Comment by jacobolus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jacobolus | Hacker News Reader

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Funny. I find Safari leaps ahead of Firefox, and even further ahead of Chrome, when it comes to browser performance (CPU use, memory footprint, and especially battery life), with snappier scrolling and animations and fewer weird graphical glitches or mouse/keyboard interaction bugs. For my own browsing habits, Firefox is very sluggish, and Chrome is completely unusable: it just can’t handle the load and brings my whole computer to a crawl. The Safari user interface also feels much more platform-native and predictable (though it has unfortunately copied several Chrome UI elements in the last few years, which I think make the basic UI worse than ~5 years ago), and I don’t constantly feel like someone is trying to gather and analyze my keystrokes or sell me out to advertisers. (I don’t have a Windows machine, so I couldn’t tell you what IE is like these days.)

Maybe there’s just a focus on different things between vendors: Google has tons of 20%-time engineers pushing new half-baked features in every direction (yes this is a bit of a caricature), while Apple is taking a more measured approach with a focus on performance and reliability.

> (...) while Apple is taking a more measured approach with a focus

> on performance and reliability.

Good luck then trying to do anything complex with video and audio on iOS Safari. I've seen many weird quirks and bugs, strange limitations (videos always playing fullscreen on iPhone) and even browser crashes.

And considering reliability: wouldn't you agree that we would be better of using a native solution for clipboard access than the buggy and insecure Flash fallback that's needed for Safari?

iOS8 release completely blew any confidence I had in Apple. They broke so much in Safari and caused an immense amount of work. IIRC web workers broke after sleeping the screen. That one was a huge problem.

You are in my experience 80 % wrong ( ahead of Chrome / Firefox). I develop webapplications at my work.

The only thing that Safari is good at is memory footprint and batterly life.

An objective view: https://html5test.com/results/desktop.html

That’s not an “objective view”. It’s just one particular dude’s feature comparison chart, without any attempt to judge or explain the merits of the features involved or the quality of implementations.

It's more objective then what you wrote, because what you wrote comes down to:

Safari is better then everything and all the rest doesn't come near. The features that it copied from Chrome made Safari worse and at they don't spy on me or sell me to advertisers.

Note: Apple has iAd and does the same, it just doesn't want Google to do it.

At least i wrote some pro's for Safari... And it's a live feature tester for HTML 5 according to the W3C HTML 5 specifications, and safari lags far behind. It runs all the test cases and the best browser comes on top. The worst browser falls behind.. In this "objective" test, Safari falls short and Chrome, Opera and Firefox are much better.

So yes, it is much more objective then your opinion ;-)

you know of a better page than html5test?

please, enlighten us.

The point is that 'more features' isn't necessarily better[1], so no list of html5 feature support is going to tell you much about how 'good' a browser is.

[1] case in point: the misfeature we are discussing in this thread, which is just another addition to the big list of browser features that I have to go out of my way to disable to get a sane experience that minimises my exposure to the incompetence of web developers

More features for web applications mean a faster distance from mobile native applications.

That is (according to me) the true reason why Apple doesn't add features to Safari ;)

Is it possible you're having this experience because Safari just is ignoring a whole bunch of stuff (that makes the web-pages slow and cumbersome) because it's too outdated to understand?

Battery life it does have an advantage on, AFAIK this is widely understood and both Google and Mozilla are trying to address it (if they can, Apple does have nonpublic/undocumented APIs...). I'm surprised you find it outperforming Firefox wrt memory usage, though.

You probably ain't a web developer.

Safari is so behind even compared to IE.

Same as this project. DataTables filters out Safari for some of it's extension:

https://github.com/DataTables/Buttons/blob/master/js/buttons...

It's just business: Apple makes no money from browsing, Google does.

It is in Apple's interest that people don't browse at all, and spend their time inside apps, where Apple has a much bigger chance of getting revenue sharing.

They are deprecating the browser, on purpose.

[Edit: this doesn't mean Apple is bad, they are just a rational company; it would be weird if they weren't doing it]

> For my own browsing habits, Firefox is very sluggish, and Chrome is completely unusable: it just can’t handle the load and brings my whole computer to a crawl.

Any example of those pages that brings the computer to a crawl?

It’s not any particular page that makes Chrome die. It’s opening more than 30 at a time. (I typically have anywhere from 50–200 browser tabs open at once.)

Do you use task manager (Hotdog menu > More tools) to kill tabs that you are not currently using? Also chrome 46 looks to be getting much better[0]; although I have also noticed a sizeable improvement with 45.

[0] http://thenextweb.com/apps/2015/08/20/chrome-is-finally-gett...

Thanks

I'm going to assume 100+ open tabs.

Anecdotally, leaving open for long periods of time causes problems, when that tab tab that includes Flash. Since Flash is fairly prevalent among Web ads, etc., it basically happens all the time.

I'm sure there's some configuration setting or extension I could use to change this behavior. However, switching to Safari fixes it as well (and gets me improved battery life overall). I haven't really noticed any downsides to using Safari vs. Chrome.

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