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Comment by rpastuszak | Hacker News Reader

If you haven't done this in some time and use a Mac, give Safari a shot. From the performance and energy usage perspective, it's wonderful. I switched more than 3 years ago and never looked back. The only thing that feels sluggish are the Google web apps (FUD in my opinion).

I've been doing front-end dev for almost 20 years and now use Chromium very rarely and only in work related context.

I'm at the risk of sounding naive here, but using any browser that is not Chrome makes the world a slightly better place (just a tiny bit), same goes with helping your non-techie friends do the same.

(yes, I know Safari is not perfect, but Chrome is cancer/storefront and it is one often things that make use collectively a tiny bit more stupid)

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I'd be happy using Safari, but the deal-breaker for me is the lack of uBlock Origin. There are other suggestions that people mention - Ghostery and Wipr for example - but somehow they don't give me confidence that they're going to be as reliable.

Couldn’t agree more. I tried to switch to safari awhile back, and loved most of the interface, the snappiness, the open tab view for people like that open a gazillion tabs. But the ads I struggled to get rid of (specifically YouTube commercials) pushed me back to chrome with ublock.

There is a very simple way to get rid of ads on YouTube in any browser…

Ok. Care to elaborate at all?

I think what OP meant is subscribe youtube premium

I used to have a "hardcore" setup with ublock origin and pihole (plus a bunch of other tools, a non creepy VPN). Plus, I’m probably more focused on privacy even than the _average_ HN reader, due to the nature of my work, but to be fair, nowadays I’m pretty happy with Adguard (w.custom exclusion lists), Hush and private relay. I don’t see any ads. I do pay for YT however.

It’s not perfect but the balance of effort versus results is pretty good imho. The only thing I really miss is being able to disable JS per site, instead of globally, which Safari doesn’t allow :/

I use a hosts file on macOS and Firefox Focus’ content blocker on iOS. It works quite well except for YouTube and I pay for that.

Check out Orion! It's a Webkit-based browser like Safari but the devs also ported the extension APIs from Chrome and Firefox, so you can install Chrome and Firefox extensions. It's Mac-only and in beta but, there's tons of features that could be worth checking it out.

I'm a heavy user of "Browser profiles". I have a profile for Work and one for personal stuff and I can't live without it.

I gave Safari a try and I loved it, but the lack of Profiles made me switch back to Chrome. I hope they implement such feature in the future.

Have you tried using Tab Groups? I'm using Work/Study/Personal and switch between them at the end of each pomodoro (hit CMD + Shift + <up, down>).

It's not as good as FF containers or separate profiles in terms of sandboxing/isolation, but in terms of UX it's pretty neat. I keep HN and all of my distractions in one tab group then just hit one key to hide them and only see the work context, all distractions are gone.

This approach works well enough for me because it feels super simple, although I miss FF containers a little bit.

There was an entry from one of the Chrome early developers on NH recently: https://neugierig.org/software/blog/2022/12/chrome.html

> “Chrome 12 [an old version] was the best Chrome", but since I’ve come to see underneath that for me what I wanted was a fast tight browser, and once I had that, pretty much by definition most subsequent work was just gonna make it worse.

Safari is today’s fast tight browser I dare say.

Safari has a terrible UI and it lacks vertical tabs (I still don't understand how anyone uses horizontal tabs as they are clearly inferior if you have more than a few tabs open) and uBlock. I use it for a handful of financial websites where fingerprint ID is more convenient.

Safari has vertical tabs.

Safari's UI just isn't good for me.

The UI is ok, the major issue with Safari is to not have uBlock.

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