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.
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.
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.
We have no particular stance against it, though I agree with the other poster that WebGL is more the future.
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.