Sidelining Safari

It was bound to happen. For months, I’ve done my best to prevent this, but eventually, my patience and tolerance weren’t enough. Here I am, writing a post about how I finally decided to ditch Safari as my main browser, and replace it with third-party options. This change was a slow process somehow — spanning a couple of weeks or so — but the gravitational forces of better options were very difficult to escape once I upgraded my work computer to Tahoe, and got to witness Liquid Glass, the mess of it all, and how right most critics were.

Safari on Tahoe works fine, I guess, but so many little things feel wrong (it’s a theme with Tahoe and Liquid Glass). For example, I can’t tell at first glance which tab is active, despite the enormous amount of screen real estate occupied by the address, tab, and bookmark bars. Meanwhile, the Safari extension situation is frustrating as always, and, in 2026, it is still impossible to use the search engine of your choice without requiring an extension that simply redirects search queries.

For years, since the first version of Safari for Windows, I have been a loyal, if intermittent, user of Safari. Even today, in a work environment made of Google Workspace, Google Meet, Slack and others, I’ve resisted using the other usual suspects that are Blink-based browsers like Chrome, Brave, Vivaldi, Edge, &c. I’ve dipped my toes in the water a few times, yes, but Safari remained my first choice. Habits, soft spot, call it whatever you want, but to me Safari was always the obvious, the default Mac browser, despite its flaws.

Earlier this year, I gave Helium Browser a try: a newish, smartly named, Chromium-based browser, aimed at being light, fast, and stripped of all Google surveillance technologies. The trial was a success, and, after switching back to Safari for a fair fight, I realised that Helium was the most efficient browser to use for work.

But the more I used Helium, the more I realised how much better it was than Safari, even the superior Sonoma version that runs on my personal computer. Helium is well-designed, and its set of features is exactly right for me, and, being a Chromium-based browser, it works with my web-related BBEdit scripts.*1 It was just a matter of time before admitting that sticking to Safari was not the best option any more, even for my personal use.

My current JavaScript-off by default approach to web browsing surely didn’t help Safari’s case. Indeed, I was starting to get tired of opening private windows to reload tabs with JavaScript “turned back on” for sites requiring it.*2 It was fine until I realised how the same JS-off system was much more convenient to implement on Helium using uBlock Origin (an extension that comes with the browser).

On Helium, this is how it works: JavaScript is turned off by default via uBlock Origin. When a site requires JS, I activate it temporarily for that site via uBlock Origin, and JS stays on, only on that tab, until I close it. For sites where I want JS on all the time, I can “lock” that setting and I don’t have to think about it again, or go into the browser’s settings, navigate to the list of sites where the extension is allowed or not, and so on. Quicker and easier than my Safari system.

Another perk of not using Safari on my Mac — and therefore not being able to sync my favourites, history, and open tabs with my phone any more — is that I don’t have to stick to Safari on the iPhone either. I can now finally use the great Quiche Browser without feeling like I am missing out on the cross-device comfort I experienced with both instances of Safari.

And you know what is great about Quiche Browser? You guessed it, I can add a handy JS on/off toggle onto the toolbar. With Safari and the way it makes extensions like StopTheScript work on iOS, the Private window or quick access to settings workaround I had on the Mac wasn’t manageable, making it pretty much impossible to browse the web with JavaScript turned off by default on the iPhone.*3

So what’s the catch with Helium? I am surprised to say that performance doesn’t seem to be an issue on my early 2020 MacBook Air, at least for now. It may be a little warmer than usual, yes, but I was expecting to hear the fan way more often than I do. Video streaming doesn’t appear to be easy on the CPU and/or memory, but it wasn’t great on Safari either. In fact, Kagi’s Orion — a WebKit-based browser — is seemingly worse than Helium on my computer when it comes to the vacuum cleaner sound effect.

The main and only catch I can see so far is everything password-related. I use Apple Passwords, and I could solve 95% of my problems with the iCloud Passwords extension, but I want to use Helium with the services disabled, which prevents it from installing extensions. The Apple Passwords’ little shortcut that lives in the Mac menu bar is helping, but is not ideal.

When I look at modern browsers like Helium or Orion on the Mac, and Quiche Browser on the iPhone, I can see a widening gap between those and Safari. These browsers — made by very small teams — are surprisingly good. Not sure I can say that about Safari any more. Using these apps, you can tell the developers behind them care about the product.

How many people work on Safari at Apple? Are some members of the Safari team looking at this new generation of browsers? I hope they do, I hope they care. I hope one day they will give me good reasons to switch back to Safari. This is one thing I expect from Apple at WWDC.

In the meantime, I’ll let you know how my honeymoon with Helium goes, or if I get sentimental and reunite with Safari sooner than expected.