macOS Big Sur

As a daily user of Safari, I can't let you say that. The devtools suck. The network tools suck (why is it so hard to find the request payload??), the elements tools suck, there are basically no extensions (React, Redux, etc.). They are just horrible. As much as I try to use only Safari, I still fallback on Firefox Dev when I need some real devtools.

I use it for the reasons you mention but it's a really bad browser. It's the only browser that still has consistent rendering issues in 2020: sometimes parts of the pages stay blank, CSS grid support has inconsistencies with other browsers, and some basic layouts fail only on Safari.

Another one of my pet peeves with Safari is text selection. It's the worst I have ever seen: https://imgur.com/qC7amU1

It has the potential to be good, but it's just not.

1. Just lost a few hundred Tabs from last session. Not the first time this has happened to me on Safari. ( Firefox used to have this problem as well, they implemented multiple LastSession.json to combat the problem and it is basically a thing of the past. )

2. Fav Icons meant they are no longer showing the Tab Description once you have a dozen tabs as they will shrink to Icons Size. So you either have normal Tabs or Tabs with Fav Icons, not both. ( This is new in Safari 14 )

3. Show Tab Overview will reload all the tabs, including those that were in idle / unload state. If you are a heavy tab user you should not do this. Having a hundred tabs reload will cause hundreds of GB of Data written to your SSD. Basically shortening its lifespan.

4. AFAIK ( I could be wrong ), Extensions still requires you to have an $99/ year developer account. Some of my favourite extensions are now either paid or can no longer be used.

Apart from that, yes it is very good.

- On my 15" Macbook Pro (mid 2014), when you speed up videos in Safari the sound is distorted and weird, while in Chrome it sounds properly sped up. I use this a lot when watching educational videos.

- Youtube videos max out at 1080p.

- While there are decent ad blocking extensions, they're not as good as uBlock Origin.

- Web pages are fast and smooth, but the browser UI doesn't consistently feel as quick and snappy as Chrome.

- I once saw some rendering bugs when loading old reddit -- parts of the page were black.

This was Safari 14.

The critical functionality required for uBlock Origin and other request-based ad-blockers is blocking using the WebRequest API, which isn't supported in WebExtensions in Safari [0].

[0]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/Web... [0]: https://github.com/mdn/browser-compat-data/blob/master/webex...

It’s just one of those “no-shit” killer features that a browser touting its privacy-centricity cannot afford to not have

Unfortunately I can't really commit to using Safari on desktop because they don't have good ad blocking extensions (please correct me if I'm wrong). Really like FF for this.

But I really appreciate how Apple is committed to improving and highlighting Safari. After totalitarian regimes, browser engine monoculture is the greatest threat to Internet freedom I can think of.

- Pinned tabs are actually pinned tabs, not a small tab at the side of a single window that can still be easily closed

I'm looking down on the touch bar, and it's an indecipherable blur of basically identical tiny renders of web pages. I've never once found it useful, and the tab view has favicons (finally), if the touch bar had them I would likely use touch bar switching fairly frequently.

To be fair, no other browser does this obvious thing, either. I don't understand it.

Been using Safari for almost a year now, and this is one of my favourite features.

The last time, the thing that kept me from switching was inconsistent or confusing behavior around the URL bar auto-filling suggestions. When I focus on it and start typing it would fill in URLs with a lag, and so I'd try to navigate to a page, but just as I was about to hit Enter, it would auto-suggest some different path or set of parameters and then my Enter would navigate there instead.

It also (I guess to appear speedy?) would always speculatively load the root page when I'm typing something. So if I'm trying to type in "localhost:4000/somepage", it would issue a request while I'm still typing that for "localhost:4000/", which would inevitably cause me confusion when developing by triggering breakpoints and stuff I wasn't intending.

Chrome solved this a decade ago... just keep shrinking the tabs down to Favicon size or smaller. Safari just added Favicon images last year, and I don't even think they're visible by default.

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EDIT: Favicon-only compact tabs to have actually been changed/added in Safari 14 for Big Sur!? Which would actually probably push me to switch (and upgrade to Big Sur, even).

> https://9to5mac.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2020/07/macOS...

I only use FFX and Chrome for testing, although I tend to use FFX a lot for the developer tools and Vue integration. That being said, Safari has extremely polished dev tools that are highly capable.

I was using Safari 14 since the day it was released for macOS Catalina. The animations, for example when you open the link menu (cmd+L), make it sluggish. And that's on last year's 16" macbook pro without any heavy load, so it should not be slow.

Dev tools have improved, but so has Chrome. They still have a long way to go. I'm a frontend developer so I use these tools daily and I still use Chrome only because of the superior developer experience.

The touchid support is a neat feature, but 1password gets very close to it and I can use it in any browser. The only place where I was truly surprised with Safari was when you log to icloud.com, Apple pulls some 1st party magic there.

I'm now using Firefox in place of Safari, it feels faster and snappier. Checks all the boxes listed in the parent and then some, except native fingerprint support. I wonder if Safari is somehow performing better on big sur. I will test it during the weekend when I upgrade.

Basically I’ve been using Safari (desktop and mobile) for eighteen years in a row. I usually have Chrome on my machine too, for one reason or another, but I don’t think I fire it up more than a handful of times a year.

And remember: your browser doesn't have to be open-source to chip away at the Chrome monopoly. Every website that sees an uptick in non-Chrome visits will have to adjust their product priorities accordingly.

Not sure if they fixed this in Big Sur, but since Mavericks all the way through Catalina there's been a critical bug with Safari's use of the macOS keychain, such that if you don't use iCloud Keychain, then you cannot migrate your Local Items keychain (the one used by Safari) to another machine, even during a restore from a backup. Hence a loss, damage, or theft of your machine means the loss of all passwords saved by Safari.

I posted about it here recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24626562

I switched to Firefox for this reason. I can't afford to lose all my passwords.

If so, that's a deal breaker for me right there.

Is this just me or anyone else?

Also I need tab syncing with my Android phone and adblocking wasn't great on Safari

It's baffling at best that you imply you believe this.

It's proprietary software (so you can't prove it already at this point) from one of the most user-hostile companies in history, and one that at the bare minimum "was" involved in mass data gathering programs (example: PRISM), but everything points to "still is" and "will be" - not only for arbitrary governments but for its own pockets too.

A few more good things

- Credit/Debit Card store

- I browse on iPhone as well as Mac. They tabs are visible on both devices, including book marks etc

- The killer reader mode

- Reading List: it’s replaced Pocket app for me.

I think some of these aren’t new in the browser world but it’s just nice when I could use them without being hounded by a few thousand trackers.

My main browser is Safari, and I'm very happy with it, but I do also run Firefox for some things. I enjoy some of its plugins more (eg, ForgetMeNot), but overall it's pretty clunky compared to Safari.

That said, I do have to close the tab / restart after a few dozen reloads. I blame the 35 MB of JS that's being loaded, :/. (production version is 1/10th of that)

As someone who has to support Safari, I can still say that both Chrome and Firefox are better by about an order of magnitude. They are bad enough that I've given up trying to debug safari specific issues in safari, and just proxy the behavior in firefox.

the showstopper for me is lack of profiles. you can effectively have 2 profiles, one for 'safari' and one for the dev or preview edition. there's a very expensive (>$10) cookie switcher extension that would have the ability to effectively create profiles, but the need for that has escaped them. i actively inquired maybe 18 months ago and they had no inkling to work on that.

the other thing i like about recent chrome is the ability to have an extension only activate on click. this gives you a much higher assurance about it's safety.

This is a joke when your telemetry is sent unencrypted over the wire with no way to disable the same. Right now, Windows beats MacOS for privacy. At-least you can disable stuff on Windows with some effort.

We'll see after I upgrade

The first is a must for privacy reasons and I would be very shocked if FF without javascript running didn't beat the pants of Safari with it for almost all sites.

How can you assess the privacy of the browser? Did you do tests to verify this?

What are you referring to? I have upgraded but haven’t noticed a difference.

* no uBlock Origin

* further deepening an abusive relationship

Also, it doesn't support clearing data upon closing the browser if you're interested in that feature.

-A future of monolithic internet instead of a flourishing forrest.

-Technological advances driven by singular forces - i.e ultra thin laptops.

-The decimation of small but potentially impactful hardware innovation that my flourish one day.

Don’t get me wrong - i write this post on a Mac, for the same reason you all use it. Much of the technology is now mature enough but Apple’s muscle and patent have now become an inhibiting force. Thus this is my last Mac, last iphone. hopefully this resonates with someone, and instead of picking holes in a 5 bullet point post you focus on the bigger message here. Because there is one.

https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai

I used to use BetterTouchTool and Stay to do this, but after a co-worker tipped me off on yabai+skhd, I've been extremely pleased and rarely have to think about window placement (took me a while to get the config "just right", of course).

I haven't tried it on Big Sur, but because of the way yabai can assign windows to spaces, I don't believe you'd face this issue.

https://www.xquartz.org/

I appreciate those nags. Those nags clued me into app behavior; I learned what apps are requesting keyboard access even when they're not in focus, for instance. Blindly trusting our apps to access our keyboards and not gradually become keyloggers is a recurring problem in our industry, it seems, so that was a very welcome change.

I upgraded to Catalina 5-8 months after it was released, mostly because the initial rollout was so rocky (at least according to the articles on HN).

Going to keep my eyes peeled for reviews here in the next few weeks. Hopefully this is a more stable release than Catalina.

What finally did it for me was when I did an "ls" in a terminal after an upgrade, accidentally hit the wrong button when the OS asked for permission, and locked my terminal out of file system access. Mac OS is no longer any good for professional use, outside of media creation.

I have a friend who effectively works on code quality at apple who's always talking about how seriously they take this kind of stuff... and yet, there are without fail always issues in their flagship OS releases. I don't get it.

It runs a bit slower, but at least you can try it out.

Wat?

"Woah, pricing/releasing this game this way was part of our mobile strategy, not our desktop strategy - how dare you run that game on a computer!"

I know not all iOS apps target all devices - some are iPad only, etc. Is Apple allowing developers to arbitrarily prevent their apps from running on Macs? Can an app tell it's running on a Mac rather than an iPad?

- Notification system integration

- File management integration

I think if they get that right Apple does indeed have a game changer.

If a user can download and run the Amazon Prime app, why bother supporting Safari? The App version supports detection of VPNs, supports analytics etc...

Same applies with Netflix, Disney+ etc...

Then there are the devs which have OS X and iOS apps. Why would they maintain two code bases when now they can just support the iOS app and work on both? The app itself will be more optimal because it's designed for ARM/mobile so is likely newer with a cleaner architecture.

80% of the App Store Revenue are Gaming on both iPhone and Android.

I’ll wait to use ARM on a desktop computer until an OS/platform with more freedom and a much better UI commonly runs on ARM. That will be Windows.

I am also sitting still on Mojave. In the past there were usually compelling reasons to upgrade - in terms of quality of life and performance. Catalina, in my use cases, doesn't really do a whole lot for me. I can't think of a single feature that I want aside from perhaps the standalone Podcasts app. But because of all the noise raised during the last upgrade season from Mojave to Catalina I decided that the juice definitely wasn't gonna be worth the squeeze.

So now I have pretty much decided to just cruise this 2018 MBP along on Mojave until I replace the machine entirely. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Mojave on my 13” MBP 2015 is still fantastic. Great OS, great keyboard, USB ports, MagSafe, etc.

My money's on "Sequoia".

Next up has got to be "Bigger Sur", then "Biggest Sur" is up after, and then they'll finally be done.

Also, I don't like how the buttons in the toolbar don't have any borders and have an annoying delayed hover background color effect.

Otherwise, the UI is quite usable.

I wonder when a touchscreen mac will be ushered in by Apple. My kids always smudge up my laptop screen attempting to avoid the trackpad.

WebGL 2 is required for MSAA-enabled offscreen framebuffers among other features that aren't available in WebGL 1 as extensions.

A lot of this seems to involve how deep down browser specific behaviors the developer goes. I've seen a few pages that work better under Chrome than Safari. Even big Storybook sites seem to do better under Chrome.

I dont understand why. It seems macOS update and iOS update dont share the same CDN infrastructure. Could someone comment on possible reasons why that is the case?

Interesting, usually these big updates are fast, even hours after launching. It could indicate bigger demand than expected, or a technical problem.

Be nice though, and check infrequently.

Edit: This is now resolved.

Yes; absolutely.

The first couple of Catalina releases were a hot mess—my Apple USB keyboard refused to work reliably; I could only use the Bluetooth keyboard that came with the iMac.

By the time we got to 10.15.7, it was rock-solid.

I've been running the release version for a couple of days now and it's been rock-solid as well.

Obviously, I'm one person out of many, but a quick Google search indicates that I'm probably not the only one that felt stupid updating today.

You can find the full list of apps that bypass it here: /System/Library/Frameworks/NetworkExtension.framework/Versions/A/Resources/Info.plist under ContentFilterExclusionList.

Just a case of waiting unfortunately...

After upgrading to Catalina ~10 months ago the MS mouse has been flawless in daily usage. I haven't gone back and tried my Logitech mice.

https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/anvufc/psa_2018_macs...

It's basically not completely reproducible and is random.

Beyond giving you basics like Windows-style "snapping", it's highly customizable with keyboard and even trackpad and touch bar shortcuts

Assuming you have "zoom" set in System Preferences | Dock, double-clicking the title bar does that too, I believe.

Great for short cuts to resizing your screens better then the OS Version I was using before.

This is the biggest mistake in macOS.

The only thing that keeps me is MacOS, but even that's going down the tube. I don't want new features for the Macbooks every year on schedule. I just want the thing "to work".

I've been slowly moving back to Windows because if I'm unhappy with a computer, I might as well pay less for it.

MacBook Air (11-inch, Early 2015) and iMac (21.5-inch, Late 2015).

give it some time and you'll never want to turn it on again.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_binary#Universal_2

Yes, of course.

> two binaries

Yes and no. Technically, they are single binaries. The Mach-O binary format has supported the concept of a "fat binary" at least since NeXTStep was ported to Intel. So it's a single file, a single "binary", but with different sections for different architectures. Kernel selects the right bits of the binary to executer when loading.

> flag at boot-time

Nope. On an ARM Mac, ARM code will run natively, Intel code will run via Rosetta. On an Intel code, Intel code runs natively and ARM code does not run. This is done transparently for each binary.

I still have a bunch of Macs at home running El Capitan and Sierra because they work and because I don't have two weeks to screw around moving each one over to Catalina. When they die I'll probably just move the whole house over to Linux because Apple has so completely lost the plot on what personal computing means.