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Comment by x0054 | Hacker News Reader

For a long time I have been trying to switch to Safari, but the UI just does not work for my use case. I really need tabs with site icons, and an address bar that goes side to side and does not auto center text.

Are there any good alternatives to Safari that also use WebKit? Something that would be more efficient, but with a more traditional interface. To each his own, of course, but it would kill apple to make some of the more recent changes to Safari optional.

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Same here. I could run just about everything I needed (notably, 1Password and µBlock) and be very happy with Safari if it weren't for the inexplicable lack of favicons on tabs. There are some SIMBL hacks and such, but I just want that simple feature built in.

What kills it for me is the `Command + number` shortcut - that triggers bookmarks instead of tabs (like in Chrome or FF), a setting that can't be overridden :/

cmd+number works in El Capitan.

Either way someone looses out, bookmarks were so handy.

Like you say, in the end, the point is, Safari would be a much better browser if it's UI was much more customizable. Of course, that's completely against Apple's idea that they know how it should look, and if your opinion is different, it's simply because you are an idiot. I really wish they would back away from that attitude, and allow more customization.

Even if an app doesn't have an override for chosen key assignments, you should be able to override anything visible in a menu by using System Preferences (Keyboard category, Shortcuts tab, App Shortcuts item).

You can change that in Safari settings

I've also been wanting to switch but god, the Xcode inspired dev tools make me weep in comparison to Chrome's.

I tried so hard but 2 browser: one for browsing and 1 for dev just doesn't work for me.

For me it's the other way round, i've been trying to use Firefox but the "pinch to zoom" feature in Safari is so smooth, and so crappy in Firefox, that i always keep coming back to Safari... If you read a lot of text on a Macbook, being able to zoom quickly and efficiently becomes a high priority.

Things like this are much more important for me than energy-efficiency.

> If you read a lot of text on a Macbook, being able to zoom quickly and efficiently becomes a high priority

I read lots of text on my Macbook and I have never purposely used this feature. On occasion I have accidentally engaged it, which is annoying.

You may want to get a checkup from an optometrist. No joke. I think almost everyone is affected by age-related degeneration of their vision at some point or another.

Well coincidentally i've been to an optometrist in a hospital about a year ago, my eyes are perfect (i don't have glasses.)

If i open https://news.ycombinator.com/news on my Macbook pro retina 15" i see news items 1 to 22 in a tiny font.. so i zoom to about 10 items which i find much easier to read (bigger text and less info), and using pinch to zoom you can do it very easily - in Safari.

I use the text reader built into the OS, due to my Dyslexia, so I guess I never noticed :) For me it's just highlight and press the key to have the test read to me, I have "Samantha" cranked all the way to the top speed. That said, Chrome also has very nice pinch to zoom nowadays.

I like the UI, especially after they adopted Chrome's "don't resize the tabs when the mouse is in the tab bar and the user is closing tabs" feature.

The only thing I really miss in Safari is searching websites using a prefix.

Give the OmniKey extension a look, for prefix searches

For shorthand searches in Safari this works great: http://safarikeywordsearch.aurlien.net

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