Using Safari for a week

Software

Firefox has been getting flaky for me again, after several years of rock solid performance. On a whim, I switched to Safari as my default browser for a week. The results are below, listed by area.

General browser

  • It’s fast, in every sense. It’s also true, it uses less battery power.

  • The narrow Address Bar in Yosemite is maddening, and you can never get it centred correctly again after you install extensions.

  • No vertical stacked tabs. How anyone can cram all their tabs into a horizontal bar (with barely readable titles) in 2015 blows my mind.

  • The bookmarks sidebar is inefficient. I can fit barely half the bookmarks vertically in it than I can in Firefox.

  • Firefox’s developer tools are getting better, but they’re still no match for Safari’s Web Inspector.

  • I didn’t realise how much I rely on favicons as visual indicators, now that I’ve lived without them in Safari now.

Extensions

  • No Tree Style Tabs. See comment about vertical stacked tabs and how critical they are.

  • No PrivacyBadger, though the EFF has never cared about Safari.

  • Safari Cookies is a solid cookie blacklist/whitelister, though the lack of a quick toolbar icon limits its utility.

  • Disconnect doesn’t provide a Safari extension on their website anymore, but their Git repo hosts an old version. Still seems to work.

  • JS Blocker is a nifty extension for making 2015-era cruft pages usable and more private again, like NoScript on Firefox.

  • The DuckDuckGo extension isn’t really necessary, now that we can choose it as the default search and can use hashbangs to get anywhere else.

Conclusions

As I have since Safari was first introduced, I used it briefly before moving back to Firefox (and Camino back in the day). Old habit die hard, and there are a still a few things that prevent Safari being my primary browser. The state of things are much better than last time I checked, though.

I'd also use SeaMonkey again as well, if it were for sidebar tabs. Maybe I do need to brush up on XUL after all.

Author bio and support

Me!

Ruben Schade is a technical writer and infrastructure architect in Sydney, Australia who refers to himself in the third person. Hi!

The site is powered by Hugo, FreeBSD, and OpenZFS on OrionVM, everyone’s favourite bespoke cloud infrastructure provider.

If you found this post helpful or entertaining, you can shout me a coffee or send a comment. Thanks ☺️.