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Comment by LeoPanthera | Hacker News Reader

What does Chrome do better than Safari?

For me - it works properly on spotty connections. I have fast, but unreliable internet that drops connection few times an hour and Safari and Firefox are almost unusable - when connection drops for just a few seconds they cannot open many websites for up to 5 minutes (reddit, google and youtube among many others; hacker news is one of the few that work all the time).

Chromium based browsers do not have that issue, I used to use Vivaldi but temporarily switched to Safari as I wait for ARM build of Vivaldi and I am constantly frustrated by that issue.

I have tried debugging it but got nowhere, it seems to be system wide issue as some 3rd party apps exhibit this behaviour too (for example live streaming through IINA or Skype) while others not (Electron based apps usually work fine). Recently switched to new M1 Macbook and it happens on it too.

I wonder if this is a DNS issue. Are the browsers that work ignoring the system DNS servers? Perhaps using DoH?

This was my first idea, I tried setting DNS to 8.8.8.8, tried 1.1.1.1, tried others, tried setting them in Network Setting, tried on router, tried sudo killall -HUP mDNSResponder. I can ping those faulty websites during Safari downtime without issue, but somehow the browser does not even try opening the website (Timeline Recording in Safari shows no Network Requests). It looks like macOS is caching something somewhere and when that cache expires it starts to work again. Emptying Safari caches does not help and I don't know if there is any way to purge all system networking caches.

Chromium based browsers certainly ignore something, it might be DNS related but I'm out of concrete ideas what exactly to change.

Does anyone know a way to get Safari to show a preview of the url when you hover over a link?

I tried to switch recently since it's supposed to waste less battery but two things I found were a bad experience after Chrome:

- no decent ad blocker? the one I saw recommended was Ad Guard but that seems to require you to have an Electron app running simultaneously (!) in order for it to block anything

- in Chrome when I hover over a link I see the url in the bottom left 'status' area... I had no idea how much I like this until it wasn't there in Safari... it feels really weird to click on a link and not know where it goes to

You can force click on the link if you have a trackpad that supports it. There are probably ways to simulate a force click even without such a trackpad. The same also applies to iOS: links can be previewed across many apps by long pressing.

KB here: https://support.apple.com/guide/safari/go-to-websites-ibrw10...

That shows the whole webpage. It looks like they just want to see the link in the lower left, which can be done, as others have said, by turning on the status bar from the View menu.

force trackpad press on the link to see a preview

Ad Guard for Safari does not require you to run the app to block ads. Just quit the app.

The hover thing might be some pref but Safari shows urls on mouseover.

When I quit the app the Ad Guard shield icon went back to "paused" so I assumed it needed to be running to work

It's not the best UI but the mouseover of the icon tells you what's going on, albeit in tiny print at the bottom:

https://i.imgur.com/hnRrBVr.png

View -> Show Status Bar

Ah great, that's it!

The other thing I miss with Safari I don't think there is a solution for... there's no version for Android, so I miss sharing history and passwords with the browser on my phone.

My fault for not buying all Apple devices I guess

- AdGuard has to run its app in the background, true, but it‘s very well behaved. - menu: View —-> ShowStatus Bar (command /)

Supports web standards ? Extensions ? Developer tools ?

I'm using Safari as my primary browser because Chrome is a resource hog and this i9 MBP sounds like a 747 taking off when it starts using CPU but Chrome is a better browser feature wise - I plan on switching back to desktop (since this WFH shift it's just better) and I will 100% use Chrome even if Safari was an option (fan noise/CPU power/power consumption aren't a concern).

Runs on my computer.

(not a big fan of chrome though)

Well that's a great answer. ;)

It's kind of a shame that Apple killed off the Windows version of Safari. I often wonder if they would consider bringing it back.

1. dev tools 2. extensions

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