.fyi/interop-2025?stable https://wpt.fyi/interop-2025?stable
  - realusername 8mo ago
    Safari's problem has never been the lack of supported standards, more that the support is buggy. You'll find that yes the feature is there but it throws a nonsense exception in a weird case and same in CSS. It's also the last non-evergreen browser so bugs take longer to fix than Firefox or Chrome, compounding the problem.
seec 8mo ago
The reason to use Chrome is better extension support, better/more useful functionalities (translation, favicon bookmarks, Google Lens), better autofill/autologin, and better performance for web apps generally. Another very useful property is being able to sync your Chrome profile on any computer, which comes in very handy when you need to do stuff on computers you do not own. Doing the same with Safari is possible but a hassle. I have used Safari since it replace Internet Explorer back in the days, then switched to Chrome a few years ago after a beta broke password syncing and AdBlocker Extensions for Safari were paid/not as good. Like much of Apple's software, it has strengths and looks good but is really lacking in many ways. It also locks you into the walled garden pretty tight, which can be annoying at times. Apple should go back to releasing a cross-platform version if they want to be taken seriously, in my opinion. In general, their incentive to build software solely for their platform is a double-edged sword because they can't manage to create hardware that can cover every need (especially for 3D/engineering), and it becomes very annoying to rely on it the moment you need to use another OS (either Windows or Linux). Another example is Apple Notes being decent, but using it in the web browser is basically a joke (might as well not exist).
- KolmogorovComp 8mo ago
  > and better performance for web apps generally At which cost? Huge RAM footprint, deadly battery killer, slow start time. How often do you need heavy performance for web apps versus just browsing?
  - asvitkine 8mo ago
    https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/1fguko2/everyone_says_chrome_devastates_mac_battery_life/ https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/1fguko2/everyone_say...
    - hu3 8mo ago
      > In my 3-hour tests, Safari consumed 18.67% of my battery each time on average, and Chrome averaged 17.33% battery drain. That works out to about 9% less battery drain from Chrome than Safari. Yes, you read that right, I found Chrome was easier on my battery than Safari. With how much engineering was poured over V8, I don't doubt.
manuelmoreale 8mo ago
I'll join in saying I also daily Safari for generale usage (with only two extensions installed 1Blocker and Are.na) and I have basically zero issues. I also do dev work in Firefox + Safari. I use Firefox mainly because I prefer their dev tools to do frontend work. Chrome I almost never use. This insistence that Safari is the new IE is honestly baffling. Yes Safari is not perfect and yes Apple is Apple. Still, Safari is far from being a train wreck.
jeroenhd 8mo ago
I find Safari's devtools to be quite annoying, but to each their own. Firefox' dev tools still hold the crown for me. The lack of cross-platform support is also annoying to the point where I generally don't bother testing on Safari unless I'm absolutely forced to. Until Apple releases a Safari build for Windows and/or Linux, Safari users will just have to rely on Safari's compatibility with cross-platform browsers. The open source version of WebKit works fine as a user, but behaves differently from any official Safari releases, so as a web developer it's not really usable as a testing tool.
- Zardoz84 8mo ago
  Orion , a web browser using the same engine that Safari, are to going to release a version for Linux. I'm expeting to get it so I could test stuff on something Safari like.
  - saagarjha 8mo ago
    I assume Orion will have the same issues as the open source build.
  - jeroenhd 8mo ago
    Orion doesn't have access to Apple's additions to Safari. WebKit exists but isn't similar enough to actually verify that everything works.
jiehong 8mo ago
> why do you use Safari and not Chrome To me, it's annoying people ask that question. It's like they ask why I use brand A of shoes and not B, but it's my choice and nobody would expect a monopoly from an Ad company to be a good thing. Social pressure is real, though.
latexr 8mo ago
I also use Safari as my main browser, but do have some gripes. The one that bites me every day is how I cannot pick an arbitrary search engine. The ones they have are very few and awful. One that bites me on occasion is the inability to selectively disable JavaScript per website. Another is the atrocious permissions management for extensions. On iOS you can’t even deny access to a specific website until you allow it once first. One that bites me rarely is AppleScript support being slightly worse than in Chromium, specifically there being no way (other than GUI automation) to make a new Private Window. One that hasn’t bitten me yet is the ugly pill-shaped tabs in Tahoe, together with the removal of the unified tab layout. The most frustrating part is these are very easy to fix. Note also that this isn’t an endorsement of Chromium, there’s a reason those browsers aren’t my main. Right now there isn’t a single web browser I like and that does everything I want acceptably. But Safari is the least bad.
- sweetp 8mo ago
  I actually built a content blocker which gives the ability to selectively block javascript (or any data type for that matter) https://minim.sweetpproductions.com https://minim.sweetpproductions.com :)
  - latexr 8mo ago
    I meant natively. I don’t want an extension for this, though I have bought StopTheScript. Reason being that to selectively block JavaScript with an extension, I have to allow it on every website (meaning placing an inordinate amount of trust on the developer) then block the ones I don’t want. That’s completely backwards from what I want, which is to disable JavaScript by default and enable it on just a few websites.
SunshineTheCat 8mo ago
I agree with you on this one, I've never understood the fascination with Chrome. Safari has done a pretty good job of maintaining a clean and simple UI along with being reliable. If there was a downside I guess it would be in the realm of extensions/plugins where Chrome probably has a leg up. That's where I decided to make the jump to Brave. All the same Chrome extensions without the Google nonsense (and built in ad blocker). I still really like Safari though and would likely use it daily if it had a built-in ad blocker.
- alemanek 8mo ago
  It isn’t free but 1Blocker works well across iOS and macOS devices for ad blocking. I am not affiliated with them; just have had it for the last 3 years.
ksec 8mo ago
>And I couldn't tell you what the last one of those was, it was so long ago. I encounter it on a weekly or monthly basis before Safari 18.0, but then subsequent release 18.2 along with latest 26.2 I finally have yet to encounter one. I am hoping they will shift a little more focus on multi Tab usage, less paging, address bar, and some other desktop browser features.
gabeidx 8mo ago
There was no snark in my comment, I genuinely think it's a good thing that Safari is becoming better every day. I am using Safari right now and have been using it as my main browser for a long time. Mind you I've been building for the web for 19 years at this point and I have seen it all. It's a sad state of affairs when one can't make a positive comment without triggering someone to look for the spice take hidden between the lines.

drawfloat 8mo ago

I wish they would fix the bug that has plagued testing against Safari for larger applications since day 1: the silent memory restart. At the very least give an error indicating why the page just refreshed so users/testers can report it, but it would honestly be best to just let a modern desktop browser use the available memory if desired.

ljm 8mo ago
This is probably the single most frustrating issue on iOS Safari, and the Reddit website triggers it all the time. It would be nice if Reddit wasn't a total hog that could barely load two separate pages without crashing from a memory leak, or allow you to navigate without breaking the back button completely, but it'd also be nice if Safari was more resilient to it.

nerdjon 8mo ago

I have never understood the complaints about Safari and at this point it feels more like parroting than anything grounded in facts. Unless I am using Windows (which I use for anything except gaming sparingly) Safari is my primary browser on my Mac and I stick with it on my iPhone and iPad. It does what I need it to do and I never have issues as a user. It works with the plugins I need it to work with (mostly 1Password). I am sure there are genuine issues with the browser just like with any software, but it is already past "decent" and does its job.

jimmaswell 8mo ago
As a web dev, Safari is like the new IE6 - it does everything slightly wrong and I have to sprinkle my code with special cases for it because too many people use it to ignore. This modal scrolls properly in Firefox and Chrome? Not Safari, better add a million extra css attributes and maybe even some JS for fun to deal with it. This CSS parses exactly the same in Firefox and Chrome? Not Safari, they decided to Think Different. My workplace's frontend codebase is absolutely polluted with /* Safari fix: ... */ https://www.google.com/search?q=examples%20of%20code%20that%20works%20everywhere%20except%20safari#ip=1 https://www.google.com/search?q=examples%20of%20code%20that%...
gabeidx 8mo ago
Decent is a positive adjective [0]. My comment was not a complaint, I am glad to see Safari improve. [0]: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/decent https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/decent