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Comment by macrael | Hacker News Reader

Safari is a great browser and I'm sometimes surprised at how huge Chrome's mindshare among developers is. Every time I try Chrome out on my Mac I end up running screaming back to Safari. Safari doesn't choke on tons of tabs, it doesn't eat battery and memory for breakfast, it's never started autoplaying videos when I open a tab in the background, it's got support for picture in picture video which is my most used new feature of OS X in ages, and is fast fast fast.

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Because Safari has consistently lagged behind Chrome and Firefox for functionality and standards compliance?

And still does: http://caniuse.com

Chrome chrome dev tools still beats out Safari. If I'm going to use a browser to develop with I might as well use it all the time.

I would love to switch to safari full time though. The battery gains are pretty nice.

Yeah, I left Safari when they rebuilt their dev tools. Should have stuck with the original WebKit dev tools.

I don't think it is fair to discount battery life, memory usage, and performance so heavily. Looking at the http://caniuse.com list there are plenty of features supported by Safari and not supported by Chrome including Audio Tracks, Video Tracks, ES6 modules, SVG Fonts, Animated PNG, CSS regions. Safari is actually the first to 100% ES6 compliance; Chrome sits at 89%.

I would also remind everyone that Google chose to fork Webkit to create Blink. They could have contributed their IndexDB engine to webkit at any time but chose not to. They could have contributed to the process isolation refactor but chose to do their own thing instead. They could have collaborated on JSCore instead of creating V8. That isn't wrong or right but it is the truth and it does mean duplicated effort.

Some of the features supported by Chrome are interesting to web-only developers I'm sure, but I don't want the browser on my mobile phone running service workers eating my battery in the background. With great power comes great responsibility and the JS-advertising-infested web has a really poor record on handling responsibility.

If you give a web developer media playback, they force auto-playing media on you.

If you give a web developer responsive layouts, they steal your ability to zoom.

If you give a web developer cookies, they inject tracking bugs to invade your privacy.

If you give a web developer service workers they will absolutely drain your battery.

(Yes not everyone but it will be widespread enough that browsers will be forced to invent countermeasures.)

That's only the newest version of Safari, before that it was pretty shit (on par with IE). Can't expect the mind share to change overnight, especially when it has lagged for years.

[cite needed]

All the things xenadu02 mentioned have shipped in previous Safari releases. In some cases last year, in other cases weveral years ago.

Still no CSS scroll snap points & CSS regions under Chrome.

Safari has always been ahead of Chrome for design & user experience. I'm not sure what the benefits of Chrome are?

It's really weird to see this myth about Safari being the new IE6. At no point did Apple abandoned WebKit or add proprietary features to the extent that Microsoft did. They've continued to plug away adding new functionality and as has been mentioned they are ahead of Chrome/Edge in some areas and behind in others.

Some features in particular service workers Apple has deliberately chosen to take a firm position on because they value battery life and security.

>Google chose to fork Webkit to create Blink

Wasn't this because the amount of work required to co-operate with the WebKit project made it not worth it for Google?

I find it more likely that Apple and Google's views on key topics (e.g. privacy/advertising) were diametrically opposed (not to mention Android vs iOS).

Note: Chrome exists for many OSs - Safari is only found on Apple ones.

They had Safari for windows at some point…

Which is bad for developer centric product design but what about user centric product design?

Honestly feel like I'm back in the IE era at times as I go over to devs and point out something isn't working only to be told "try it in Chrome".

Only difference between the IE era and the Chrome era is the self satisfied grin that they're on the cutting edge when something only works in Chrome.

I have a lot of small extensions I use with Chrome, but that list's getting smaller everyday. The dev tools are not the same, but they're getting pretty close.

My main gripe with Safari is that its release schedule is basically tied to OS releases. Ever since Chrome, I've come to love continuous releases. It's extremely satisfying to know that your browser will receive those important security updates quickly.

With Safari I have to deal with the App store nonsense (I still can't believe how bad that application is), waiting for stuff because Apple wants major releases to happen with their busted OS releases (your OS is free now! Please do rolling releases).

And I'm not a fan of Apple's positioning for web apps compared to Google or Mozilla. I like fancy new features!

The OS integration is, of course, better. Looks nice to use. And I think Chrome halves my battery life at this point. I should give it a shot again.

We're moved to shipping new web developer features twice a year. That's not near as often as Chrome but still a big improvement to once a year, solely with the major OS releases.

This release also has a ton of compatibility and standards compliance fixes.

You might want to consider the Safari Technology Preview. Updates every 2 weeks! https://webkit.org/downloads/

(Although, it has had some pretty major bugs. There was about a month where commenting on Github was broken, and currently JIRA doesn't even render.)

We try to prioritize bugs that block livability for STP. Do you know if there's a bug filed on the JIRA thing so I can get folks to follow up?

Yep, it's this one: https://openradar.appspot.com/30056643

Thanks!

EDIT: Also just found this Firefox bug report for the same thing: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1328218 Discussion there seems like it's really more of a JIRA bug than an FF bug ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Just letting you know, this bug is fixed in STP Release 22

> It's extremely satisfying to know that your browser will receive those important security updates quickly.

Apple has shipped plenty of Safari security updates outside of the OS update cycle. Feature releases of Safari are tied to the OS update cycle, not security updates.

I enjoy Safari and use it for general browsing. However, as a developer, I perceive their developer program to be unfriendly with a high barrier to entry. That may be acceptable in a closed ecosystem like iOS but unacceptable in an ecosystem like the general web.

Safari's store & extensions are part of the Apple ecosystem, not the web's. Part of the trade off I suppose.

Right, that's what I was trying to get at, sort of. From the developer page for extensions -

> The future of extensions development takes place in Xcode

and

> To develop without a certificate, you must tell Safari each time it is launched

These points can be trivial for someone who is or has no issue becoming a part of the Apple Developer Program. However, the red tape seems contradictory and almost hostile compared to developing extensions for Chrome and Firefox where all you need is your favorite text editor.

It definitely would be great if you could use your preferred tools and build from the commandline, or if Apple could ease the process of self-signing for local deployment.

However, the tension between developer and user friendliness as noted elsewhere in this discussion applies here as well. Presumably a part of the fees that Apple collects from developers covers the cost of auditing extensions for security, and identifying developers which provides a disincentive for user-hostile activity.

Meanwhile, Chrome extensions have been a vector for adware and malware–often because bad actors will buy popular but unmaintained extensions and users will get an updated version that is user-hostile in some way. One could argue that Apple should fund the auditing process out of other revenue, and that it is short-sighted of them to try to make the developer ecosystem self-funding on the backs of deveopers of free extensions, but either way, I've felt a lot safer recommending Safari to my less technical friends and family than Chrome for this reason alone.

I agree. On macOS all of my web browsing is done on Safari, except for using Chrome for Google products, Facebook, and Twitter.

I keep the privacy settings much tighter on Safari, even though I frequently delete all 'web data' (cache, cookies, etc.) on both browsers.

Developers love Chrome because its Devtools are second to none.

I don't know why but I find the Safari Dev Tools to be more usable than the Chrome ones... but that might be a stylistic preference. I've been working with Xcode and iOS since Xcode 3.0, so maybe the UX is just something I've grown accustomed to.

For a long time they were identical, then Safari made some changes that made them MUCH worse. But in the last few years I found that fixed and I haven't gone reaching for chrome in quite a while.

I like Safari too, but end up doing the opposite, returning to Chrome.

My main complaint is that tabs are slower to open, switch, and close, all things I do very frequently and while impatient. I'm going to guess that these are largely fixed costs and aren't noticeable on a newer system (mine is from 2011).

The lack of favicons is a big productivity hit when I have many tabs open and need to find specific tabs. But, I haven't yet given "Show all tabs" a good-faith shot, maybe it is a viable alternative.

A smaller productivity hit is that quick search for websites doesn't lock in or provide visual cues, so you need to pause after typing your query to make sure it didn't switch to searching Google.

Performance seems to be generally better than Chrome, but occasionally much worse. I'm not sure if I prefer Safari's better average-case performance or Chrome's better worst-case performance.

I think I would prefer Safari if just the tab performance matched Chrome's.

For me it's mostly a few minor UX things, such as not displaying favicons, or how it behaves with a lot of tabs.

Also it's extension ecosystem isn't that great. Stuff like ublock isn't in the official safari extensions page, so you have to go discover it yourself. I can't find a good right click to image search extension either.

Well, think of all the devs who do not work on a Mac.

For me, it's because I use Windows at work, macOS and Linux at home and Android on my smartphone. AFAIK, Safari runs on only one of those 4 platforms. I am a Firefox holdout and it runs on all 4.

Also, IMO Safari until recently was very buggy and lagging extremely behind other browsers in features. Not sure if Apple ever got their act together on that.

The main reason I use Chrome over Safari is accounts. Has anyone heard if Safari has any plans to add profiles/accounts?

I think their point of view is to use the OS Accounts, (Talking about macOS) where the browser is focusing only on specific things, while the OS takes care of things like "Accounts".

This is all well and good but doesn't help when I'm working with multiple clients. For example, I'm an AWS DevOps guy and am generally logged into AWS under 3 different accounts at any one time. Can you do something like that with Safari? Chrome has "Accounts" and Firefox is experimenting with "Collections" but I don't know how to do it with Safari.

I like to use Chrome for development because I prefer its tools, but as a general browser I agree it's nicer.

are you happy with the safari extensions?

I like that Safari supports content-blocking extensions that it guarantees can't read or transmit content from webpages. Makes me feel safer about running them, rather than relying on goodwill. I'm not sure if Chrome has a similar feature.

I find Chrome trashes my battery, and for some reason will never quit reliably and requires force-quitting. I've also never figured out how to start Chrome with an empty blank screen, which I feel should be simple enough...

However, I do still use Chrome sometimes because some websites simply work better with it and it has integrated Flash support (which means I don't need to install Flash globally in my system).

I am very happy using wipr.safariextz over even uBlock Origin on FF. It just works.

I use Chrome only for a) google docs b) flash/pdf c) news sites that block me due to content-blocking.

That's interesting. I ran from Safari to Chrome because Safari was choking on a ton of tabs for me.

Every time I've tried safari I've found it really slow.

Also, I can't browse without Vimium.

That extension is called Vimari[0] for Safari. It's literally the first thing to show up if you search for "Safari vimium".

[0]: https://github.com/guyht/vimari

If I ever used my MBP unplugged, I might care about battery.

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