Recent improvements to Safari
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TBH I never understood why people use Chrome on a Mac unless there is a specific extension or site that doesn't work with Safari.
Also, not using anything from Google is a big plus for me to use Safari (or Firefox for the record) anyway.
Once you can't use uBlock Origin with Chrome due to the proposed Manifest V3, Firefox will be the only real option.
There's no uBlock Origin, sure, but AdGuard for Safari is a good alternative. And you can complement that with StopTheMadness if you so wish.
Native Advertising seems to be at this stage fairly tame, but I don't hold any belief that it can't/won't change. If it stays at the level where the most you get is 30 seconds of a YouTube video dedicated to ads and occasional ad-only articles, in my opinion it's fine. It's still annoying, but it's not the immediately disruptive experience that more traditional web advertising are, and with YouTube at least, it seems many of the creators have settled on having predictable timing for their ad segment, either right after their intro or right at the end, and I think this is a healthy way of handling it. It's not interrupting the actual videos typically, the advertisers get their precious views and tracking, and the creators get paid. With native advertising articles, it's fairly fast to recognize that there's no real information in an article and to just skip it; if the authors still get paid and the advertisers are satisfied with the screen time, then so be it, I'm ultimately not too annoyed by such a situation as I don't get interrupted by ads.
I hate advertising in general, but with the above, I would call it acceptable for the time being; I haven't even bothered with the YouTube ad segment skip plugins/scripts for such items.
Alternatively, many VPN providers offer ad-blocking services, e.g. Mullvad [2].
Both of them use EasyList [3], and you can enhance it yourself with additional (custom) filters.
[1] https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdGuardForSafari
[2] https://mullvad.net/en/blog/2021/5/27/how-set-ad-blocking-ou...
That said if uBlock is a requirement, there’s Orion[0] which is a WebKit-based browser that supports both the Chrome and Firefox version of uBO on both macOS and iOS.
It is able to block all ads, trackers and annoyances that users encounter. Including all YouTube ads.
Don't disagree that there are some limitations with more contemporary ad blocking approaches but they do the job for most users needs. These approaches will likely continue to evolve and include necessary capabilities to do more in the future.
Mozilla maintains a list of which keys are compatible across which browsers as well [2]
[1] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/safariservices/saf...
[2] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/Web...
https://github.com/w3c/webextensions/issues/298#issuecomment...
I just went to give it a try, as the website copy says "Free from the App Store" and "optional Pro subscription", however, I was disappointed that the pro subscription is required to give it a try. It just says "Magic Lasso is disabled" and requires me to start a 1 month free trial. Really feels bait-and-switch.
I uninstalled it without subscribing, as my personal feeling on it is if you don't believe in the product that you have to, frankly, mislead me before installing it, it's not worth trying. I'd feel very different if the website was clear on the pro subscription requirement.
If it's not a scam it at least works hard to appear as a scam.
A small combination of user scripts for YouTube specific blocking with TamperMonkey and Wipr+KaBlock+1Block seem to work, with only Wipr requiring a purchase.
But I really wish Apple would walk back the position on how ad blocking runs in safari, as uBlock Origin made the argument for Safari much more convenient.
It is good though that a small number of user scripts and extensions get it "close enough"; I mainly miss element zapping/blocking from uBlock Origin at this point.
Lightweight and faster than Safari in benchmarks, same WebKit engine and able to run Chrome and Firefox extensions out of the box, including uBlock Origin. Still in beta and you can try it for free. It is zero telemetry and completely user supported through Orion+ subscription. Has a very active feedback forum at OrionFeedback.org.
It seems like such an easy feature to add, but I'd bet there are Apple politics in play preventing Safari from adding this feature.
I'll admit it. it's Microsoft Edge. big reason is compatibility with some other Microsoft stuff I use at work.
otherwise safari is the daily driver.
It's very easy to use and switch between profiles on Chrome. Firefox is not as good here, but at least they have container tabs.
Regarding extensions, it's not only the number of extensions available, but what they're capable of doing and the process of discovering them. Sure, you can buy some extension to block ads, but it's still not as capable as the free and open source uBlock Origin. You can hide cookies popups, but probably not auto click the "deny" button like some extensions do.
Safari is also a bit too simple for me. I like things that "just work", but also have some control over things. Chrome offers a good compromise, I think. Firefox gives you more power, but their UI isn't as polished as Chrome.
I like Safari's power usage but since I got a M1 MBP, I don't worry about the battery life that much anymore, so the higher drain from Chrome/Firefox doesn't affect me.
To add, Apple’s native support for security tools such as iCloud Keychain, privacy relay, hide my email etc makes it that much more compelling to continue to use Safari.
a) Google Meets was unreliable on Safari;
b) the search in Safari is terrible (in one instance it could not find a word that other browsers would).
b) Agree with this one.
It indeed has some bugs about autocompletion and messing up CSS in dev tools, needing a site reload, but nothing super major.
* I also regularly use Windows and Linux. Chrome is familiar and have synchronized across all of them.
* I need a proxy extension to bypass China’s network restrictions. The extension was not available on Safari (I don’t bother to check now).
* uBlock Origin is more powerful than Safari’s adblockers. For example, uBO can skip the 90 second long advertisement in the front of some Chinese video site.
URL autocompletion is an absolute joke. Detaching tabs has been browser-crashingly-bad for about a year. Still no way to tell whether the current page has already been bookmarked. Performance is pitiful on large pages (e.g. long PRs on GitHub) to the point typing is takes whole seconds longer. Pointless "apps" for web extensions, which make it unnecessarily complex for non-Apple developers to publish web extensions for Safari.
I only use it because it's not Google’s and because it integrates better than Firefox. If I didn't have an iPhone I would never think of using Safari on Mac.
https://www.magiclasso.co/insights/tragedy-of-safari/
As developers of a Safari exclusive ad blocker – Magic Lasso Adblock – we thought it was time to write this follow-up after seeing the progress Safari has made in the last 12 months.
The Safari team deserves kudos for their significant progress and delivery.
This is the type of feature Apple are capable of doing because they own the full stack - phone OS, computer OS, browser. Nobody else has that (well Google do with ChromeOS but i doubt such UX is a part of their focus there).
Of course the problem is that if you want to use a different browser, or Tim Cook forbid, a different mobile OS, you lose of all that because there's no interoperability. A form of vendor lock-in if you will.
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/security/password_...
It is the single biggest hurdle for me in developing PWAs for iOS. Bring it on!
It means people can start developing apps for the web that will basically work on any platform that can run a browser. A huge step forward for the web platform that has so far been stunted by Apple's unwillingness to support these web standards
I almost never approve a notification request. From anything, be it an app or a website. Off the top of my head the only notification sources that I have enabled are messaging apps, and even there I only have them turned on for the couple that I use for my most important communications.
I consider it a nuisance and almost an anti-feature that every random app nags me to give it notification permissions. By the same token, granting that anti-feature to even more things if something I Do. Not. Want.
Apple's implementation will likely have a toggle in the settings to decide whether or not you can be prompted for this permission. In fact, you can already do this with Firefox (and I assume Chrome).
The people like you and me who don't allow any notifications anyways will likely just turn off the prompt entirely. But for developers, this helps bring the web platform one step closer to equal treatment as native platforms and can dramatically open up the ecosystem Apple currently so tightly controls
A calendar app, a messaging app, etc. All sort of apps have reasonable use cases for notifications, and now you can write those apps as persistent web apps on iOS.
The user should still have control over notifications of course, and if you're downloading, let's say, a shopping app, no reason to allow notifications, it'll just be ads or whatever.
Overall, flexibility is good.
Messaging services can also make an app, because I sure as shit don’t want my entire browser to become more annoying just because someone can’t be assed making an app. Hopefully safari will gate this BS on making a home screen app rather than just making every site a beacon of “add notifications so that we can sell you to advertisers even when you aren’t on our site!”
> Overall, flexibility is good.
It would seem we're unlikely to agree on the value proposition of notifications from random websites. My assumption is that I'll see a bunch of BS "get notifications" spam from a variety of sites, none of which have any reason to justify the spam. Just as happened with the first version of "let's give websites the ability to spam users. Surely that won't be abused" notification system.
Personally I don’t really see the point.
Native apps are good for Apple, web apps are bad for them. They've been using their full control of one of the world's most important computing platforms to cripple the web platform. If web apps really were that unappeling to users and developers, they wouldn't need to worry. Just stop the obstructions, and the market would decide in the favor of native apps. That they've been fighting this tooth and nail tells you that they have no confidence.
And let's be clear, Apple never even needed to do the work themselves. They just needed to stop blocking competing browsers. Again, if notifications are so bad, surely the users would have staid in Apple's no-notification garden rather than ship to a browser with that feature. But again, they have no confidence in their users actually choosing Safari.
Literally the last thing I want from a random website is notification spams and pop up, but woooooo soon I guess I’ll have to get used to pop ups asking me to receive ads from websites all over again.
If I decide I like/need your service I would expect an app to be available, because again, I don't want the constant threat of my messages being tied to the identity the various spyware companies have built from my browsing. I also don't want to have to switch to my browser and then find the message tab or wait for a giant multi-meg web app to download again. If Safari limits access to the spam API to just home screened pages then I wouldn't mind the addition of notification spam: creating a home screen app is a reasonable indication the user does value a site highly, and more importantly limits the ability of random sites to spam me with notification requests.
Don't get me wrong, I understand that you can make mediocre cross platform webapps more easily than actual good apps, it's just that as a user I don't care. The argument "this is easier for me" falls flat because plenty of other people have been able to make apps, and those apps are typically better, but they actually get basic platform behavior correct. Failing that you can make an electron or similar app, and have all the crappy cross-platform BS, but hey at least you get to ask to spam me and you can't sell me out with spyware linked to my normal browser instance.
This isn't about regular web pages that want to annoy you.
I can't wait to see what the proportion of "hey let us spam you" requests from sites is to sites that have any reasonable justification. I'm guessing it won't be good. Just as happened with the first API that gave sites notifications.
How many companies are making iOS apps and not Android apps and telling Android users to just use the web?
You looks like assuming that I am defending Android/Google against iOS/Apple. Sorry, I'm a long time iPhone user (about 15 years by now), who believed Steve's HTML5 vision and now just be sick about Safari being nearly unusable as a serious development platform. I am tired of installing 100s of apps just because those companies just wanted to send some weird push notification. Apple is the one to blame and now they're forced to fix that thanks to DMA. You don't have to have that angry of this fact.
> And why did you think companies will build a web app instead of Android apps when they cannot practically reuse it on iOS
Because they are already building a web app for computers.
> Apple is the one to blame and now they're forced to fix that thanks to DMA. You don't have to have that angry of this fact.
And you really think companies are going to all the sudden stop writing native apps?
These companies could have already built just an app for iOS and a web app like they do now for computers and not waste time building native apps.
And let’s not even go into how shitty and low powered the average Android device is and how badly it performs with native apps and web apps.
No I’m not saying that all Android devices are bad. I’m saying that the average $250 Android device is bad - and yes that’s the average selling price of an Android in the US.
Android users aren’t buying high end devices.
Performance, smoothness, battery life, mobile integration, password management, the list goes on.
I had to support and still know by heart the bugs and idiosyncrasies of IE 5, 6, 7, 8 etc. I have no sympathy for people who say Safari is the new IE.
Also, Cocoa text niceties work as expected. Multi language spelling, dictionary, text to speech…
I’m a huge fan, one of the best apps Apple ever made. It made the iPhone possible.
The various Cloniums (Chrome, Edge, etc) are probably second best in this regard with Firefox sadly placing last… Mozilla stuff has always lagged behind in that department. For example, it only got native context menus in the past year or two after the issue sat on the bug tracker for over a decade
I couldn't disagree more. Ignoring the lack of uBlock Origin and multi-account containers (which are table stakes for a browser), Safari's interface is unwieldy and lacks serious customization and a usable implementation of vertical tabs. I can't believe that a $2t company is so careless with their apps.
Vivaldi is indeed a paragon of customization.
Grandparent commenter was invoking Firefox, however.
I use Wipr, block third party cookies and use private mode when needed, use bookmarks and tab groups.
Not liking the UI is very subjective, personally I think they all suck somewhat.
The reasons vertical tabs are niche:
1. horizontal is the default in every browser 2. The most popular browser doesn't have any way to have functional vertical tabs 3. It is a huge pain to set up vertical tabs in Firefox 4. Safari's implementation of vertical tabs is a sad joke.
Vertical tabs are clearly superior and there is no doubt that horizontal tabs will eventually be a relic of the dysfunctional past.
The tradeoff of sacrificing some horizontal page space for a vertical tab list is indeed worthwhile if you're opening and revisting 10 or 15+ tabs. I've got about 150 open right now.
However, I'm pretty sure that the vast majority only have open between 4 and 7 tabs almost all of the time. If this is true, and if it remains true, then it's likely the primary reason why horizontal tabs have been the default in browsers, and why it will remain the default.
I can assure you that doesn't even register as something most end users would consider useful, if they manage to parse it at all.
Maybe if you’ve never used another browser.
Safari is good enough and offers the best battery life. This is all that’s good about it.
The dev tools suck, especially the network tools. The extensions suck. The weird distinction between bookmarks, favorites and reading list makes no sense so I always lose the pages I wanted to keep. On desktop the animations are awful (e.g. when swiping to go to the previous page, it blinks way too much, this is especially visible with Dark Reader because the dark-white transitions will kill your eyes).
I use Firefox on my work laptop and it’s just a better browser. I’ve got no complaints about it.
Dev tools are terrible, that's why I said “end user point of view”.
>The extensions suck.
Again, the amount of of people that even know what that is tiny.
>The weird distinction between bookmarks, favorites and reading list makes no sense so I always lose the pages I wanted to keep.
I love them. They are completely distinct things in my mind and the fact that the browser reflects it is just another thing to love about Safari.
>swiping to go to the previous page
I never do that. Command-Left arrow.
>Dark Reader…
I hate dark mode for everything other than my terminal.
Or maybe, just maybe, Safari actually hasn't been the best. It's been a vehicle to kill the web as a competing open platform. It's only now that regulators have finally woken up that Apple actually needs to compete, and suddenly discovered all these decade-old features that they need to actually implement to even reach parity, let alone being the "the best".
The idea that simply by visiting a web page can fill many gigabytes of the user’s drive and keep using CPU resources even after a tab is closed is antithetical to what the web is supposed to be.
>A leaked proposed EU act may force Apple to allow alternate browser rendering engines on iOS. This would give users the choice of which browser and rendering engine to use on their devices.
This has been passed into law. Enforcement should begin in 2024. The UK, Japan & Australia have all proposed similar provisions. Interop 2022 is a few features jointly chosen by the browsers to focus on and work on that year. It's not a good metric for comparing browsers.
>It is worth noting that these changes are still in draft and are early EU proposals with no final decisions yet made. Again it is Final and has been passed into law.
Since the first iPhone, iOS Safari displayed a clunky wheel selector for HTML selects, requiring more taps than necessary to view and select an option from the list. Finally at some point last year they ditched the wheel, replacing it with a simple list (similar to Android), requiring less interaction to select an item. Only took them 15 years to fix this UI inefficiency.
Even now it's stupid they don't offer keyboard filtering.
The original iPhone, and many versions after it, was probably 4 times smaller than the current phone.
Even on the current large iPhone screen the dropdown lists (instead of scroll wheels) are usually a pain to navigate because they are often a much smaller target and don't allow mistakes (you mis-click on an item, you have to open the dropdown again)
I agree on keyboard filtering though.
Yes it was. It required more interaction than necessary to select an item from a list, which is the definition of inefficiency. Why do you think they changed it.
Not only that, but the picker wheel only showed a few items, you had to scroll to see more than about 3 or 4 items. All this squashed into half the screen. Inefficient and poorly designed.
When selecting numbers on a date calendar, the wheel can be forgiven because you don't need to see the whole list to know the estimated position of your choice. But most select boxes on the web are NOT number pickers, but lists of words required to be read before a selection made. The old and now dead iOS select element wheel was a sorry piece of UX design indeed in most select box cases.
But the recent introduction of "tab groups" has been an absolute game-changer for me. I currently have groups set up for technical research, shopping, gift ideas, recipes, and random-shit-about-bicycles. This is great not only for keeping tab-madness under control, but also the ability to close windows full of tabs without worrying about losing stuff. The tab groups have memory, sync across devices… brilliant stuff and absolutely worth re-developing ones browser habits around.
Safari has long supported the vast majority of them.
But let's consider this:
"A leaked proposed EU act may force Apple to allow alternate browser rendering engines on iOS... Some experts believe that this would increase competition in the market"
Whoever believes that is not an expert, and hasn't thought it through. Apple's insistence on WebKit is the only thing keeping Chrome from taking over the Web entirely. Once I realized that, I stopped whining about Apple forcing Webkit on everyone in iOS.
Most people don't even understand iCloud, let alone notice the few Safari integrations that aren't form- or password-completion that all browsers can do.
Not sure about credit-card completion though. Do other browsers offer that? I really appreciate that one in Safari.
Pathetic.
It will probably take a few years for Safari to lose the “new IE” reputation it got.
It slowed down when it won, same will happen to Chrome after Google is done turning it into ChromeOS.
Safari is the only relevant browser preventing Google to achieve that goal.
Please tell me how Chrome has "slowed down" after reaching the current market share years ago. It's not like Safari is the one making on-spec progress like Firefox did in 2005. Sounds like you're the one not understanding the early browser wars.
It’s just that once Microsoft won the web, it turned out what they wanted to do with it as the main competitor to their fat-client business was nothing, so the IE team was effectively dissolved and IE stagnated, leaving an opportunity for Firefox to displace it. But before that happened, they innovated like crazy, up to and including (by some accounts) a right to demand features they needed from the Windows team—and, on the other hand, writing the original implementations for others: multilingual UI, a Unicode layer for 9x, windowless ActiveX controls, new revisions of the common controls, etc.
So you’re right that Chrome is not the new IE of 2009: Chrome is the new IE of 1999. And unlike Microsoft back then, Google now seem perfectly happy to fund the hamster wheel if it means every other prospective browser is also forced to run inside it or lose users.
Try appending this piece of code to your `index.js` and let me know how it goes in Safari:
const r = /(<!foo)/