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Comment by deeblering4 | Hacker News Reader

I see people recommending Firefox, but I'll say that for mac users Safari is a very usable browser too. It's quite fast, and to my knowledge is not collecting/sharing my personal data with apple. https://www.apple.com/privacy/

These days I only use chrome for the g-suite tools that seem to require it to avoid mid-meeting crashes.

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Safari has the same kind of AdBlock limits that Chrome team wants to implement. Also it's kinda behind the curve on iOS when it comes to features.

Not to mention the fact that iOS users are forbidden from using any competitive browser, including Firefox.

I'm not sure what you mean by forbidden? Chrome and Firefox (and other browsers too) are readily available through the iOS app store.

Those iOS browsers you see in the app store are just wrappers for the same Safari browser engine.

They all use Safari to display the page, they just wrap the Safari browser engine with their own toolbars and other features.

WebKit is not Safari.

And they don’t open when you click links on the device, only MobileSafari does.

Safari as well. Almost anything but Chrome. Both Safari and FF are good. Im only using these 2 myself

Safari is horrible for HTML5 games. Dealing with all sorts of issues to the point where I've more or less given up and just tell my Safari players to use something else.

Some of my front-end colleagues like to tell me that Safari is the new IE 6. Not in terms of the market domination (that's Crhome for you), but in terms of dragging the front-end back with unimplemented features, quirks, and bugs. The amount of hacks they have to add just to support Safari is uncomfortable.

No, they are confusing developing for Chomium first and not testing on all browsers.

Safari is behind in terms of W3C features. But implementing unsupported features does not mean you are hacking to support Safari. They should look into the progressive enhancement principle and CSS @support feature.

I'm strictly talking about the canvas and audio implementations, forcing me to use all kind of different hacks just to get a reasonable FPS in Safari. Audio I've given up on long time ago and don't get me started on Mobile Safari.

+1. Safari is great. Super fast, great on battery life, and has most, if not all, of the extensions you would look for.

Safari on iOS is great. Safari on Mac is underwhelming and sucks.

My biggest gripe is I can’t update it without updating the entire OS. Also, dev tooling is really bad. God help you if you ever need to unregister a service worker.

For non-developers, which is most people, those are non-issues. Safari is excellent for the things that matter: speed, power usage, and integration with the rest of the Apple ecosystem.

Agreed. Although Firefox is probably better for general purpose browsing if you are a non-dev power user, especially one who cares about ad blocking.

The integration is a good point.

Have you tried Safari Developer Previews? It's been a while since I've used them myself.

[0] https://developer.apple.com/safari/download/

I have not. I don’t think they have any extra dev tools though; it’s just the later version of the browser (which, granted, may include improved dev tools). And you still need to be on latest macOS to run it.

But thanks for the tip on the preview releases; I’d forgotten about those. I’ll check them out.

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