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Comment by sergimansilla | Hacker News Reader

Agreed. However, it still has the best perceived performance. Just open a page with a heavy layout and scroll up and down, or type an address or search term in the location bar and "feel" how fast it loads. Apple really put some effort in making it "feel" extremely fast.

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I use Safari daily as my primary browser on desktop. I don't doubt it presents challenges for developers, and hope they update faster.

But, not only is it fast on OS X, the battery life optimization is amazing. I run Safari without Flash installed, and only need to pop over to Chrome once and a while.

I've come to understand Chrome is making more power consumption adjustments in it's OS X version, and look forward to seeing if it can compare, but I'd also like to see memory usage addressed.

But for me, Safari loads everything I need, save for the odd video that is only available in flash, which now happens very rarely. And for me being able to use the web browser for hours and hours each day without a similar hit from Chrome to both power and memory is worth it for me.

Chrome is bloated and inefficient; even if it's not doing power-saving CPU scheduling. The "one process per tab" model seems great, but it allows Google to ignore performance problems in the browser and push them off to the page itself. That said, Google is a lot more active in pushing the envelope of browser development, so even though I personally stopped using Chrome, I still appreciate the work Google is doing on it.

Totally agree with the speed of Safari. I have Flash enabled, albeit with a plugin that forces click-to-load. Safari is a lot faster than Chrome at this point; it just feels more like the fast, stripped-down browser that I want.

Since Mavericks, Safari comes with a 'Power Saver' feature that automatically pauses resource-intensive Flash plugins.

I agree except for the back button. I hate how swiping to go back takes you back to a screenshot temporarily while the page reloads. I attempt to scroll up and down and interact with the screenshot until suddenly the page isn't how I remember it due to the reload.

It's such a terrible, terrible design and I check every new version in hopes that this would be addressed.

in 10.11 it seems like this is fixed and the page won't always need to reload.

I'm fine with Safari, but the page refresh on back annoys me to no end

I really like this feature. A page redraw generally takes less time than the time needed for my eyes and brain to re-parse the page. When I have to stare at a blank page for a varying amount of time after having decided to go back, the entire navigation process feels very sluggish and slow. Using other browsers I find myself opening a lot more temporary tabs to account for this. Swipe and hold is also nice when you just need to go back to reread a few sentences, etc.

Most pages shouldn't need a refresh when you go back after a few seconds or minutes. What annoys me are websites that set stupid expiry times or Cache-Control values.

Maybe on OSX, yes. On Windows on my PC, basically every browser beats Safari on my retina MBP if it comes to speed.

Apple has stopped supporting Safari on Windows. SO yes, you are using Safari 5.0, from over 2 and a half years ago...of course every other browser will beat it.

I might be mistaken but I read the parent as saying that each browser on his windows pc is faster than safari on his mbp.

Of course you're not mistaken; the meaning is completely obvious to a native English speaker, but that doesn't describe everyone here, of course.

The comment you're responding to specified Safari on OSX.

    However, [Safari] still has the best perceived performance. 
    Just open a page with a heavy layout and scroll up and 
    down, or type an address or search term in the location 
    bar and "feel" how fast it loads.

The performance gap is particularly noticeable on older Macs. Safari feels about the same as other browsers on my recent Mac... but there's a big gap in responsiveness between Safari and the other browsers on my wife's 2009-ish Core 2 Duo. [Edit: I mean that Safari is much more responsive than Chrome or FF]

This doesn't excuse Apple dragging their feet on web standards, of course.

It's just puzzling. Clearly Apple puts a lot of work into Safari. It's not the bastard child that IE was at Microsoft... recall how the IE team was disbanded after IE6 at one point.

And yet, frustratingly, Apple doesn't support modern web standards despite allocating a healthy slice of developer resources to Safari.

Its in Apple's interest to not have Safari work well on older machines (since they want people to buy new machines), or improve it in ways that would make the browser better compete against the app store (especially on mobile).

It is in their interest to have it be a very nice looking document viewing platform, which is where I imagine most of their developer resources are going towards.

   Its in Apple's interest to not have Safari work well 
   on older machines (since they want people to buy new
   machines)

Then they're failing miserably, because as I (and others in this conversation) have attested to... Safari is noticeably faster than Firefox or Chrome on older Mac hardware.

So I don't think your theory holds any water. Sorry.

(Edit: My post was unclear. I and others feel that Safari, despite its other shortcomings, is the most responsive browser on OSX - not the least.)

I think he interpreted your post as being the opposite of what you meant it to say. You said the performance gap is more noticeable but you probably mean in favor of safari, although it could be interpreted either way.

I did, and I should have read it more carefully. That being said, I think there is a balance that Apple tries to maintain here. If there experience on older systems is terrible, they run the risk of people switching to a different operating system and platform. If the experience isn't significantly better on newer hardware, however, customers won't be motivated to upgrade.

I would definitely not attribute it to any purposeful attempt at by a company to make things worse for older systems... human beings developing software on new hardware is already enough to make performance issues happen.

In reality, if the lead developers of some software find the experience to be good enough on their machines, that's going to lead to it becoming worse on old hardware, no matter what the company (as people have said in this thread, it's even worse with chrome and firefox.)

It takes huge amounts of effort to ensure that the development work you're doing is performant on a range of hardware. If you neglect doing that, I'd definitely chalk it up to laziness and not malice.

(In other words, I agree that performance gets worse from version to version, but you don't need to attribute to malice that which can equally be attributed to laziness.)

I don't necessarily attribute it to malice either. Their interest in making money and being successful will motivate where they spend their development dollars in maintaining older software and keeping current customers happy on their older systems versus developing new features and software that will increase sales.

    I should have read it more carefully

No, I was unclear. :)

    If there experience on older systems is terrible, they 
    run the risk of people switching to a different operating 
    system and platform. If the experience isn't significantly 
    better on newer hardware, however, customers won't be 
    motivated to upgrade.

I'm certain the main engineering goal they have for Safari is energy efficiency.

Battery life is one of the two or three major selling points of all their devices, and improved (or at least equivalent) battery life is something they deliver with every iteration of OSX.

I believe Safari's performance/responsiveness is largely a happy accidental byproduct of this focus on energy efficiency.

Again, I'm not defending anything they do. I'm a OSX user and Firefox is my browser of choice, if that tells you anything!

I think you're right. I edited my post for clarity.

I don't find this puzzling at all. I think Apple wants Safari to be a great browser for the limited role they think the web should play.

They are putting a lot of work into making the browsing experience better on Safari, very successfully I think, but adding tons of features that could expand the role of the web as an applications platform is just not in their interest.

Safari still has some pretty glaring problems. Take going back, for example. Going back, it loads an image of the previous page before it actually loads the real page. This gives the perception that it's loaded immediately, but it's not really loaded. This means the page is not responsive. It also looks fuzzy, and you can see it's fake. It's horrible, and while it's intended to fake being fast, it only serves to remind me that it's not actually fast.

Then their is the problem with black boxes. I don't know why, but all to often, safari loads a page and there are black boxes on that page. Just covering up portions of the web page. I have to resize the window or do something to get Safari to rerender the page so it will go away. This happens frequently.

Couple this with all the other issues OSX has, I can't but make the assumption that Apple is focused on Quantity rather than Quality.

Of the 3 big browsers in Mac, Firefox is still, in my mind, the most solid. Safari suffers some serious problems, not the least of which is that it's only for Mac.

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