Comment by kahnclusions | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kahnclusions | Hacker News Reader

I've switched from Firefox to Safari for most of my browsing, and Chrome for anything that needs devtools.

Why? Battery. Efficiency. On the new M1 Macbooks I can run Safari and be unplugged all day long. The increased power consumption and battery drain is noticeable when using FF and I can't make it all the way through the day. As far as extensions go, I have 1Blocker and it works well, it does block YouTube ads. The only things I miss are Tree Style Tabs and Container Tabs.

I also find performance on FF to be a lot worse than both Chrome and Safari. Firefox gets sluggish with many tabs open. JS-heavy sites will be jittery and laggy in Firefox, but buttery smooth in Chrome. Having 100 tabs open is sluggish in Firefox, but smooth in Chrome/Safari. In FF some sites will occasionally crash their tab, but they don't crash in Chrome/Safari. Etc.

Then there's the attitude of Mozilla constantly changing the interface, shoving things like Pocket or Mozilla VPN in my face. Sorry Firefox, but I've left and not coming back.

My favorite part about Safari is how, because I don't own an Apple device, I have next to no options for testing and fixing the issues that get filed with regards to my web application not working in Safari.

Probably 2/3rds of the bugs I get are specifically related to Safari while the other 1/3rd are just general issues that affect every browser.

It's insane to me that they provide no way to possibly resolve this without going out and spending money to buy their hardware.

Is Epiphany unworkable for testing? It's got the same engine behind it.

Wait, Epiphany on elementaryOS is 100% WebKit? Had no idea tbh.

What exactly do you expect? That Apple brings back Safari to Windows and Linux? There's public demand for that every now and then (eg [1]), but that has it's own set of problems ie. that Safari-on-Win/Lin won't be representative of what's rendered on Mac OS due to font handling, antialiasing, power management, and other peculiarities on Mac OS (Mac OS would typically run on much higher resolution than Win/Lin).

I'm not even using Mac OS currently, but I don't think it's Apple's job to make your web app run like on Chrome when Google is calling the shots on so-called "web standards" with tens or hundreds of new features every quarter, with necessarily surprising results. Personally, I'd find it ok if you just label your app with "Best run on Chrome" because that's the reality the web has degraded to, and the actual problem of web apps. Or deploy as Electron app on Mac OS.

Maybe Apple could provide a Mac OS + Safari VM, like MS was doing (or still is doing?) when they were producing IE. But then the question is on which machine would you be able to run those VMs given Apple is heading towards ARM-only instruction set machines. Should Apple commit to produce x64 binaries for backward-compatible emulation on historic hardware? Personally, I do like Apple's innovation where the rest of the industry is lagging behind.

[1]: https://www.xda-developers.com/safari-for-windows-editorial/

This comes up every time and I have to point out that Apple provides Linux builds of WebKit.

=> https://WebKit.org/downloads

They’re not marketed as “Safari” because Safari is part of macOS, but it’s an official build of the same rendering engine.

There's also WinCairo for Windows. https://trac.webkit.org/wiki/BuildingCairoOnWindows

But unfortunately they don't provide binaries, so you have to build from source.

Do you know why that is? Sounds crazy unhelpful to not provide windows binaries.

Actually if you check that page above, under "Download build artifacts from Buildbot", there's binaries available for download which includes MiniBrowser.exe.

https://trac.webkit.org/wiki/BuildingCairoOnWindows#Download...

I tried safari, but the lack of extensions is a major turn off. How do you browse the web without uBlock Origin or “I don’t care about cookies”?

An ad blocker is still a must have, and there are several available.

I notice no difference between chrome and ublock origin or safari and Wipr or Firefox Focus.

If you can pihole, that might be a partial solution.

Safari feels like what would happen if Playschool made a browser.

It's funny to me how many people give one tiny reason and are like... Nope goodbye forever.

Hah, so true on both points.

On the smoothness of JS, I wonder if that is more about site developers testing against Chrome and Safari but not FF.

Exactly my experience too !

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