Is Safari now a bad web browser?

I’ve been using Safari since around 2005, when the first Windows version was made available.¹ Back then, I loved the way iTunes worked and looked, so I was all in for Safari on Windows. Two years later, I continued to go deeper into the Apple World by getting my first Mac: the 2007 iMac, the first made in aluminium, and only the second iMac to feature an Intel processor.

Today, after nearly 20 years of loyalty to Safari, I’m considering switching to another default browser on my personal computer. I mean, why is it so hard to watch a YouTube video without hiccups, and why can I only choose from a selection of 4 search engines, including three Bing-based?

I had a similar hesitation back when there was this controversial redesign a few years back. Apple eventually allowed users to revert to the old Safari design in settings, but there were a lot of debates and talk about Safari’s direction and about what Apple’s priorities should be regarding its cherished and despised WebKit browser.

While I immediately appreciated some of these changes (especially the URL bar at the bottom of the screen on mobile for instance), I gave the new desktop design a chance but ended up keeping it “traditional.” The whole thing felt like a lot of noise about nothing, but surely a sign that Safari wasn’t getting better fast enough. Group tabs and user profiles are welcome additions, but I feel like the essentials of the web browser are lagging behind some of the competition.

Maybe this is part of the web development community and some of their practices, or Google’s — in its own selfish interests, but for instance I found that Safari is particularly under-performing while using YouTube, and, to a lesser extent, Google Workspace web apps and some public service websites, often only optimised to work on Chrome’s engine.

When I watch YouTube videos, my computer heats up, and the battery drains quickly. I initially attributed this to the aging Intel processor of my early 2020 MacBook Air, or speculated that Google might be nudging users towards Chrome, which presumably handles YouTube better. I’m not sure anymore. Nonetheless, in the past few months, I’ve grown increasingly dissatisfied with Safari, having to toy around extensions like StopTheMadness or Vinegar just to be able to enjoy my web browsing times. This is when I started considering alternatives and keeping an eye out on what is available.²

I’ve experimented with other browsers. I even gave the latest version of Firefox a try. My frustration with Safari stems from its less-than-smooth performance and limited search engine options. Meanwhile, new browsers like Arc and SigmaOS are innovating in terms of UI and functions, with features like integrated content blockers, JavaScript functions per site, note-taking systems, and side-by-side tab views.

Meanwhile, Safari remains conservative and simple, which could be a welcome philosophy in the age “A.I. this and A.I. that” but in that particular case, this feels outdated, and missing the point on making it great under the hood. By itself, Safari’s performance has not been particularly great in the past couple of year. I guess it has been fine, and resting on the “historical” advantage of preserving the Mac battery life better. Other than this well-deserved reputation, the rest of the app feels a little out-of-time and lacking appeal.

I’m not savvy enough to talk about web standards, web engines, and HTML rendering and such. I’m just a user, for whom the web browsing experience isn’t getting better, while the browser features mirror a lack of ideas and will to make Safari truly better, competitive, and attractive to new users.

As a symbol of this, Safari’s reading list feature has seen zero updates in the past 12 years. It remains impractical, providing minimal information on saved articles — only the title and URL — with no indication of reading time or authorship. There is also no default reader mode for articles, making the reading list nearly indistinguishable from simply bookmarking a page.

This lack of functionality can push users to alternatives like Pocket, Instapaper, Readwise Reader, or Goodlinks. These services are great and work well on Safari, but for other apps and tools, like search engines, extensions can be a getaway to eventually using another browser, where better versions of the extensions often exist if they even exist in the first place.

Paradoxically, I keep using Safari because of its high-quality extensions. Despite not having many, the ones I use are excellent, such as the Wipr content blocker, Vinegar, StopTheMadness or StopTheScript. I wish some of these features would become natively integrated into Safari, like the ability to disable JavaScript on a per-site basis, which currently isn’t possible. Without these extensions though, Safari is almost unusable, and while this is also true for other browsers, they don’t suffer from the same performance and lack-of-features issues.

I’m contemplating trying the Safary Technlogy Preview to see if any of its regular improvements could make Safari more competitive: I’ve read one day that the way Safari is updated — linked to OS update — is one of the reason for its limited evolution and incremental improvements.

Speaking of WebKit, I worry about the future of browsers based on the WebKit engine. If users increasingly switch to Blink-based browsers like Chrome, particularly in regions like the EU, fewer websites will end up being tested on WebKit, and Apple’s commitment to maintaining Safari may wane, along with Safari support by extension developers. This will get worse with the weakened position of Safari on iOS. This can potentially lead to an even greater influence of Google in the adoption of web standards, a scenario I find concerning given Google’s existing influence over the web itself.

This trend highlights a paradox in the Digital Markets Act, which aims to provide more user choice but might — ultimately — lead to less diversity in browser and web engine options. As of today, whether we like it or not, and whether Apple abuses its dominance or not, Safari plays a critical role in preventing Chrome from completely dominating the market, but this is definitely not an excuse for Safari to stagnate and to reign exclusively on iOS and iPadOS. John Gruber writes:

Imagine if Chrome could deplete your iPhone battery as fast as it does your MacBook battery. Imagine if you were one of the millions (zillions?) of people whose “incognito mode” browsing history was observed and stored by Google and deleted only after they lost a lawsuit. Imagine — and this takes a lot of imagination — if Google actually shipped a version of Chrome for iOS, only for the EU, that used its own battery-eating rendering engine instead of using the energy-efficient system version of WebKit.

This is fair, but it is also fair to say that if Safari were truly better — a truly great browser — made available on other platforms (like iCloud is on Windows, and like Apple Music is on Android) and not only hiding behind its battery efficiency legacy on Apple platforms, maybe Chrome would not be so popular in the first place. Nobody is forced to use Chrome and its Blink engine, even on Android (I think?), and even if most people are victims of a groupthink effect and effective — if not questionable — strategies from Google. Anyone can decide not to use it, but many still do. Chrome is not a fatality, it’s factually a choice. This cannot be said about Safari on iOS and iPadOS.

The signs of Safari going downhill have been on display for a while, but I guess we decided to look away. It’s disheartening to see Safari, a browser that introduced me to the world of Apple and Mac, in such a downfall, becoming a shadow of its former self, a decline that seems mostly self-inflicted. I’m not the only one feeling like this. Recently, this is what Michael Tsai wrote:

I’m having so many problems with Safari for Mac: sites that don’t work properly, or that stall and stop updating, or that forget that I just logged in; the app beachballing for 30 seconds at a time, the whole browser getting wedged and not loading any pages until I restart it. After 20 years of using Safari, I find myself using Chrome more and more, and it seems faster and much more reliable. (Surprisingly, it even offers more search engine choices than Safari.) I don’t like this. Chrome is still not as good of a Mac app, and I want it to have solid competition. But Apple has dropped the ball, and Chrome “just works.”

Apple needs to spend more resources on their browser, and find new ambitions for it now that it will be more challenged on iPhones and iPads. The world needs a strong, well-funded alternative to Chrome. Maybe the Apple Intelligence features and A.I. will be one way to help Safari, but I’m pretty sure this won’t be enough, unless Apple starts becoming more ambitious with their browser and the web engine behind it.