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Comment by amativos | Hacker News Reader

A few things that kept me from using Safari full time (instead of Chrome) last time I tried it:

- On my 15" Macbook Pro (mid 2014), when you speed up videos in Safari the sound is distorted and weird, while in Chrome it sounds properly sped up. I use this a lot when watching educational videos.

- Youtube videos max out at 1080p.

- While there are decent ad blocking extensions, they're not as good as uBlock Origin.

- Web pages are fast and smooth, but the browser UI doesn't consistently feel as quick and snappy as Chrome.

- I once saw some rendering bugs when loading old reddit -- parts of the page were black.

This was Safari 14.

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uBlock Origin is glorious.

Safari 14 has resolved an inconsistent, tedious bug I kept experiencing (most often on reddit): changing the URL query parameters in the address bar and hitting return immediately resulted in the page merely being reloaded. Had to wait a solid second or so before hitting return to have a decent chance of getting the correct page.

But I've grown much, much too fond of this "No Javascript unless I say so, etc etc" experience to give it up without a substantial other benefit.

> Safari 14 has resolved an inconsistent, tedious bug I kept experiencing (most often on reddit): changing the URL query parameters in the address bar and hitting return immediately resulted in the page merely being reloaded. Had to wait a solid second or so before hitting return to have a decent chance of getting the correct page.

I've experienced something similar before Safari 14: when opening Safari for the first time and quickly pasting the URL to the address bar and hitting Enter, the URL would just disappear and I'd hear a bell sound. Had to wait a second to paste the URL and have it actually go to that page. These little things contribute to a general feeling that the browser is not polished enough for everyday use.

This has been ongoing for me for... I don't even know how long. At least Mojave, maybe earlier.

Ah, shucks. I never managed to find a conclusive "acknowledgment" of my issue, so once Safari 14 rolled around, I only checked whether I can make my issue reoccur and shrugged it off as resolved. Guess I was wrong, because your description feels eerily familiar. Maybe we're using it too fast.

Agreed about the user experience. Really unpleasant to work around some indiscernible and apparently unfixable problems. I feel like in a "death by a thousand papercuts" scenario with Apple software, but I suppose that is a topic unto itself.

With Firefox I sometimes notice oddities with how fonts are rendered, and it generally feels "less native", but at least I don't run into miscellaneous issues like that anymore.

Loss of ublock orgin is the real dagger for me. I haven't found another adblocking software (apart from maybe DNS adblocking via pihole) that I trust the same as ublock origin.

I use ublock origin when I can, but on safari (ios and mac) I use Wipr. Doesn't have much in the way of configurability, but it works well enough as-is, even blocking "annoyances", which ublock origin does not block by default (must be configured).

Doesn’t macOS Safari use the same content blocking model as iOS Safari now? You don’t have to trust the software as much, because all it does is give Safari a list of blocking rules.

With Big Sur safari now supports 4K YouTube videos

Anybody know if Safari software or hardware decodes VP9 or AV1 YouTube videos? If software, does it lead to fans blowing?

VP9 videos run smoothly on Safari—no fans.

Not just on Safari either, VP9 decoding is HW accelerated in Chrome on Big Sur (as of Chrome 86)

Given that the comment you're replying to mentions support for WebExtensions being added to Safari, does that mean we can expect to see uBlock Origin support sometime in the near future?

For the best video experience you shouldn’t use a browser anyway, with mpv you get not only undistorted fast audio, but with https://github.com/jgreco/mpv-scripts/blob/master/rubberband... librubberband kicks in to automagically tweak the playback rate on the fly for the perfect balance of raw speed and intelligibility (which in turn allows you to play faster without having to go back 5 seconds and rewatch at a slower speed when someone speaks a line faster than the others).

I use a simple hack to make opening mpv easy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24509028, but IIUC there are browser extensions that make it completely automatic.

Good news for you then: the new Safari on Big Sur lets you play 4K HDR videos on youtube.

Luckily there is a Webkit-based macOS browser that runs uBlock Origin.

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