Dear Safari, Things I Hate About You

For the most part I am fine with Safari, but I also can't say there is any browser that I actually like using.

I feel like one of the biggest problems is, well what are the alternatives? I use Firefox on my PC but since that is primarily for gaming I don't really need the interconnectivity. On my Mac, iPhone, and iPad the way everything works together is just way too valuable.

I wish it's memory didnt just keep inching higher and higher and I need to close it regularly, but I don't know if that is unqiue to Safari or if it would happen on other browsers if I opened way too many windows and tabs.

That being said: "Everyone knows about your tawdry Google relationship" yeah that needs to be addressed and is the same reason I don't consider Chrome an option. Everything else, I am not convinced any other browser is really much better.

So, performance hasn't kept up and you don’t like the extension ecosystem?

Performance I understand, its hard to compete with v8 and JS is pumped down our pipes in ever-growing amounts.

Extensions are poor, truly, with this I agree. But extensions are also a huge reason that people consider browsers to be unperformant (hilariously, based on my previous statement). I can understand the Safari team being less than excited to permit even worse performance.

More important: Stop losing authenticated sessions. Stop randomly corrupting the whole past cookie-jar for no reasons. Safari, just stop! This is crazy annoying.

It’s inexcusable that the only choices for default search engine are Google, or 4 companies which are reskinned versions of the Bing API.

It should be possible to set the default search engine to any URL with a ?q= parameter.

Maybe be the change you want to see in the world and don't use/support the most closed ecosystem?

The alternatives are not prefect, nothing is. But they are all more open and that is something we can build upon.

Orion is a nice, macOS only, Safari-based browser with vertical nested tabs.

https://kagi.com/orion/

It's made by folks at Kagi.

I started a thread of specific complaints on Twitter and tagged @jensimmons. Every issue was quietly resolved a few releases later.

Interesting to be written by a company who's revenue comes from selling a Safari plug-in.

Also not supporting PWAs and in general being behind and ocking on next gen web features

The list of issues with the Apple/Google relationship has a lot of unsubstantiated claims, such as sharing full web browsing history. Does anyone have a reference to where that claim comes from?

Their claim that Safari has gotten slow is that other browsers have gotten better, not that there has been any negative performance changes. I would suspect that HTML rendering as well as Javascript execution have significant diminishing returns on performance improvement investments.

Their first reference it there being issues with Web Extensions was to some person's random GitHub issue tracker, which isn't being updated when issues are fixed and doesn't necessarily provide a FB number to show it was raised to Apple. This IMHO is somewhat Apple's fault as they haven't contributed a Web Extension API component to WebKit; it is a Safari feature and needs to be raised as Feedback (which is then not externally referencable, and may not be updated as internal duplicates of the issue are closed).

The 4th thing in the article title/headline "Dear Safari, 4 Things I Hate About You"... seems to be missing?

How about disabling the unpinch to zoom out to the tab overview? Happens accidentally all the time and reloads tabs/hogs RAM when it does.

Or fixing the erasure of URLs from older tabs? Impossible to easily reload (but Translate to.../then view original does the trick).

Safari did the fundamentals quickly and solidly. Now not so much.

I've seen under the apple skirt, and the incentive structure there is such that these issues are inevitable. You get more RSUs and promotions when you make something new, and not when you make something simpler and more robust.

> You can earn our trust back, but only by stopping this relationship now and putting our privacy first.

I don't mind if Google is an option, but there should be an easy way to add third party search engines too (On top of the new modal where you can pick your default search engine in the EU at least).

For Kagi you have to install an extension just to overwrite that: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/getting-started/setting-default.h...

There are things to complain about Safari, but these don't feel that big of a deal. Some of my issues:

1. Massive memory consumption if left running to long 2. Randomly says "you are trying to close two tabs!" when you only have highlighted one 3. Randomly just stops loading a tab, and you have to literally close that tab and open a new one 4. Randomly opens a new tab in a random window when clicking, and you have to hunt for it 5. Hardcoded search engines

That's just off the top of my head.

I'm in Europe but as far as I know we're still stuck with WebKit browsers here as well with no sign of any other browser engines being made available through any alternative app stores. I think Apple has made it theoreticallly possible, but practically impossible and some charges were made against them for it.

Well, for a company so dedicated to Safari, you could design your site with better Safari iOS support ;)

https://webkit.org/blog/7929/designing-websites-for-iphone-x...

Sadely, I happen to be a single issue Safari dismisser kind of human.

When I open (click) on a folder in the bookmarks toolbar and then hover on adjacent folders it doesn't automatically open them, I also have to click on them. For this single feature alone, I never could use this browser.

> "Everyone knows about your tawdry Google relationship"

Of course they know, they specifically requested it.

safari dev tools suck ass. and they have done for at least 5 years if not more.

i'd say they've gotten worse even.

and expecting me to create an Apple ID and then download 30GB of xcode crap just to port my 5kb chrome extension to safari. yea right.

I kinda like Safari…

iCab and Orion are both much better and customizable without sacrificing performance