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Comment by clamprecht | Hacker News Reader

Ah, my semi-annual "fire up Safari" event.

I used to be like that but ever since I found my fans not spinning and the extra 2 hours of battery life under Safari, I haven't gone back to Chrome.

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.

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