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Comment by ancorevard | Hacker News Reader

Why is it that not more people use Safari?

On a MacBook Pro it is not only faster but your battery life lasts noticeable longer.

Not to mention the Safari engineers' stand on privacy as compared to Google Chrome...

I used Safari as my primary browser for about a year, mainly because it was easier on the battery. I gave up on it because:

1. I kept running into Safari-only issues on websites. The most memorable one was on the American Express website. I couldn't switch between cards because the selection widget was broken on Safari.

2. The marketplace for Safari extensions is anemic, a problem which is only going to get worse[1] as legacy extensions are about to be totally deprecated[2]. Firefox did the same thing, but at least they moved to the WebExtension API. Safari App Extensions are very limited in what they can do.

3. Safari's developer tools were not as good as Chrome's or Firefox's.

[1]: https://redditenhancementsuite.com/safari/

[2]: https://9to5mac.com/2018/06/09/safari-12-extensions-more/

The most common complaints I've seen have been that it doesn't support their extensions or they need their web sessions to sync to their Android/Windows/Linux device.

Why would I use a proprietary web browser when good open source ones exist?

I doubt the engineers make the privacy decisions?

Since they write the software, I'm sure they have more than a little sway.

Damn I've been working wrong all this time! I didn't know because I write some of the code I get to make the product decisions!

I don't want to attack a strawman here, but your comment makes it seem like you think that programmers simply write code that they're told to write, providing no input on the project at all. This isn't true at all: just because you're not a product manager doesn't mean that you don't have a chance to influence the final product; in the extreme case that you're told to essentially "shut up and code", you can exercise your control by walking away from the project if you don't like where it's going.

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