Performance, smoothness, battery life, mobile integration, password management, the list goes on.
I had to support and still know by heart the bugs and idiosyncrasies of IE 5, 6, 7, 8 etc. I have no sympathy for people who say Safari is the new IE.
Maybe if you’ve never used another browser.
Safari is good enough and offers the best battery life. This is all that’s good about it.
The dev tools suck, especially the network tools. The extensions suck. The weird distinction between bookmarks, favorites and reading list makes no sense so I always lose the pages I wanted to keep. On desktop the animations are awful (e.g. when swiping to go to the previous page, it blinks way too much, this is especially visible with Dark Reader because the dark-white transitions will kill your eyes).
I use Firefox on my work laptop and it’s just a better browser. I’ve got no complaints about it.
Dev tools are terrible, that's why I said “end user point of view”.
>The extensions suck.
Again, the amount of of people that even know what that is tiny.
>The weird distinction between bookmarks, favorites and reading list makes no sense so I always lose the pages I wanted to keep.
I love them. They are completely distinct things in my mind and the fact that the browser reflects it is just another thing to love about Safari.
>swiping to go to the previous page
I never do that. Command-Left arrow.
>Dark Reader…
I hate dark mode for everything other than my terminal.
I couldn't disagree more. Ignoring the lack of uBlock Origin and multi-account containers (which are table stakes for a browser), Safari's interface is unwieldy and lacks serious customization and a usable implementation of vertical tabs. I can't believe that a $2t company is so careless with their apps.
Vivaldi is indeed a paragon of customization.
Grandparent commenter was invoking Firefox, however.
I use Wipr, block third party cookies and use private mode when needed, use bookmarks and tab groups.
Not liking the UI is very subjective, personally I think they all suck somewhat.
The reasons vertical tabs are niche:
1. horizontal is the default in every browser 2. The most popular browser doesn't have any way to have functional vertical tabs 3. It is a huge pain to set up vertical tabs in Firefox 4. Safari's implementation of vertical tabs is a sad joke.
Vertical tabs are clearly superior and there is no doubt that horizontal tabs will eventually be a relic of the dysfunctional past.
The tradeoff of sacrificing some horizontal page space for a vertical tab list is indeed worthwhile if you're opening and revisting 10 or 15+ tabs. I've got about 150 open right now.
However, I'm pretty sure that the vast majority only have open between 4 and 7 tabs almost all of the time. If this is true, and if it remains true, then it's likely the primary reason why horizontal tabs have been the default in browsers, and why it will remain the default.
I can assure you that doesn't even register as something most end users would consider useful, if they manage to parse it at all.
Also, Cocoa text niceties work as expected. Multi language spelling, dictionary, text to speech…
I’m a huge fan, one of the best apps Apple ever made. It made the iPhone possible.
The various Cloniums (Chrome, Edge, etc) are probably second best in this regard with Firefox sadly placing last… Mozilla stuff has always lagged behind in that department. For example, it only got native context menus in the past year or two after the issue sat on the bug tracker for over a decade
Or maybe, just maybe, Safari actually hasn't been the best. It's been a vehicle to kill the web as a competing open platform. It's only now that regulators have finally woken up that Apple actually needs to compete, and suddenly discovered all these decade-old features that they need to actually implement to even reach parity, let alone being the "the best".
The idea that simply by visiting a web page can fill many gigabytes of the user’s drive and keep using CPU resources even after a tab is closed is antithetical to what the web is supposed to be.