Truth be told, I have stability issues with Safari (and sometimes opening up new blank tabs takes 5 seconds... kind of ridiculous) but I prefer that my laptop not get too hot.

I recently turned off flash by default in Chrome. Changed my life.

Do you find anything missing in particular, or non-functioning?

Not the OP, but I found that Google Play Music wouldn't work with Flash disabled in Safari, but also wouldn't tell me why. I had to manually enable it, then it worked fine.

You shouldn't miss many things. Maybe some embedded videos on news sites that are not youtube, but I can live with that.

I'm running Firefox without flash for months already, everything is fine ;)

Google also turned off flash (except the "main content") by default in Chrome 45. It's now click to play.

DO you have battery life concerns or overheating issues. The OS PM shouldn't let an application overhead the laptop.

High CPU usage tends to make things hot and waste battery. I think it's just a matter of the browser not letting the CPU idle for whatever reason.

I do run AdBlock Plus though, and am hoping that content blockers in OS X El Capitan will help with this even further.

Switch to uBlock Origin. Way better on CPU usage.

On chrome or Safari? Someone did a comparison of all the different blockers on HN a few weeks ago and I found out about uBlock Origin. But they didn't support Safari.

The other fork of uBlock is on Safari.

https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock#safari

Have you owned a Mac laptop before ? The aluminium case is a giant heatsink and it's very common for applications to cause the laptop to become hot. Sometimes unbearable so.

It's well known that Safari is significantly better than Chrome when it comes to resource consumption. There are even some podcasts with ex maanagers of the Safari team where they talk about Apple prioritising battery life over anything else.

Software shouldn't be able to (and can't, I'm pretty sure) cause the hardware to literally overheat, such that it's damaged. But it can easily cause the hardware to become uncomfortably hot, because the hardware is more tolerant of high temperatures than squishy human flesh.

I'm heavy trackpad user (on macbook) and any browser except Safari is just terrible for me. Scrolling is terrible and laggy, random guestures I didn't want to issue, etc.

And icloud tabs, reading list, etc are very handful, because sometimes I want to use iPad instead of computer.

random guestures I didn't want to issue

Funny, because that's the exact issue I have with Safari but didn't have with any other browser.

Disable them in the trackpad settings.

I've never found a legitimate use for pinch to zoom or rotate on OSX.

I use the zoom out pinch gesture to close tabs.

The amount of times I've 'accidentally' started a back/forward button action just by trying to scroll in Chrome... It's incredibly sensitive.

This happens to me all the time. So annoying... feels like something to do with how it locks the scroll direction when you first start the gesture. So even a perfectly vertical scroll will result in a back if the initial jitter has locked a horizontal motion.

Does safari work better? I deleted or disabled it, and stopped using it for a while. After upgrading to yosemite I haves used it a bit. Mozilla firefox seems to crawl. Even with tab focus and other performance settings the fan seems to turn on after lengthy use and dev tools would just spin the beachball.

I am considering safari seriously as a primary browser unless I can find a way to optimize Firefox. How has your experience with safari been?

I used to be the same - I used Chrome as my "dev" browser, and Firefox as my "actual" browser. But Firefox has gotten worse and worse (hanging, slow response, etc) for no discernible reason (i.e. I disabled all the extensions and it was still bad).

So I gave Safari a try. And it's actually... fine. Nothing mind-blowing whatsoever, but has all the features I needed in Firefox. My one irritation is the trackpad gestures I don't want. A good few times now I've accidentally gone back by swiping with two fingers, zoomed out to tab selection by some oversensitive pinch gesture, etc etc

System Preferences > Trackpad > More Gestures > Swipe between pages > Swipe with three fingers

Thanks! I did look in Safari preferences, I should have known better than to expect Apple to put the option there...

I'm in a similar boat. Safari has surprised me lately - particularly its speed.

That said, there are a couple things that always frustrate me with stock Safari:

1) You can't reopen an arbitrary number of recently closed tabs. (You can use Command+z to "undo" closing one, but if you've closed two, or three, you're out of luck. I prefer how Chrome handles this. Though perhaps there are good reason to avoid this feature.)

2) Tabs don't have a favicon. They may be ugly sometimes, but with many tabs open favicons really simplify navigation. Of course, this can be fixed via 3rd party SIMBL extensions.

Otherwise, using Safari has certainly been better than I expected.

> Requirements: Live streaming uses Apple’s HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) technology. HLS requires ..., or a PC with Microsoft Edge on Windows 10.

Interesting. They are limiting it to their own devices and software, except they allow Microsoft Edge. Is there a technical reason for this? Couldn't Chrome/Firefox work? Strange that they would give Edge an exception.

I think this is one of Apple's semi-standard protocols that just happens to be supported by Edge, not that Apple is "allowing" Microsoft's browser in any way.

This is the first time They've allowed Windows, I think

They don't "allow" anything. No other browsers support HLS

Edge supports HLS, the others don't.

It's not that they gave Edge an exception, it's that only Edge, aside from Apple products, implements HLS (an Apple specification).

Microsoft Edge fully supports HLS, Firefox doesn't at all, and Chrome doesn't officially support it on desktop browsers.

Chrome supports its own streaming method, MPEG-DASH with H.264 which is what Youtube runs on where possible. Firefox stated it won't support H.264 on principle (although it does now, for WebRTC). Android supports HLS, as does iOS, out of the box. HLS was designed to supersede RTSP however we also have the equally-ubiquitous RTMP, which Flash supports natively. You can get an HLS stream via Flash with an add-on to some clients so now this will work on IE, Chrome Firefox, and there are also some custom, proprietary clients out there for h.264/HLS. It's not a pleasant ecosystem right now..

Firefox supports h264 just fine and has done so for about a year.

Yes, thanks to the open source H.264 codec from Cisco. This is about open source options and I think Firefox's decisions are completely valid.

https://gigaom.com/2014/10/14/h-264-support-arrives-in-firef...

The way that article is written makes it sound like a closed-source codec, but it is actually open:

https://github.com/cisco/openh264

and the code is better than I expected from a commercial project, it even uses may_alias properly. I wonder why the decoder doesn't support CPU multithreading, though? Slice threads are pretty simple to add.

It's about the patents.

"while OpenH264 is not truly open, at least it is the most open widely used video codec"

http://andreasgal.com/2014/10/14/openh264-now-in-firefox/

Well Web rtc in firefox uses the "H.264 codec from Cisco".

Normal videos like youtube uses the operating system decoder.

To clarify a number of points:

- Chrome (and other browsers) support MPEG-DASH via javascript through the Media Source Extensions (MSE) (which Safari actually supports[1])

- Firefox does not "bundle" H.264 (because of licensing) but has recently supported it where the OS provides it[2].

- HLS and MPEG-DASH are fairly similar in theory, but in practice HLS requires complete (with header/metadata) chunks whereas MPEG-DASH can "arbitrarily" chunk a video file and just feed into a MSE video stream. Both work with manifest files detailing different resolutions/qualities and chunk sizes + offsets.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_Source_Extensions#Browse...

[2] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Apps/Build/Audio_and_vid...

Firefox supports H.264 via system codecs, and supports MPEG-DASH as of version 41 (currently beta, will be stable in a few weeks). MPEG-DASH is a more open standard, and has better support for adaptive bitrate streaming, so I think it's likely to become the defacto standard in the future. It's fairly new so isn't supported everywhere yet, but it's getting there, and seems to have a lot more industry support than other options.

Actually HLS is an IETF draft [1], but I'm not sure why Apple never followed through on making it a full standard because it's got a ton of clear advantages to traditional streaming technologies. I think it's more an issue of other browsers not supporting it, rather than Apple stopping them.

1: https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-pantos-http-live-streaming...

HLS requires you to use MPEG-2 streams[1], so it will not work with non-MPEG streams, like WebM.

DASH is more technologically neutral. For Apple however, it is NIH.

[1] - from the spec: Each media file MUST be formatted as an MPEG-2 Transport Stream or an MPEG-2 audio elementary stream [ISO_13818].

Oh yikes I didn't know that :) That's pretty bad.

But this is exactly the kind of thing where you can update the draft to support better codecs, but Apple seems to have just abandoned it.

Is there a reason you couldn't put VP-8 video and Vorbis audio into an MPEG Transport Stream?

OK, this is one of things where you have to be very precise with the terminology. HLS does enforce the use of MPEG-2 Transport streams, but it does not force the use of the video encoding that is packaged in the stream. It is very typical (in fact it's the norm) to see HLS using H264 for the actual encoding work, and MPEG2 TS is actually a pretty decent specification for throwing around video streams.

I don't know that you can really say that DASH is more technologically neutral. I mean what are you saying, that HLS is not technology neutral because it forces you to use an MPEG specification, but if you opt to use an MPEG specification up-front, that's neutral?

Anyway, as someone that writes the client code for these things, I much prefer the HLS approach. If you go the DASH approach, you get into one of several potential messes. Either you have to say that you're only implementing one specific profile, in which case content providers complain that you're not supporting their chosen profile, or you have to write an absolutely massive client that can accept anything thrown at it.

Apple's affection for HLS stems from this same reasoning in my opinion. They too are more concerned about the client side - they want to keep the format simple for clients to handle, so that they don't have to bloat all of their code handling all of the different options. Because don't forget, the servers don't have to deal with this complexity - they choose which bits they want to use and go with it. Clients have to be able to handle everything in the spec correctly.

I feel like the Apple event page should show you the start time in your timezone. It's on a computer after all.

There are a lot of edge cases that could go wrong there such as people who live right near a timezone border. Not to mention VPN's, etc.

Giving a direct time and timezone prevents a lot of potential issues and mitigates a lot of risk. A worthy optimization for this case I suspect.

Or they could just give a countdown timer?

That would be ideal, as the start of the event is an absolute quantity of time into the future regardless of what timezone the user is in.

Sounds like a good idea to me. Have both, put the countdown under the time and date.

September keynotes sure do bring out the Appologists in force.

Seriously, what a shit elitist company Apple is turning out to be. You can't watch this on Chrome or Firefox. You can't watch it on Safari on a PC. Quicktime on a PC gives a friendly "Error 47: Invalid URL. 0".

In the meantime any 15 year old kid can get online and webcast anything they want to millions of people around the world watching on any browser on any device.

These limitations imposed by Apple are purely artificial. There is no technical reason for which they couldn't make this available on any device and any browser.

Unbelievable.

I'm so glad we got our apps off the iOS ecosystem and stopped developing products for free only to bolster Apple's standing. This is not a company you want to partner with in any way unless you happen to be another 800 pound gorilla.

Sad.

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