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Comment by baxtr | Hacker News Reader

I actually really like Safari… sometimes tabs sync across devices is buggy, reloads a lot. But other than that I’m quite content.

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I tried switching to Safari 2-3 years back after getting a new M1 Air . After using it for a few hours, websites would just stop working and only fix was to restart the browser. After a few times, I gave up and went back to Firefox.

To continue GP's comment,

> With Microsoft and Google, we just expect them to Do More Evil, with Mozilla we expect Good

And with Safari, a loathsome browser that's intent on recreating the IE6 conditions of yore, we give it a free pass.

> ...the IE6 conditions of yore...

I'm sorry, but comparing modern Safari to the worst software ever widely used is just not remotely reasonable.

IMO Netscap on Linux was worse. Maybe it was already Firefox by that point? I don't remember. But I do remember the crashes. It crashed so cleanly too. One second you had a browser and the next you didn't.

I don't know if I am rewriting history but when Chrome came out it felt like Google went "hold my beer" and in 6 months developed the first decent browser.

I'm speaking to depths of despair and mass of devastation, for which IE6 has no equal.

I can imagine the 7 people who used Netscape on Linux were very annoyed every so often.

I find Safari on iOS to be nice, and Safari on macOS to be horrifically slow and inadequate, even on the newest M-series processors. It's like two different worlds, you can really tell that all of the engineering time is going into iOS because that's where all the money is at.

I use Safari on macOS and don’t find it particularly slow

I heard someone recently describe Apple as a great hardware company with a few software people. Rings true!

Most of the iOS / MacOS software issues are things that more bodies could fix.

Indeed, although most of the real work on the hardware side is done by TSMC on the processors, and Apple just does a good job wrapping that piece of silicon into a shiny glass and metal body. Apple's real superpower is getting people to spend money inside their ecosystem. They've essentially turned into a finance corporation pretending to be a tech company.

I'd strongly disagree.

Apple designs their own processors (now), specs/sources their components (e.g. screens), and then does all the integration engineering.

That's the bulk of device work.

Which isn't to say that semi manufacturing isn't hard, but is to say there's a lot of effort between a chip and a device.

Sure, that design work and firmware development is probably a miniscule part of their business in comparison to the scale of their App Store and other service revenues though. And Apple does no manufacturing at all, the screens come from Samsung and the phones are assembled by Foxconn.

TSMC builds the chips, according to Apple's designs. Foxconn assembles the phones, according to Apple's designs.

I don't think you realize how much work goes into building and cerifying a working, mass market device.

In my quest to move away from Chrome I tried to daily drive Safari on my new work supplied M4 MBP. I really tried, but it was just too slow in daily use. At first I thought something was wrong with my networking or Internet connection, or possibly all the web apps I use were having a bad week. However, booting up Firefox (or rather Zen browser) immediately solved all of my performance problems on all of my web apps.

There were some other problems with Safari as well; profiles didn't work quite the way I needed them to, limited extensions (no uBlock Origin!), etc. I probably could have worked around them but I didn't need to; Firefox was almost perfect.

I like it too. I use the Add to Dock feature a lot! E.g. for slack, which does not have a native app, I use the website instead.

I find the UI atrocious and primitive. The extensions are ManifestV3 alike and worse yet, pollute /Applications (why?!). I don't particular find Safari fast, it uses just as much memory as any other browser, and all the claims about power efficiency are never backed by any numbers, just like /r/macos parroting "macOS good cus UNIX" while not understanding there have been plenty of shit UNIX distributions.

Plus the incompatibility with various sites... Just sticking with FF. I can certainly appreciate an OS-integrated browser, though. It makes life simpler for users and if you have the full Apple ecosystem, the tab sync is useful.

I find that incompatibilities are less of an issue with Safari than FF simply because Safari actually gets tested. Too many people with iPhones to ignore it, at least in US.

[flagged]

That I do in Chrome I admit :) but for my personal browsing I use safari

I do web dev and prefer safari. It’s less power hungry on a laptop. If you develop for the lowest common denominator, every other browser just works.

There’s something to be said for adding _less_ features to web browsers. A simple web is a web where open source solutions can compete with chrome. It helps avoid a browser monoculture.

Yeah but we’re not in a simple web. Safari isn’t trying to make it simple for you, they just use it to keep you in their walled garden.

PWAs are a great example of this. The general idea was even a product of the Jobs era of Apple, before the App Store.

Safari and iOS’s poor support of PWAs is exactly a result of Apple wanting to prevent app distribution channels other than their App Store.

Choosing safari is choosing a more closed web, where missing standards means that you, as a safari user, are unable to access certain features or apps that Apple doesn’t want you to access.

Missing standards like Manifest V3 that everyone was crying out for?

I get that Apple shouldn't be allowed to dictate which features belong on the web, but you're just letting Google to it instead if you opt to use Chrome.

Maybe I don't care about PWAs (which I don't), maybe I don't feel like the majority of APIs introduced lately belongs in the browser. There's very little of what you should be able to do on the web that you could not do 10 years ago. Yes, flexbox is awesome, let's have that, so is the dialog tag. WebGL, Blutooth, USB, device memory, battery status... No, the browser doesn't need to support that.

The browser doesn't need to support WebGL?! Together with Web Audio and Web Assembly, they are exactly the kind of technologies allowing desktop-class apps like Figma to run in the trustworthy browser sandbox.

I don't want to have to install more apps, and more web APIs means more things can be done inside of the browser shell without having to install software that could literally do anything on your computer (and is often hard to remove completely when you're done).

> exactly a result of Apple wanting to prevent app distribution channels other than their App Store

Nah, it's because PWAs were a standard created by Google, with Google being the primary market driver, solely with the interest of advancing Google's own interests (both in undermining Apple, and making lower-end devices more usable in developing markets). Don't think Google invented PWAs, or heavily pushed them, out of some charity. Notice also that as the ultra-cheap phones (~$100) have become more powerful, and as Apple refused to take the bait, that Google's efforts behind PWA have mostly ended.

The same goes for RCS, even though it was initially made by a neutral vendor forum. Google became the heavy pusher of RCS, not just for the sake of Android, but because they had carrier deals to use Google's own infrastructure (Jibe) for RCS, and forcing Apple to accept and integrate with their own infrastructure is a better position to be in.

This is also, let's be clear, not the first time that Google has tried an "open" standard to advance their interests and bludgeon competition. AMP is what happens when the standard catastrophically fails.

Out of curiosity, what's bad about Safari's PWA support? I use it for a bunch of things from Plex to my NAS, and never ran into any issues. In fact, it works better than Windows, in that Safari will open external links in PWAs in my default browser (on Windows, if you use Edge for PWAs, it will insist on opening itself for external links as well).

Probably depends on how you do web development. I don't like Chrome for web development, but others claim it's better than Firefox and Safari. I normally use Firefox, but would probably pick Safari over Chrome, if nothing else to avoid having to install yet another browser.

We all know that the best web development tools ever to be created was those that shipped with Opera when they still used Presto.

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