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Comment by phantasmish | Hacker News Reader

There are like a half-dozen blatant bugs I encounter between daily and weekly in Safari. Text input and textarea editing is buggy in a couple ways, Apple Pay has a positioning bug where sometimes its bottom button is about 1/3 off the screen, certain elements on a couple pages smear when I scroll (but only sometimes). Not even counting ways the keyboard itself is worse now.

I haven’t seen browsing this buggy outside weird niche Linux browsers in… 15+ years?

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My issues with Safari have mostly been iCloud-related. The latest one being the iCloud tabs SQLlite database getting corrupted constantly and keeping stale tabs around that I have long closed. 26.2 seems to have fixed it, but it was around at least since Sonoma. I've had similar issues with Reading List, where again, the database gets corrupted and changes that I've made to Reading List get reverted. It is just little stuff like this that adds up and creates poor UX.

What's also telling is how long the bugs stayed around, too. They were reported on Reddit and Apple's forums for awhile with various workarounds, like deleting the phantom entries from the SQLlite database manually and doing some other gymnastics like removing the other devices from iCloud in hopes that everything would sync up nicely. No one at Apple had the time or took the time to chase down the bugs. In a world of Claude Code or Codex you would think they would have at least tried a cursory "fix this".

On a related note, maybe one of these days iCloud will have a force sync option that tells the other devices to trash their copies vs having to remove all devices and re-add to get everything coherently synced.

The lack of a "refresh" option has been a problem with iCloud for years. Back in the iOS 8/9 days, I'd write in Pages on an iPad and then try to open the document on a Mac or the Pages web app. Pages itself was (and is) pretty nice, but iCloud sync was constantly broken. Things didn't appear when I needed them to.

Some designers say that refresh buttons shouldn't exist because the interface should always reflect the current state of reality. They're right, but until the day we get 100% bug-free bidirectional sync with perfect conflict resolution that instantly polls the network whenever it reconnects, refresh buttons are a necessary evil.

I gave up on the normal iCloud tabs for over a decade now. But the Safari Tab Groups implementation is by far the best I've used. If I need to share a window, I just open it in a tab group and those have synced flawlessly for me so far.

I have had Safari syncing bugs since basically 2016. But now I can't be bothered to even use it, no matter how good it gets.

Chrome extensions, functionning ad blocking (without having to pay for a stupid Apple blessed extension) and just generally more usefull feature set is the real reason Google is winning.

Apple can't even be bothered to try making a cross platform browser, because he would cost them too much money or whatever (not that the pile of cash they are sitting on is getting a lot of valuable use).

I’ve highly preferred Safari on Mac OS for a very long time- the bugs and memory leaks are forcing me to Firefox at this point, it’s completely unusable on the betas I’ve been driving lately in the hope they fix the previous bugs.

If you switch Safari’s tab bar mode to bottom (i.e. restoring the sort-of-one-touch controls that existed before iOS 26), textareas become utterly and completely broken. It’s almost impossible to reply to an HN message, for example.

This bug is so blatant that I assumed my would have been fixed by now, but no.

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