I’ve been building websites for 10+ years, and still prefer Safari as my daily browser. I switched over from using Chrome full-time 5 years ago.
Compared to Chrome it’s anecdotally faster, objectively more power-efficient, and on par with Firefox for privacy.
I don’t know why you think Apple’s uninterested in making a “competitive” browser. It’s been years since Safari didn’t support something I needed it to do, and I’d consider myself a power user.
I've been building websites for 10+ years as well, and I can't tell you how many hours I've wasted on workaround to make something trivial work in Safari that required no work in other browsers. I've also run into some pretty gnarly animation performance issues over the years.
That being said, Apple has clearly upped the focus on the browser in the last two years, and they are shipping a ton more features and fixes in each update, so kudos to them for refocusing as of late.
If you develop for Safari first you will feel the exact opposite: you'll get it working perfect in Safari only to have to frustratingly deal with tons of issues in Chrome.
I think it was objectively true that Safari was lagging 3 years ago, but in the last two years in terms of standards, Safari is equal or better. Safari feels much faster in practice for quite a while.
I'd like to see third party benchmarks. But beyond battery, there's a fluidity to Safari that is simply unmatched by Chrome. I'm talking about stuff like: back/forward, tab open/close, resize window, scroll, quit/reopen. Also a native feel in general that makes it especially nice, like text selection and the various elements.
Compared to Chrome it’s anecdotally faster, objectively more power-efficient, and on par with Firefox for privacy.
I don’t know why you think Apple’s uninterested in making a “competitive” browser. It’s been years since Safari didn’t support something I needed it to do, and I’d consider myself a power user.