Hacker News Reader

Comment by CGamesPlay | Hacker News Reader

Safari is my daily driver, but I switch to Chrome when doing web development because the development tools were vastly superior (10 years ago I was in love with Firebug, but I don't think it's kept up with Chromium's dev tools).

View on HN

Same here. Safari day to day and Edge/Firefox for dev tools

Safari ticks all the boxes for me:

- Power consumption

- Minimal UI that is elegant and easy on the eyes

- Font rendering is much nicer (especially when compared to Firefox)

- Enter a word in the search bar and usually Siri will show you the exact website and just select it to go there. Other browsers will take you to search page first then you select the first result to go there

- SMS integration for 2FA

- Bookmarks UI is so much cleaner than any other browser.

Speaking of bookmarks, why the fuck does Edge and Firefox store any bookmarks created on your phone or tablet under a separate top level section "Mobile Bookmarks"? It is just so unnecessary and adds needless UI interaction just to get to it.

Do you use content filtering / ad blocking technology in conjunction with Safari? Last I tried to use Safari, it seemed some of the most common tools could not be plugged in / added on to the browser.

Safari is my daily driver too. Last I checked UBlock origin and Privacy Badger didn't work

I'm using AdGuard, on both desktop and mobile. It works well enough for my needs.

I use 1Blocker and StopTheMadness. Both via the Mac App Store. Works great.

Another 2 handy extensions: Tabs to Links and Tab Spaces.

I don't have any affiliation with any of these extensions; just a satisfied user.

Safari 13 eliminated the previous extension scheme. So there’s no more uBlock Origin and similar blockers (there are content blockers, which work differently from uBlock Origin). Since the ad blocking extensions are lists of content to be blocked that’s given to Safari, one is better off using NextDNS or pi-hole for blocking ads (these will work across all apps too).

Wipr is great. Both iOS and MacOS. Safari + keychain is unbeatable IMO. I tried onePassword and I use Brave for dev (Chrome has too much CPU usage, and firefox for Grid debugging). I run Brave / Safari / Chrome / Vivaldi. I find myself in Safari most outside of Dev (zero inside dev).

AdGuard works fine with Safari. I also use NextDNS on top.

Not as simple as just downloading an extension, but one could use a PiHole or similar network-wide ad blocking.

The two cons of Safari for me are:

- No AV1, Webp decoder

- No stable bookmark sync cross browser (for example, icloud bookmark sync to another Firefox in Windows is not stable)

except to these, Safari is still my daily browser.

>- Enter a word in the search bar and usually Siri will show you the exact website and just select it to go there. Other browsers will take you to search page first then you select the first result to go there

Huh? That's exactly what Firefox's "Awesome Bar" does.

Not really. Say I type in “Ikea” into Safari address bar and I have never visited Ikea.com nor is it in my bookmarks; the first option is “Siri suggestions... Ikea.com”. Either click on it or down+enter to go directly to Ikea.com

With Firefox, with the same starting conditions, there is no way to directly go to ikea.com by just typing in Ikea. If there is no history or bookmark then it will take you to a search for Ikea instead

In Firefox ctrl+enter prepends www. and appends .com to whatever word you’ve typed in the address bar, then loads it. So for www.ikea.com, just type ikea then press ctrl+enter.

That was just a simple example. The safari implementation is better, I type in “price” and it expands that to “Priceline.com”; just press enter to go directly there, otherwise either keep typing to narrow or down arrow and enter to search

I use Duckduckgo for search and when I enter anything in the address bar and append !, then I am automatically redirected to the first result of the search. Works perfectly in Firefox.

As usual with Apple, Safari is great as long as you only ever use Apple devices.

Sync Safari data like bookmarks with Windows/Android is pain.

Current user of Safari as well because of minimal UI and WebKit.

If you are using macOS, Webkit is the most obvious choice because of superior rendering performance, memory usage and energy usage. Chrome/Blink and Firefox/Gecko are not even close (and probably will never be as WebKit is as 'native' on macOS as it can get).

But lack of openness and advanced browser features on Apple's side made me embark on a project to fork WebKit and build WebExtensions API support on top of it (so you can run all Chrome/Firefox extensions on it and get the best of both worlds). We are about half-way through with API coverage. Focusing on macOS first and we have popular extensions like uBlock or Grammarly running already. We also have an iOS prototype running some FF/Chrome extensions.

> build WebExtensions API support on top of it (so you can run all Chrome/Firefox extensions on it and get the best of both worlds). We are about half-way through with API coverage. Focusing on macOS first and we have popular extensions like uBlock or Grammarly running already. We also have an iOS prototype running some FF/Chrome extensions.

This sounds great! Lack of WebExtensions like uBlock Origin and RES were pretty much the reason I switched over to Firefox when Safari 13 dropped, but there is really nothing that comes close to the usability, performance and energy usage of Safari on macOS, so I have been looking for exactly this kind of project for quite some time. I wasn't sure this "compatibility layer" would be feasible to implement, but I guess even supporting uBlock Origin only would make me switch back to Safari in an instant.

Do you guys have a webpage/twitter I can follow or a beta I can sign up for?

Not yet, we are pretty much stealth but will announce here when we have first public beta.

Is it similar to Topee? https://github.com/avast/topee

Not really. That is just a wrapper, and only supports apis supported by Safari. We are building a new browser with native WebExtension API support on top of Webkit.

I’m super interested in this project, where can I see more?

You can ping me and I'll add you to the invite list.

Awesome, just sent you an email!

(I run my own mail server so it might be in your spam)

You're doing God's work

Thanks, I too feel it is important work to be done, as hard as it is.

Don’t know if you recently tried FF dev tools, but it had some good updates in recent times.

Firebug doesn't exist anymore, it died with Firefox Quantum.

Was Firebug still useful in the last years of its existence? It seems to me the dev tools have replaced all functionality. At least that's the reason why I uninstalled Firebug.

I don't remember specifically what they were anymore, but I do remember back when that happened there were still 2-3 features in Firebug not in the official tools that I used regularly. I think one was around ajax requests, the other around CSS. I ended up holding off on the Quantum upgrade for about a year for them.

There is also Firefox developer edition. Its dev tools are a bit more comprehensive than those of vanilla Firefox. I wonder how it compares to Firebug's feature set.

Weren’t the Firebug features absorbed into Firefox over time?

https://hacks.mozilla.org/2016/12/firebug-lives-on-in-firefo...

> The decision was made that the next version of Firebug (codenamed Firebug.next) would build on top of Firefox DevTools, and Firebug would be merged into the built-in tools.

> And perhaps most importantly, we joined forces to build the best developer tools together, rather than compete with each other. Many of Firebug’s core developers are on the DevTools team, including Jan ‘Honza’ Odvarko and Mike Ratcliffe. Other Firebug Working Group members like Sebastian Zartner and Florent Fayolle are also active DevTools contributors.

> A huge thank you to them for bringing their expertise in browser developer tooling to the project!

I too use Safari and switch to Vivaldi and Firefox for webdev. I think FFs dev tools have mostly caught on (especially anything CSS related is better in FF) with Chromium, but it's still a bit behind for JS debugging

I really really want to switch to Safari but it sucks that they don't support custom new tab pages. That's really the dealbreaker for me

You can set new tab pages to open homepage. And set homepage to a local html file.

It also only supports one OS since like 2012 (at least in the past I could run the Windows release in Wine), which may seem like a weird complaint, but it sucks when I need to make sure our web page renders okay for the one business guy who uses Safari and I code on Arch. Thank God for Browserstack I guess.

Epiphany is what they call Safari on Linux: https://webkit.org/downloads :-). It's slow but works well for testing and debugging Safari-specific issues.

Safari and Epiphany are two completely different browsers.

Epiphany uses webkit, so it’s the same rendering engine.

Both being built on WebKit is different from both being the same browser, and even before the Blink split, behavior observed in Safari could differ from behavior observed in Chrome. Using observations of Epiphany as a proxy for Safari is just not reliable. I've seen differences between Epiphany and Safari without even trying—where it wasn't a matter of one being too outdated compared to the other.

Midori also uses WebKit.

What kind of custom new tab page are you talking about? Like a custom URL? Because that's possible.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com