WSJ: 'Quit Chrome. Safari and Edge are just better browsers' | Hacker News Reader

WSJ: 'Quit Chrome. Safari and Edge are just better browsers'

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44 pointsMilnerRoute18 comments

This link hijacked my back button on Android Firefox.

Same on iOS safari. Had to hold back button and select a few pages back...

I never once thought of doing that. I always restart the browser. Thanks for the tip.

I find Chrome infinitely more pleasant to develop in: those developer tools just rock. As a user though, Safari just feels smoother, seems to render pages better, and feels more native. If it had webm support it would be close to perfect for me.

I started using the developer tools in Safari a year ago or so and found that it pretty much allows you to do everything Chrome does. It's just about getting used to it looking a bit different.

I’m only using Chrome for development because of the zoomable flame-graph in the "Performance" Tab. It’s a fantastic profiling tool. Also, it’s nice that they allow plugins for DevTools (e. g. the React one). If Safari had those two features, I wouldn’t touch Chrome anymore.

Edge is based on Chromium

But as the article points out, it's faster.

IMO the case for Edge over Chrome isn't that convincing, but the Safari one is. If it had container tabs like Firefox (which has become a must for me) I'd switch in a heartbeat.

Safari doesn't have container tabs, but the Intelligent Tracking Prevention is supposed to achieve some of the same goals (but much more opaquely unless you're familiar with it's mechanisms)

You could try to read up on wether it satisfies your requirements: https://webkit.org/blog/category/privacy/

Not certainly, but most likely ITP meets your use case better than containers, as it's automatic.

The critical issue is that Firefox, Safari, and Edge all implement tracking prevention. When Microsoft switched Edge to Chromium, they implemented tracking prevention on top of Chrome, that Google refuses to implement because they're an ad company.

Note that removing tracking scripts and some ads significantly improves browsing speed and web performance as well. So even if privacy isn't your top concern, it's just... faster.

This makes Edge simply... a better version of Chrome than Chrome.

Is tracking prevention just builtin adblock?

There's overlap, but the focus is different. An ad blocker might not care about Google Analytics, which doesn't show ads. Meanwhile tracking prevention might not care about a banner ad that doesn't do any sort of tracking when it runs.

Tracking prevention will block some ads but it's focus is potentially privacy-violating script.

Safari doesn't have U2F/FIDO support, automatic non-starter.

Safari 13 does and the tech preview does

https://developer.apple.com/safari/technology-preview/releas...

Mobile Safari included

https://www.macrumors.com/2019/11/12/ios-13-3-fido2-security...

Hell yes! I'm switching as soon as this goes GA!

I had some luck with WebAuthn in Safari 13, but it didn't work everywhere, but Safari 14 does. It's in beta right now and it even supports WebAuthn with Google, Dropbox, Twitter.

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