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hliyan

For a Mac M1 user who wants a lightweight browser, what would you recommend:

1. Safari (with this, I have trouble with some websites, particularly Google ones)

2. Firefox (good, but has been a memory hog in the past)

3. Brave (like that it's Chromium, but I worry about the odd features like crypto)

4. Edge (I just downloaded it. leaning toward this choice)

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Edge is just marginally better than Chrome as they do not yet have the hegemony on the web. But that is the end goal of Microsoft.

I struggle to understand how you might skip Firefox because it was a hog in the past (it's free to try. It's been fine for years.), but are ready to jump in the loving embrace of another known bad, if not worse, actor.

To me "I'm being spied constantly and my data is being sold for profit" has much more weight than "once upon a time I had to restart the browser every other day"

I don't think Edge is looking for hegemony in the web at this point. Chromium-based Edge is marketed like Brave but with more "Corporate" friendliness. Edge is Microsoft barely holding to a legitimate toehold in web standards processes, with a skeleton crew as small as possible of developers. This Edge looks like the late stages of IE6: Microsoft has to ship a browser with Windows, because browsers are an important part of every OS, doesn't want to cede control to someone else's brand so needed to rebrand a "white label product" (and Chromium is now the largest "white label" for better and a lot worse), but overall got tired of paying for development staff on a money losing "product" and wants to focus on products that actually bring in revenue. (Which is also why Edge is the noisy home of coupon products and all of Microsoft consumer AI ambitions and so forth. You can see that's stuff making the company money, so that's why they are putting the most work into that kind of stuff.)

Not on your list: Orion Browser by Kagi.

Very fast. Zero telemetry. Lightweight, natively built with WebKit, made for you and your Mac. Industry-leading battery life, privacy respecting by design and native support for web extensions.

https://browser.kagi.com/

Note that Edge is more or less Chrome except account / telemetry going to Microsoft not Google.

+1 for Orion. Been using it on my work laptop pretty much exclusively (still need to do testing for my work in Chrome/Firefox), and it is hands down my favorite browser.

Now that 1Password natively supports Orion (they had a browser whitelist), I can probably switch back to it on my personal machines / iPhone, but Safari is still pretty sticky for my non-work life.

I'm giving Orion a try every couple months because the premise is great but unfortunately for me it's so buggy that it's unusable. But then again I rely on a lot of very modern web APIs like WebRTC. Hopefully one day it'll get there but it's a very long road ahead. Not sure where those bugs come from either because Safari doesn't suffer from the same issues.

I suggest not using Edge personally, unless you're big into the MS ecosystem. Edge has become a bloated mess, with MS adding all sorts of random crap (bing everywhere, telemetry, a buy-now-pay-later "feature", shopping, click bait news, etc). Yes you can disable most of it and pare it down, and you're sending your data to MS instead of Google, but it has left an extremely bad taste in my mouth. I'd rather just use Chrome in that case.

Microsoft also seems to have some real quality control issues too, shipping things to stable completely broken. I tried switching to Edge full time a couple years back, and in the few months I did I experienced some really glaring bugs that they would take forever to fix. I think there was a full few months where grabbing and dragging the scrollbar would cause the scrollbar to disappear and the entire web page to jut to the side, and the only way to fix it was to close the tab and reopen it.

Between that and all the constantly increasing push of their other products I eventually gave up and switched back to Chrome.

Safari for personal use, Firefox for development (with sometimes Chrome's devtools when needed).

Firefox is much less of a memory hog than Chrome, in my use case.

Safari is the best for browsing. I just don't like its devtools.

What do you use for ad blocking on Safari?

Firefox has been fine for me on a variety of macOS devices in the last 4 years, and it's currently on my M1 max macbook, and also my 2012 macbook Pro which is running OCLP and macOS 12. If it runs fine on that, can't see how you'd have an issue on any M1 device.

Firefox is working great for me on the M1, have not noticed any issues worth complaining about.

I've fallen in love with Arc https://arc.net/

It's Chromium-based with a custom UI (in SwiftUI). It's very clean and Mac-native.

I would avoid Chromium-based browsers entirely as it still allows Google to strongarm their way into standards that few others want.

My attitude is that even if all the enthusiasts switched, its too small of a marketshare to matter, and its clear nobody wants to build on the Firefox platform - not even Brendan Eich.

Our best hope is for a fork of Chromium to be maintained by the Linux Foundation and for other vendors (and Electron) to use that fork instead. Just moving Electron over would provide significant momentum.

Use Safari for 99% and Chrome for the odd website that has issues.

Safari is faster, better privacy and requires far less resources e.g. battery life, memory.

This exactly. I don't know why people are treating it as a binary choice - use Chrome when you have to, use something else everywhere else. People did the same with IE back in the day.

What do you use for ad blocking on Safari?

AdGuard. But there are many others available.

> Firefox (good, but has been a memory hog in the past)

I use Firefox for almost everything, and as much as I like it, it's sadly back to being a memory hog. The reason seems to be the process-per-origin-site thing that was introduced to protect against some attack, which causes my Firefox to have 20-50 processes, each with significant memory usage.

Can't you have Firefox unload old tabs?

I have not found a good way besides restarting FF. There is an extension but it wasn't reliable, as in unloaded active tabs and not unloading inactive tabs. IIRC the extension API didn't have sensible hooks so it was difficult.

Try Auto Tab Discard. I've been using it for years to good effect and I'm one of those crazy people with thousands of tabs open.

Pretty sure that's the one I used. Granted it's been a couple of years since I stopped, so can give it another whirl.

I use LibreWolf (a rebranded Firefox clone with less tracking) with TST and just recently I exported a few hundred tabs I didn't care for anymore so now I am down to 2-300 tabs.

I don't think it is as lean as some versions of old Firefox, but I have no problems with 500 - 1000 tabs (and I often run it next to a full IDE + VSCode + Firefox ++).

You can disable (almost) all of that. My FF only has 3 processes overall. Needed shittons of about:config tweaking to achieve it and it's probably not security best practices:tm: but hey, it works and my browser stops eating all the RAM.

I've been using Brave on an older Mac for nearly as long as it's been out, no complaints. I especially value getting adblock without need of an extension (which would introduce third-party vulnerability).

I use Brave with Brave Rewards disabled and I almost forget anything Crypto related exists.

Isn't Edge built on chromium, which is getting the chrome updates forced into it?

3. seems irrelevant and not sure why you worry

Brave and Edge. I can't take you seriously now.

I don't know why people worry about the crypto in Brave. Personally I like crypto but I have it turned off in Brave anyway and it never bothers me.

When I open a new tab, Brave tells me:

Trackers & ads blocked 36,822

Bandwidth saved 5.62GB

Time saved 3.3hours

Which is definitely a feature I like.

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