Hacker News Reader

Comment by PebblesHD | Hacker News Reader

On a MacBook I've found its almost impossible to beat Safari, it works amazingly well and doesn't annihilate my battery life. Personal choice though, I'm not committed to any specific browser and all do certain things better than the rest.

View on HN

Safari doesn't sync with any android browser, making it no-go automatically (for me).

Firefox, on the other hand, is the only browser that can sync between desktop-mobile and has adblock on both sides. Chrome unfortunately doesn't on the mobile side.

Safari does seem to be the battery life king. I wonder how it manages to do that. Could be related to why it's a slower performer than Firefox and Chrome.

I think Apple invested a lot of resources in making software battery-friendly. I'm not sure this has happened yet for Firefox or Chrome.

So did MS, which is why IE often does better than others on Windows.

I try to se Safari, but tab management is awful. There isn't (as far as I know and I really searched for it) any kind of session management that allows me to keep a separation between my work browsing sessions and my home/personal projects sessions.

Dunno, I think that depends on the content. I'm building a js-css-webgl game, and I find Safari is lucky to break 50% of the performance I get from Chrome/FF.

There's a few WebKit bugs filed about slow WebGL performance under both OSX and iOS Safari, I wonder what Apple is doing differently to Google/blink in the rendering pipeline to cause it?

No idea, sorry. My guess is that it's the JS VM but I don't know how to check. I just tried running a profile, but Safari froze and beach-balled to death. When I do profiles in Chrome it drops from 60fps down to 45. :/

Fortunately for me, Safari also doesn't implement some HTML5 APIs I use (e.g. PointerLock), so I feel justified in pretending it doesn't exist.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com