I'm puzzled as to why people seem to dismiss the "built-in" browser. It's the fastest, smoothest, best integrated, and least power-hungry browser on the platform. I regularly use all three major browsers (for testing, I write web applications) and I consistently switch back to Safari for all my non-special browsing.
I keep switching away from it due to lack of favicons and lack of extensions. I don't personally mind paying for a dev license to release an extension, but it definitely takes a toll on the extensions that get released.
Safari has a new extensions model and will be deprecating the legacy one in a year. Hence the push to migrate to newer extensions.
I made an extremely simple extension using the new model around 2months - before I try migrating an older "actually useful" extension. But theres just no way its possible to migrate.
Apple doesn't care about browser extensions now, it seems they want everyone to move to the new model, so they can collect revenue on sales on ad blockers.
:(
The web is terrible without a serious adblocker and the available alternatives (paid or not) are unable to take away the same amount of junk. People will simply start using another browser.
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/safariservices/saf...
More specifically, if you can inject scripts I don’t see why you couldn’t call window.close()
This is a tradeoff Apple made valuing privacy and performance over user freedom. The new content blocking API is safer and faster.
To use Safari, you pretty much need to decide that performance / battery life are more important than anything else which only describes my needs when I need to milk my battery when it hits 10% with no electric outlet in sight.
This is how to enable it: https://lifehacker.com/how-to-enable-safari-favicons-on-mac-...
I do use Chrome during development though.
Safari lets you peek at the previous page, and makes it very obvious that you are about to go back, without any performance hit.
It also comes with reading mode, which chrome doesn't. Even with an ad blocker, many pages are still layed out in ways that can only be summed up as reader hostile.
So for reading and moving between pages, I feel like it beats both ffx and chrome. So I disagree with your "more important than anything else" part, but agree that performance and battery is among its top features, and if you don't care for that, safari does become a hard choice.
But it needs more than that when my battery already lasts 6+ hours under heavy use and my laptop is plugged in almost all day anyways.
Perhaps you can see how a reading mode that we already had extensions for in other browsers and sexier prev/next gestures damn it with weak praise.
As I said, it provides the best performance, experience and battery life.
We have no particular stance against it, though I agree with the other poster that WebGL is more the future.
(I'm on Yosemite.)
Google Sheets and Google Docs have been horrible on anything than Chrome for a while as well, and I guess they have no incentive to make that situation change. Firefox is dealing with it better than before I think, but I won’t hold my breath for parity to ever come.
If your cpu does not have a webm decoder in hardware, it has to decode them in software which is inefficient.
P.S. macOS 10.13.6.
Go to chrome://flags, search for "UI Layout for the browser's top chrome" and pick "Normal". Restart and enjoy the old design.
Running my mouse down the list in about:config feels like I'm drunk.
This is on a brand new maxed out i7 MacBook Pro.
Now if I could just get it to be reasonable about search engines...
It's pretty bad. Firefox cuts my battery life in half doing nothing.
It can be mitigated by setting
gfx.compositor.glcontext.opaque = true
EDIT: It seems AdBlock Plus has now come out with a new plugin that conforms to Apple's new API.
I believe all of the people who report this, but it's not something I experience. Here's my usage pattern:
- 50+ hours in a browser each week
- Regular use of both FF and Chrome with very occasional use of Safari (I'm a developer of web apps)
- FF has been my primary browser for 15 years or so
- Used on a variety of Macs (2006, 2008, 2011, 2013, and 2015 MBPs with 8-16GB RAM)
- Running uBlock Origin in all browsers FWIW
...so, anecdotal, but pretty extensive.
I never had major problems with FF in the pre-Quantum days. Chrome always felt snappier than FF, and Safari felt snappier than both, but the differences were not huge and FF was "fine." And now since Quantum, FF is on par with Chrome for me in general.
The one time FF feels like a pig for me is on Google-owned web apps like Gmail.
For many years, Gmail and Gsuite apps were lightning fast on FF. But in the last few years it has gotten slower and slower on everything but Chrome. Hmmm, wonder why.
- uses 100% CPU even when idle
- frame rate drops to 2-3 per second for 5-10 seconds when switching tabs
- causes other programs to not work properly because it is using too much CPU
I have tried uninstalling the browser and re-installing OS X but it didn't solve those issues. I read somewhere it is a bug that pops up when you have display resolution scaling on and I think it applies to me because I have two 4k monitors set at 2x scaling.
uses 100% CPU even when idle
Anecdotally, I've never seen this, even when I had 1 external 4K and 1 external 2K connected. The whole OS was kind of sluggish at that point, but that was definitely asking a lot out of a puny integrated 3-year old laptop GPU so eh.
Just did a quick informal test with my current setup:
- MacOS High Sierra.
- 2015" MBP with no discrete GPU.
- Single 4K external monitor, 3008x1692 scaled resolution.
- uBlock is off.
With only a single blank tab open FF uses 0% CPU as expected. I opened three tabs: Facebook, Espn.com, and MSNBC.com. There was a brief flurry of CPU activity as the sites loaded, and FF's processes are now idling comfortably at 0-1%.
I repeated the process with Chrome and results were similar. One difference is that Chrome spawns 10x as many processes, but they seem to consume less memory each.
In both FF and Chrome, there's a palpable (500 or 750ms?) delay when switching tabs. In my experience a lot of Mac apps behave that way at scaled 4K resolutions.
I repeated this informal test in Safari and it "feels faster"; less CPU spike on initial site load and switching browser tabs feels close to instant.
I don't know if Google has gone too far with the A/B split testing and are picking winners solely on a most ad revenue metric or if they abandoned UX testing altogether. I suppose it could be a bit of both. May be their decision making AI is secretly optimizing Google in a destructive direction.. who knows.
Makes me wonder if companies aren't just slowing down their competitors..
Also the parent comment is about Google Voice, which is not a browser and therefore is not constrained by Apple's restrictions on 3rd-party browser engines.
All this unfixed for years now.
edit: reading all the comments in this thread, geez, I finally feel like I'm not a stupid user. :) The issues are real!
"Faster tab switching in the majority of cases for our macOS users"
"Improved the reactivity of Firefox on macOS"
I'm trying to switch to Firefox but it certainly doesn't feel as snappy as Chrome when doing dev work. I do like some of the tools though. Still undecided.
I've never been a huge extension user (ad blockers and some development tools), so moving to Safari was easy. The big thing I missed was favicons, and those have been in the technology preview for awhile now.
I may explore FF for development, but I'm not sure there is a need since I've already relegated Chrome to a specific task.
I have noticed a few quirks in Safari that I have to work around. Like not rendering things exactly the same way as chrome/firefox. Bit of a pain, but there is never anything that's really "broken".