Safari is often treated harshly, especially by developers working on websites. I also can’t recall if anyone ever said or wrote that he likes it as a user.
I personally am using it on all my devices and I enjoy it simplicity. I dislike the fact that there are very few good extensions for it, but I’m not sure if that’s a problem from developers or from Apple.
So, my question today is: what do you like or hate about Safari, that either made you use it or uninstall?
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I like the minimalistic UI. I like the integration. I love the tab groups and as far as I know, the privacy is also good.
Have you ever encountered some problems with tab groups? Like, I have a small inconvenience with them when I’m on a different Desktop and I open New Window from the dock, it automatically switches me to the window that is open on different desktop.
Other than that I do like them too, I like that I can assign specific group to specific focus status. I am really looking forward to the Profiles that will be in next release.
From time to time, yes. It has been perfect for few months until the latest security update. After it whenever I opened a tab group, the tabs where closing before my eyes. And just few minutes ago I noticed, that all of the tab groups have been tripled. Will see how it behaves tomorrow.
For 99% percent of my stuff for personal and work (I’m an IT guy), it just works. For the other 1%, I use Firefox.
I love it. Clean, minimal, gets out of the way, does what I want. With the iCloud keychain password management, 2FA management, auto-fill-then-delete codes from message/email (iOS 17/macOS Sonoma), it’s a real time-saver.
If you’re on a laptop for any amount of time during the day the battery life is unbeatable.
I like that Safari is not Chrome, since Apple’s core business isn’t search ads/tracking. I don’t like that WebKit is kind of the IE 6 of iPhones (only option and hard to develop against) I don’t use Firefox much, it’s always kind of been a mess (did they ever move on from XUIL or whatever it was called?). But Firefox is open source for real and I hope it can continue to be a very viable option.
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I only recently heard about Orion. Is is that good? How the Mac app compares to Arc if you know? cause Arc is the other trending browser on MacOS that I heard and tried.
Arc is good. There’s plenty to like, and has lasting potential.
That being said, here’s some recent copy pasta from another comment I wrote. It highlights reasons I’ve started looking back at FF (or Safari).
—— I’ve been using Arc for a couple of months now. But lately I’ve been toying with the idea of going back. Why?
- Extensions. I really, really, really wish I could see my password manager in plain view. Arc has a problem of limited screen real estate; instead of showing extensions, they choose to show buttons for spaces (and big buttons for “Favorites”).
- Tab sync. It’s not super confusing, but it’s a little confusing, having pinned tabs sync but other tabs not sync. Especially when Arc is going to auto-archive tabs for me. It creates a chaotic experience.
Things I’ll miss if I go back!
- Little Arc. I love it. It’s quick and what I need often times, for both in-page links and .webloc files I have in various places. The only problem Little Arc has is it is single-instanced; that makes it hard to use as my solution for PWA shortcuts on the desktop.
- Mobile Arc. It’s a neat way to implement mobile. I dig it.
Things that didn’t matter too much, but I’ll call out:
- I miss having a downloads button easily view- and click-able. Why? I like to see progress % and speed at a glance.
- The window borders are thicc. I used to change Windows registry settings to have thin window borders.
- The “add split” buttons at the top right are too easy to click on, and accidentally splitting a window can kill your progress in a web form.
- Settings don’t sync between instances. This sucks for me because I manually remap Ctrl+Tab / Ctrl+Shift+Tab to sequential switching rather than “last used”, and I have to manually remap that on all my Arc installs. [Same with Bitwarden’s field-fill shortcut.]
That is a very good opinion on the Arc, thanks for sharing.
I personally love the Little Arc the most. The idea behind it was great, being able to open link in a separate simplified window is great.
Other than that I don’t really know what I liked the most. The idea behind tabs is good too, but similar thing can be achieved with pinned tabs on Safari (obviously not that fast). The profiles idea is good as well, but I’m missing being able to associate them with current Focus status and I bet that the new Profiles coming to Safari will have that.
I’m a Firefox user trying out Orion right now. I gotta say that I’m impressed. It looks and acts like Safari, which I like, but supports all the extensions I love.
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Love how fast it is. Don’t love the UI or plug-in ecosystem. So Firefox is my daily driver on desktop and will be on mobile if Apple ever unchains 3rd party browsers properly on iOS.
I’m really bad at closing tabs because I’m either lazy or think I might need them later, which leads to my safari window having like 1000–1500 tabs open by the time I decide to sort through them and save/close some stuff. I also never close the app itself, it stays open for months.
It never lags. I find that impressive.
I’m currently at 1158 btw. I guess I’ll need to sort that out sometime within the next month :)
That’s the worst case of anxiety I’ve ever seen.
You’re NEVER going to NEED a tab. Just close them.
Haha, I know. But its mostly laziness, like if I need a new tab I just open one, and since it doesn’t lag I don’t care. I do save quite a lot though when I go through them and I refer or look up quite a few afterwards. So, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I hate that it’s buggy. For example I have to use my iPad to create or edit bookmarks - updating bookmarks just doesn’t work, at all, on my Mac, and it’s been like that for about a year.
As for what I love… mostly that it syncs everything, even tabs, between my desktop/laptop/tablet/phone. No other browser does a good job of that, and it’s a must have feature for me.
Arc was even better at syncing, and also less buggy… but they changed how syncing works. It’s rubbish now.
I use it on all my Apple devices, and honestly, would use it even on my Windows work laptop if I could.
I love that it’s minimal, is very energy efficient and protects my privacy with Private Relay. Also fills up passwords from Keychain in an instant and isn’t Chrome like 90% of web browsers today.
Up until about a month ago, Safari was the browser I used 95% of the time. I like the interface, swiping back to close a tab that was just opened from a link, etc. I don’t use a lot of extensions, so I don’t really miss them.
For the last month, I’ve been using Arc, but I may not stay with it.
I want Startpage to be my default search engine.
I use Safari as my primary and almost exclusive browser (falling back to Firefox once in a blue moon). I wouldn’t say I love or hate it - it’s JUST a browser after all - but there are a couple of things that come to mind:
- I “hate” that some web developers just develop for Chrome and call it a day, though I usually have the ability to say “Well, fuck you, too.” and not patronize those sites. Apart from that, Safari works and works well (for me) on all the sites I care about.
- I “love” that Safari integrates effortlessly across all my Apple devices - and this is a powerful motivator to stay in Safari’s garden. I like bookmark and secure password sharing. I like handoff. I like using “advanced” integrated features like Hide My Email (if I wasn’t using HME, I’d be using Firefox or DDG’s counterpart, but HME is “right there” and “works well”) and VPN (ditto).
(On my Windows 11 box, which I touch with ever-decreasing frequency, I use Firefox exclusively, and if Safari didn’t exist, that’s what I would use on my Mac.)
I just use it to airplay YouTube videos from my iPad which has it skip ads and sponsor segments with the sponsorblock segment without having to bother with the YouTube app. Don’t even have it installed. So it’s awesome in that area.
I hate that extensions like sponsorblock are paid on safari probably because Apple chatges an annual $100 fee while other browsers don’t. I just use Firefox with addons I prefer like containers on desktop.
You might want to try the Yattee app. No ads and has SponsorBlock
I do not like Safari’s tab groups. I need all tab groups always visible. That is something Chrome got right. Edge’s UI is even better there.
I don’t want to use the sidebar. I don’t want to have tab groups hidden behind a button.
I have tried. It just does not work for me.
Safari is one of the browser platforms we develop for, and honestly it doesn’t deserve the hate. Jen Simmons is on fire with guiding Webkit and I can usually debug easier on Safari and Chrome than Firefox.
Chromium, IMHO as a web dev since 1996, is more the New Explorer than Safari, especially where typography is concerned.
