I don't really know about all the details of those metrics but I know one thing: Safari is smooth. Actually it was just perfect in the previous years too for me anyway. It just works and works super-efficient. That's why I use it. The only reason I have Chrome installed is to test my websites with Chrome and use MetaMask.
TBH I never understood why people use Chrome on a Mac unless there is a specific extension or site that doesn't work with Safari.
Also, not using anything from Google is a big plus for me to use Safari (or Firefox for the record) anyway.
You can't do proper adblocking (e.g. uBlock Origin) on Safari. That's why I don't really use it except when on battery and out travelling - and even then I'll often avoid using Safari since ads are so awful. Yes, I've tried the Safari adblockers, they suck. As far as I can tell they do marginally more at best than a DNS block.
Once you can't use uBlock Origin with Chrome due to the proposed Manifest V3, Firefox will be the only real option.
This was one of the main reasons we built the Orion browser [1].
Lightweight and faster than Safari in benchmarks, same WebKit engine and able to run Chrome and Firefox extensions out of the box, including uBlock Origin. Still in beta and you can try it for free. It is zero telemetry and completely user supported through Orion+ subscription. Has a very active feedback forum at OrionFeedback.org.
Same. In my experience it’s only marginally less effective than uBlock Origin. You do have to open the app to make sure the rules are loaded once in a blue moon though.
That said if uBlock is a requirement, there’s Orion[0] which is a WebKit-based browser that supports both the Chrome and Firefox version of uBO on both macOS and iOS.
To add to the other responses here, I won't deny the lack of uBlock Origin was a painful point for me going all in with safari on Mac; even the previous broken incarnation that had to be manually built and was a bit buggy was still fantastic compared to non-uBlockOrigin alternatives.
A small combination of user scripts for YouTube specific blocking with TamperMonkey and Wipr+KaBlock+1Block seem to work, with only Wipr requiring a purchase.
But I really wish Apple would walk back the position on how ad blocking runs in safari, as uBlock Origin made the argument for Safari much more convenient.
It is good though that a small number of user scripts and extensions get it "close enough"; I mainly miss element zapping/blocking from uBlock Origin at this point.
As the author of the linked article, there's over 250,000 users of our Safari-exclusive ad blocker[1] with few complaints.
It is able to block all ads, trackers and annoyances that users encounter. Including all YouTube ads.
Don't disagree that there are some limitations with more contemporary ad blocking approaches but they do the job for most users needs. These approaches will likely continue to evolve and include necessary capabilities to do more in the future.
I just went to give it a try, as the website copy says "Free from the App Store" and "optional Pro subscription", however, I was disappointed that the pro subscription is required to give it a try. It just says "Magic Lasso is disabled" and requires me to start a 1 month free trial. Really feels bait-and-switch.
I uninstalled it without subscribing, as my personal feeling on it is if you don't believe in the product that you have to, frankly, mislead me before installing it, it's not worth trying. I'd feel very different if the website was clear on the pro subscription requirement.
good to hear, thanks for the resources. Do you know if Apple has made any specific statements or commitments to continuing to support v2 for the foreseeable future?
I've read that uBlock Origin remains difficult to circumvent by anti-adblock techniques employed on sites today, and the sites where ads are blocked by Safari's content blockers simply haven't made the effort yet. I don't have any experience in this area, and would love someone who does to chime in.
Not exactly; this is a bit of semantics, but "Native Advertising" is different than traditional advertising, and Native Advertising might be _an_ answer to ad-blocking, but it's by no means _the_ answer.
Native Advertising seems to be at this stage fairly tame, but I don't hold any belief that it can't/won't change. If it stays at the level where the most you get is 30 seconds of a YouTube video dedicated to ads and occasional ad-only articles, in my opinion it's fine. It's still annoying, but it's not the immediately disruptive experience that more traditional web advertising are, and with YouTube at least, it seems many of the creators have settled on having predictable timing for their ad segment, either right after their intro or right at the end, and I think this is a healthy way of handling it. It's not interrupting the actual videos typically, the advertisers get their precious views and tracking, and the creators get paid. With native advertising articles, it's fairly fast to recognize that there's no real information in an article and to just skip it; if the authors still get paid and the advertisers are satisfied with the screen time, then so be it, I'm ultimately not too annoyed by such a situation as I don't get interrupted by ads.
I hate advertising in general, but with the above, I would call it acceptable for the time being; I haven't even bothered with the YouTube ad segment skip plugins/scripts for such items.
I have to use Chrome on a Mac because Safari refuses to support multiple profiles. I'm a fan of compartmentalization, so my side-business saved passwords are different than my personal saved passwords. Apple would prefer that I create two separate accounts on my Mac (and the annoyance of syncing dotfiles between the two), but Chrome just lets me switch between users seamlessly.
It seems like such an easy feature to add, but I'd bet there are Apple politics in play preventing Safari from adding this feature.
I’m using Brave for the same reason - compartmentalisation via profiles (“People”). Keep LinkedIn and other data vacuums quarantined, thank you very much.
Personally, I like Chrome's UI much more than Safari, and also enjoy the devtools UI much better. Also like many devs, I use the most popular browser by default so I can design for the majority of users (realizing how this may offend some of you...).
Indeed, this worked well for the sites that targeted IE, and I’ve seen enough sites saying variations on “designed for ie/chrome” to know you’re not alone in that belief.
It's very easy to use and switch between profiles on Chrome. Firefox is not as good here, but at least they have container tabs.
Regarding extensions, it's not only the number of extensions available, but what they're capable of doing and the process of discovering them. Sure, you can buy some extension to block ads, but it's still not as capable as the free and open source uBlock Origin. You can hide cookies popups, but probably not auto click the "deny" button like some extensions do.
Safari is also a bit too simple for me. I like things that "just work", but also have some control over things. Chrome offers a good compromise, I think. Firefox gives you more power, but their UI isn't as polished as Chrome.
I like Safari's power usage but since I got a M1 MBP, I don't worry about the battery life that much anymore, so the higher drain from Chrome/Firefox doesn't affect me.
This is me down to every single detail, including about testing and using MetaMask.
To add, Apple’s native support for security tools such as iCloud Keychain, privacy relay, hide my email etc makes it that much more compelling to continue to use Safari.
* I also regularly use Windows and Linux. Chrome is familiar and have synchronized across all of them.
* I need a proxy extension to bypass China’s network restrictions. The extension was not available on Safari (I don’t bother to check now).
* uBlock Origin is more powerful than Safari’s adblockers. For example, uBO can skip the 90 second long advertisement in the front of some Chinese video site.
My only problem with Safari is the age old algorithm they use for audio pitch correction on sped up videos, i.e. any videos you speed up (i watch at 2.3x) has the audio extremely tinny. Chrome and Firefox don't have this problem.
I've been using Safari for years now and I still think it's poor in many areas.
URL autocompletion is an absolute joke. Detaching tabs has been browser-crashingly-bad for about a year. Still no way to tell whether the current page has already been bookmarked. Performance is pitiful on large pages (e.g. long PRs on GitHub) to the point typing is takes whole seconds longer. Pointless "apps" for web extensions, which make it unnecessarily complex for non-Apple developers to publish web extensions for Safari.
I only use it because it's not Google’s and because it integrates better than Firefox. If I didn't have an iPhone I would never think of using Safari on Mac.
As developers of a Safari exclusive ad blocker – Magic Lasso Adblock – we thought it was time to write this follow-up after seeing the progress Safari has made in the last 12 months.
The Safari team deserves kudos for their significant progress and delivery.
This is such a cool feature on Macs. My iPhone receives the OTP via text message, it gets forwarded to Messages on my Mac, and then desktop Safari offers to enter the code. It all takes less than a second. Do other platforms have this? Honest question, I have no idea.
Nope. Android has this API where an app that is confirming your phone number with an SMS can automatically read it (without having access to the rest of your text messages) , but not all apps implement it (probably the majority though).
This is the type of feature Apple are capable of doing because they own the full stack - phone OS, computer OS, browser. Nobody else has that (well Google do with ChromeOS but i doubt such UX is a part of their focus there).
Of course the problem is that if you want to use a different browser, or Tim Cook forbid, a different mobile OS, you lose of all that because there's no interoperability. A form of vendor lock-in if you will.
The comment claims Safari, an app, has exclusive access to system features, my comment shows how other apps have access to the same features. The web has nothing to do with it.
I see that now after re-reading. You meant the other browser developers could add this. I first took it as saying websites could add it with some input attribute. My mistake.
Only works if you have an iPhone right? It annoys me more and more that I’m a prisoner of the apple ecosystem. I want to buy a folding phone but it’s android.
Yes, this is why I use Safari for a handful of financial websites that use 2FA. I still use Firefox with Sidebery for all other browsing because Safari has an inferior interface and poor overall usability.
Would you be ok with the mailman going through your letters and handing you the PIN code for your amex on a post-it note? "Saved you opening it yourself."
This only works with OTP codes formatted in a specified way so the system can make sure it’s only suggesting OTP codes and only on the website they are intended for.
Agreed! I don’t know why anyone would want that. And even Apple is getting bad with their own notifications. I just got one from Apple Music yesterday about the Super Bowl. WTF? I had to turn off Notifications for that now, too.
A calendar app, a messaging app, etc. All sort of apps have reasonable use cases for notifications, and now you can write those apps as persistent web apps on iOS.
The user should still have control over notifications of course, and if you're downloading, let's say, a shopping app, no reason to allow notifications, it'll just be ads or whatever.
Happily good calendaring apps have a standard protocol to communicate with calendar apps that don’t load a ton of Facebook and Google stalkerware every time you load them, and let their users just use their prefer calendar app.
Messaging services can also make an app, because I sure as shit don’t want my entire browser to become more annoying just because someone can’t be assed making an app. Hopefully safari will gate this BS on making a home screen app rather than just making every site a beacon of “add notifications so that we can sell you to advertisers even when you aren’t on our site!”
My favorite calendar app is a PWA that uses those standard protocols to integrate with services, plus some other features that I want. And soon, it will have notifications, too.
Ah, see I prefer not to have my personal data proliferated to a bunch of additional companies that want to monetize my data, and I like my use of such apps to not include spyware linking that to all the trackers on the web.
It would seem we're unlikely to agree on the value proposition of notifications from random websites. My assumption is that I'll see a bunch of BS "get notifications" spam from a variety of sites, none of which have any reason to justify the spam. Just as happened with the first version of "let's give websites the ability to spam users. Surely that won't be abused" notification system.
One point is to not allow Apple to act as the gatekeeper to what applications can be implemented and used on iOS. A second is to not force implementors of a fundamentally cross-platform application where I care about the service rather than the technology stack to waste huge amounts of resources on reimplementing the app multiple times. A third is having the economic gains of the app go to the people who actually did the work, not to the middleman who has been resting on their laurels for 15 years, collecting their 30%.
Native apps are good for Apple, web apps are bad for them. They've been using their full control of one of the world's most important computing platforms to cripple the web platform. If web apps really were that unappeling to users and developers, they wouldn't need to worry. Just stop the obstructions, and the market would decide in the favor of native apps. That they've been fighting this tooth and nail tells you that they have no confidence.
And let's be clear, Apple never even needed to do the work themselves. They just needed to stop blocking competing browsers. Again, if notifications are so bad, surely the users would have staid in Apple's no-notification garden rather than ship to a browser with that feature. But again, they have no confidence in their users actually choosing Safari.
It's not that websites will now send you notifications. It's that PWAs will now have the option to ask to send you notifications in the same way any other app on your iPhone does.
It means people can start developing apps for the web that will basically work on any platform that can run a browser. A huge step forward for the web platform that has so far been stunted by Apple's unwillingness to support these web standards
I think the post you're replying to reflects a very different view of the utility notifications, which I share.
I almost never approve a notification request. From anything, be it an app or a website. Off the top of my head the only notification sources that I have enabled are messaging apps, and even there I only have them turned on for the couple that I use for my most important communications.
I consider it a nuisance and almost an anti-feature that every random app nags me to give it notification permissions. By the same token, granting that anti-feature to even more things if something I Do. Not. Want.
I'm with you and almost never grant permissions for anything. I even have notification badges turned off for everything they'll let me turn it off for (everything but the Settings app).
Apple's implementation will likely have a toggle in the settings to decide whether or not you can be prompted for this permission. In fact, you can already do this with Firefox (and I assume Chrome).
The people like you and me who don't allow any notifications anyways will likely just turn off the prompt entirely. But for developers, this helps bring the web platform one step closer to equal treatment as native platforms and can dramatically open up the ecosystem Apple currently so tightly controls
So bizarre that there are devs think we want webpages with the ability to spam them.
Literally the last thing I want from a random website is notification spams and pop up, but woooooo soon I guess I’ll have to get used to pop ups asking me to receive ads from websites all over again.
Let's say you write an email client as a web app. Or a twitter client. Or perhaps an encrypted voice telephony webapp. Of course it is important for them to deliver notifications for those who want to receive them.
This isn't about regular web pages that want to annoy you.
> This isn't about regular web pages that want to annoy you.
I can't wait to see what the proportion of "hey let us spam you" requests from sites is to sites that have any reasonable justification. I'm guessing it won't be good. Just as happened with the first API that gave sites notifications.
And if I am using an encrypted telephony app, I want it to integrate with the native phone dialer, recent messages, etc. I also want it to behave like a phone call when my phone is paired to my car using Bluetooth. All of my third party calling apps do that now.
If you're offering a web based messaging app, I am assuming that no matter how "secure" you may claim it is, your site is filled with spyware that connects to every other website in my browser. To me that's a big negative, and so I'm not going to trust it. As a byproduct I am uninterested in allowing a "secure message" website the ability to spam me when I'm not on that site.
If I decide I like/need your service I would expect an app to be available, because again, I don't want the constant threat of my messages being tied to the identity the various spyware companies have built from my browsing. I also don't want to have to switch to my browser and then find the message tab or wait for a giant multi-meg web app to download again. If Safari limits access to the spam API to just home screened pages then I wouldn't mind the addition of notification spam: creating a home screen app is a reasonable indication the user does value a site highly, and more importantly limits the ability of random sites to spam me with notification requests.
Don't get me wrong, I understand that you can make mediocre cross platform webapps more easily than actual good apps, it's just that as a user I don't care. The argument "this is easier for me" falls flat because plenty of other people have been able to make apps, and those apps are typically better, but they actually get basic platform behavior correct. Failing that you can make an electron or similar app, and have all the crappy cross-platform BS, but hey at least you get to ask to spam me and you can't sell me out with spyware linked to my normal browser instance.
This is what antitrust regulation can do at its finest; when we had a draft for DMA, it was clear to everyone that Apple cannot block third party browser engine forever. MS has surrendered to Blink and Mozilla is getting irrelevant. So if Apple insists to drive everyone to the App Store ecosystem instead of the Web then Blink will take over the entire browser engine market sooner or later. Which is really bad for customers. I'm happy to see that Apple's now pivoting into the web ecosystem thus bringing real competition back.
So if Apple “is driving everyone to the App Store instead of the web” and Android browsers are so much better, then why do companies waste time making Android apps instead of telling Android users to just use the web?
How many companies are making iOS apps and not Android apps and telling Android users to just use the web?
Oh, what a typical example of whataboutism. We've been talking about iOS and you're bringing not just Android but Android browsers to attack a strawman? Chrome has been a much better development platform than Safari before 2022 but that doesn't necessarily mean it's better than the primary platform API? And why did you think companies will build a web app instead of Android apps when they cannot practically reuse it on iOS? Isn't the whole point of PWA cross-platform? Have you heard about the Apple/Google duopoly structure and how it's working? And about its implications on web development?
You looks like assuming that I am defending Android/Google against iOS/Apple. Sorry, I'm a long time iPhone user (about 15 years by now), who believed Steve's HTML5 vision and now just be sick about Safari being nearly unusable as a serious development platform. I am tired of installing 100s of apps just because those companies just wanted to send some weird push notification. Apple is the one to blame and now they're forced to fix that thanks to DMA. You don't have to have that angry of this fact.
No, I’m saying that since almost every service of note has a website for computers anyway, if it’s only Safari that’s keeping apps from being web apps instead of being “forced” to go through the App Store, then why do companies bother about making a web app and an Android app?
> And why did you think companies will build a web app instead of Android apps when they cannot practically reuse it on iOS
Because they are already building a web app for computers.
> Apple is the one to blame and now they're forced to fix that thanks to DMA. You don't have to have that angry of this fact.
And you really think companies are going to all the sudden stop writing native apps?
These companies could have already built just an app for iOS and a web app like they do now for computers and not waste time building native apps.
And let’s not even go into how shitty and low powered the average Android device is and how badly it performs with native apps and web apps.
No I’m not saying that all Android devices are bad. I’m saying that the average $250 Android device is bad - and yes that’s the average selling price of an Android in the US.
> From an end user point of view, Safari is the best browser
Maybe if you’ve never used another browser.
Safari is good enough and offers the best battery life. This is all that’s good about it.
The dev tools suck, especially the network tools. The extensions suck. The weird distinction between bookmarks, favorites and reading list makes no sense so I always lose the pages I wanted to keep. On desktop the animations are awful (e.g. when swiping to go to the previous page, it blinks way too much, this is especially visible with Dark Reader because the dark-white transitions will kill your eyes).
I use Firefox on my work laptop and it’s just a better browser. I’ve got no complaints about it.
>Safari is the best browser, hands down, on any platform, by a long shot.
I couldn't disagree more. Ignoring the lack of uBlock Origin and multi-account containers (which are table stakes for a browser), Safari's interface is unwieldy and lacks serious customization and a usable implementation of vertical tabs. I can't believe that a $2t company is so careless with their apps.
While Safari is no paragon of customizability, Chrome and its derivatives are easily the worst in that regard. At least Safari lets you to customize its toolbar, which is more than Chrome allows.
1. horizontal is the default in every browser
2. The most popular browser doesn't have any way to have functional vertical tabs
3. It is a huge pain to set up vertical tabs in Firefox
4. Safari's implementation of vertical tabs is a sad joke.
Vertical tabs are clearly superior and there is no doubt that horizontal tabs will eventually be a relic of the dysfunctional past.
The tradeoff of sacrificing some horizontal page space for a vertical tab list is indeed worthwhile if you're opening and revisting 10 or 15+ tabs. I've got about 150 open right now.
However, I'm pretty sure that the vast majority only have open between 4 and 7 tabs almost all of the time. If this is true, and if it remains true, then it's likely the primary reason why horizontal tabs have been the default in browsers, and why it will remain the default.
It’s also a great Mac app. Open a link in a new tab or window, frontmost or background? What happens by default, what keyboard shortcuts should work in each case? No browser has a better answer to these questions.
Also, Cocoa text niceties work as expected. Multi language spelling, dictionary, text to speech…
I’m a huge fan, one of the best apps Apple ever made. It made the iPhone possible.
The various Cloniums (Chrome, Edge, etc) are probably second best in this regard with Firefox sadly placing last… Mozilla stuff has always lagged behind in that department. For example, it only got native context menus in the past year or two after the issue sat on the bug tracker for over a decade
If Safari were the best browser for end users, why has Apple been blocking competing browsers for such a long time? Surely the users would stay on the Safari given it is both the default and the "best browser", and nothing would change. They could have avoided so much regulatory scrutiny.
Or maybe, just maybe, Safari actually hasn't been the best. It's been a vehicle to kill the web as a competing open platform. It's only now that regulators have finally woken up that Apple actually needs to compete, and suddenly discovered all these decade-old features that they need to actually implement to even reach parity, let alone being the "the best".
Many of those features are not in the interest of the end user. It’s Google’s idea that the web should be converted into a cross platform product it controls. And Firefox follows along in the hopes of remaining relevant.
The idea that simply by visiting a web page can fill many gigabytes of the user’s drive and keep using CPU resources even after a tab is closed is antithetical to what the web is supposed to be.
Overall the progress with Safari in the last has been great, and really shows why it's so important to have competition or even the threat of competition. It's only because of regulatory scrutiny that Apple has been pushed to give the Safari/Webkit the funds they need to make a good browser once again. Still a long way to go to catch up-to Firefox and Chrome but it's heading in the right direction.
>A leaked proposed EU act may force Apple to allow alternate browser rendering engines on iOS. This would give users the choice of which browser and rendering engine to use on their devices.
This has been passed into law. Enforcement should begin in 2024. The UK, Japan & Australia have all proposed similar provisions. Interop 2022 is a few features jointly chosen by the browsers to focus on and work on that year. It's not a good metric for comparing browsers.
>It is worth noting that these changes are still in draft and are early EU proposals with no final decisions yet made.
Again it is Final and has been passed into law.
What is the best setup for Safari on mac to block ads, block YouTube ads, block trackers, block cookies popups and automatically deny cookies? I like Orion but it is simply broken on many websites, especially some forms or buttons do not work sometimes, and it is not compatible with keychain and doesn't suggest passwords.
Because of this, my browser workflow is Orion for everyday browsing, for some websites I know I have to use Safari, for some I have to use Chrome, if a website doesn't work with Safari I first try Firefox and then Chrome. It seems to me like there's a room for improvement here :/
One very overdue improvement to iOS Safari I noticed: the humble HTML select element.
Since the first iPhone, iOS Safari displayed a clunky wheel selector for HTML selects, requiring more taps than necessary to view and select an option from the list. Finally at some point last year they ditched the wheel, replacing it with a simple list (similar to Android), requiring less interaction to select an item. Only took them 15 years to fix this UI inefficiency.
Yes it was. It required more interaction than necessary to select an item from a list, which is the definition of inefficiency. Why do you think they changed it.
Not only that, but the picker wheel only showed a few items, you had to scroll to see more than about 3 or 4 items. All this squashed into half the screen. Inefficient and poorly designed.
When selecting numbers on a date calendar, the wheel can be forgiven because you don't need to see the whole list to know the estimated position of your choice. But most select boxes on the web are NOT number pickers, but lists of words required to be read before a selection made. The old and now dead iOS select element wheel was a sorry piece of UX design indeed in most select box cases.
The original iPhone, and many versions after it, was probably 4 times smaller than the current phone.
Even on the current large iPhone screen the dropdown lists (instead of scroll wheels) are usually a pain to navigate because they are often a much smaller target and don't allow mistakes (you mis-click on an item, you have to open the dropdown again)
When articles about new versions of Safari are released, I go straight to the details of ECMAscript and CSS improvements and disregard everything else as irrelevancy.
But the recent introduction of "tab groups" has been an absolute game-changer for me. I currently have groups set up for technical research, shopping, gift ideas, recipes, and random-shit-about-bicycles. This is great not only for keeping tab-madness under control, but also the ability to close windows full of tabs without worrying about losing stuff. The tab groups have memory, sync across devices… brilliant stuff and absolutely worth re-developing ones browser habits around.
That's nice to hear. Safari is my main (only, really) desktop browser.
But let's consider this:
"A leaked proposed EU act may force Apple to allow alternate browser rendering engines on iOS... Some experts believe that this would increase competition in the market"
Whoever believes that is not an expert, and hasn't thought it through. Apple's insistence on WebKit is the only thing keeping Chrome from taking over the Web entirely. Once I realized that, I stopped whining about Apple forcing Webkit on everyone in iOS.
I definitely share the concern over Chrome's dominance, especially given the Manifest v3 crap, but it seems hard to believe they'll manage to take over the iOS ecosystem. Or even the mac ecosystem at that. As shown in this very thread, mac users really value the fact that Apple owns their whole stack and is able to do things like automatically fill in OTP codes from text messages (something that would be a huge invasion of privacy if any other company did it lol). Safari is tightly integrated with Apple's OSes and takes full advantage of that to offer things that would be impossible for other browsers to offer
I hope you're right. But remember that readers of this site are not representative of the computer-using public in general. If Mac (and eventually iOS) users have enough sites, friends, or support people from mostly-computer-illiterate service providers telling them to use Chrome, I suspect they might.
Most people don't even understand iCloud, let alone notice the few Safari integrations that aren't form- or password-completion that all browsers can do.
Not sure about credit-card completion though. Do other browsers offer that? I really appreciate that one in Safari.
On release, IE6 was so ahead on CSS standards conformance it broke websites. The old (long-forgotten) incantation for accessing XMLHttpRequest is the way you create a COM IDispatchEx object by ProgID from inside Active Scripting, because that was the way it worked in the original IE implementation. Before there were PWAs or Electron, there was the HTA, introduced with IE5. (Admittedly XUL came even earlier.) And so on—those are not exceptions.
It’s just that once Microsoft won the web, it turned out what they wanted to do with it as the main competitor to their fat-client business was nothing, so the IE team was effectively dissolved and IE stagnated, leaving an opportunity for Firefox to displace it. But before that happened, they innovated like crazy, up to and including (by some accounts) a right to demand features they needed from the Windows team—and, on the other hand, writing the original implementations for others: multilingual UI, a Unicode layer for 9x, windowless ActiveX controls, new revisions of the common controls, etc.
So you’re right that Chrome is not the new IE of 2009: Chrome is the new IE of 1999. And unlike Microsoft back then, Google now seem perfectly happy to fund the hamster wheel if it means every other prospective browser is also forced to run inside it or lose users.
Google won the web years ago and it's still "innovating." By "is the new IE" people generally mean the 2007 IE, not the 1999 IE. I don’t think many complained about those shiny new ActiveX APIs in IE 3 and Chrome doesn't really have anything like that (even though they push features out with few signals from the rest of the platform)
Chrome already won, non-Apple users basically don't have a choice.
Please tell me how Chrome has "slowed down" after reaching the current market share years ago. It's not like Safari is the one making on-spec progress like Firefox did in 2005. Sounds like you're the one not understanding the early browser wars.
Sssh, the world is filled with people who just think that if chrome does it, it’s correct, and that if chrome doesn’t do it, it doesn’t matter, and that if a site works in chrome then every other browser is wrong. Completely unlike the old IE developers.
Anyone who disagrees hasn't tried to develop a website on Chrome and Firefox only to find out Safari still doesn't support regex lookbehind (which means zero javascript will now run). It's only been available in Chrome for 5 years after all, no rush.
None of your Jacascript code will run? That sounds overly dramatic.
1. this only concerns regex 2. there’s an alternative regex syntax doing the same thing as part of the ecma standard 3. it can be implemented very easily without regex in almost all cases 3. It seems like you’re only considering chrome for desktop, not other browsers or mobile
TBH I never understood why people use Chrome on a Mac unless there is a specific extension or site that doesn't work with Safari.
Also, not using anything from Google is a big plus for me to use Safari (or Firefox for the record) anyway.