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Comment by drcongo | Hacker News Reader

I use Safari for actual browsing because it's really unbeatable at it - very fast rendering, has tabs. I'd argue Chromium doesn't quite live up to that promise thanks to the horrible UI rendering and spectacular battery drain that it inherits from Chrome. Firefox I think does a nice compromise between being a good browser and having all that customisation stuff that the kids seem to like, but it does have a tiny hit on performance there too, ie: when opening a new tab the UI lag is as bad as Chrome. Vivaldi takes it to an extreme, and obviously gets the extreme UI lag that goes with that.

I'm probably in a minority, but for me anything that gets in the way of me opening a new tab and loading a webpage in it is just harm.

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Safari user here too. It's great. Admittedly, I'm fairly invested in the Apple ecosystem and enjoy my laptop and phone operating as two views on the same computing state, so I'm biased... but Safari renders very nicely, has minimal UI, runs fast and I like it a lot.

I'm not looking forward to the Monterey tab design tho' when I eventually have to upgrade to a "current"-ish version.

I'm on the Monterey tab design, and it's hit and miss. First time using it I was wondering what the fuss was about wrt knowing which was the active tab, it seemed fairly clear to me. However, I've since seen states where the active tab is lighter than the others (it is right now) and other times where the active tab is darker than the others (definitely happens in a private window) - the lack of consistency is the biggest problem with it. Also, it's _really_ hard to tell if you're in a private window on the latest Safari.

The chrome color-changing is obnoxious and plainly harms UX, and the design is weirdly wasteful of pixels for something that looks like it was intended to save space. It also continues the flattifying trend of making it impossible to distinguish individual interactive elements unless you're looking directly at them—gimme buttons, depth, and contrast, damnit.

And that's after switching it to the more-classic-like version that keeps the URL bar separate.

The tab groups are sort of cool, but they're bugged for me (opening a link in a new tab results in a blank tab, after briefly displaying the intended content after I switch to it, but only in named groups, not in the default unnamed tab group) and their relationship or lack of relationship with windows keeps throwing me off. Overall this feels like something the window manager should handle, in some fashion, though I admit existing features aren't quite enough to cover what it does. It also seems like the whole concept needs to be integrated with bookmarks. All in all, good direction, but something's still missing.

Oh, and I also forget to switch to them, so haven't used them at all since about the first week after initially setting a few useful ones up. I need a way to at least tell Safari to open tabs for certain sites in certain tab groups, regardless of where I start to load them. Otherwise I end up with the same 100+ tabs in the unnamed tab group as I always have.

Does it help to do this:

Preferences -> Tabs -> Uncheck "Show color in tab bar"

The new tab design is entirely optional on Monterey, the reception to it was that bad. I personally don’t use the new tab design on the desktop. But I do use the new tab design on iOS (which conveniently moves the address bar to the bottom of the screen)

They’re reverting that change. It’s already done in the betas.

As an iPad owner, Safari is great, it does the job for occasional browsing, displaying things to someone (small gatherings, meetings, family, etc).

As a Linux Desktop user however, I don't care about UI speed since my browser usage is mostly static, a few documentation pages, a lot of heavy tabs at work (JIRA, Gmail, Chat, Teams, web related projects, etc). Maybe I have a powerful desktop bias since my Ryzen doesn't seem to have any visible performance hit, either Chromium, Brave, Firefox, Vivaldi open tabs in a flash. On my laptop (also Linux) every browser feels a bit sluggish though with Chromium being the fastest. Macs (specially the new M1s) are a different beast and feels like Safari is specially optimized for them.

I love Safari, too - my issue is that I use different OS's in parallel and not having bookmarks/settings sync is a big usability issue :/ so I'm stuck with Ungoogled Chromium, where I can at least solve for the bookmarks sync.

I like having separate sync for work vs home. So I use different browsers for each. Any other suggestions for keeping things separate?

I guess it depends on the browser - for Firefox you can easily register another account, for Chrome, I guess it needs another google account though

Gnome Web is also good

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