Apple: Switch to Safari (From Chrome) | Hacker News Reader

Apple: Switch to Safari (From Chrome)

apple.com

36 pointssigna1173 comments

I’ve tried switching to Safari a few times, but I keep struggling with finding an ad-blocking extension that Just Works. Aside from that, I like it, but just a couple minutes on the ad-covered Web makes me need to go crawling back to Chrome. I set up uBlock Origin Lite years ago in Chrome and it’s functionally fully set-it-and-forget-it.

“Just use pi-hole” well sometimes I leave my house so that is an insufficient option.

I’ve used AdGuard for years across Macs and iPhones and it works great.

Same. Also works great for the family, kids to grandparents

I use Wipr 2 for safari on both ios and macos and I’ve had no problems with it, not sure what sites you’re using but blocks on all the ones I use.

Wipr is my recommendation as well. It's great both on Mac and iOS.

Wipr 2 and AdGuard for me, never see an ad.

This is a paid application with additional features paywalled. Why not just use Firefox and uBlock Origin?

- Not an option on iOS

- Safari sips battery on macOS

No hate for Firefox, and glad it’s an option for people, but Wipr was worth the small $ to me personally. YMMV.

Why not uBlock Origin Lite for Safari? https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ublock-origin-lite/id674534269...

One should question why they are being forced to use "Lite" in the first place.

I find this statement ironic while talking about the browser that spearheaded manifest v2 deprecation for "safety". Just use Firefox people, ublock origin still works there.

what's stopping you from using the same extension (ublock origin lite) in safari?

The other limitation, from my wife: you cannot change the browser header colours. It’s all the standard steel or cloudy style they have now.

It’s stupid, I know. But sometimes people like cars with a different colour of paint. Chrome has had this since maybe 2009?

wBlock works quite well.

https://github.com/0xCUB3/wBlock

https://skula.me/project/wblock/

Still haven’t found an ad not bested by NextDNS. Granted, not an ad-blocker extension but it “just works” and blocks ads, so good enough?

>Apple: Switch from Chrome to Safari!

Thanks, but I've already upgraded to Firefox.

I would love to use Firefox exclusively on my Mac, but I also like a long lasting battery. Because of https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1941693 Firefox currently uses twice as much CPU during YouTube video playback than even Chrome when you have ProMotion (120 Hz) enabled, significantly reducing battery lifetime. Switching to a different browser every time I want to play a longer YouTube video also isn't the best user experience.

Tell me about it. My old MacBook Pro was only getting like 3-4 hours of battery life with FF.

Firefox is not an upgrade from either Chrome or Safari.

My only complaint about Safari is I wish Apple would fully adopt PWA standards on iOS. I believe they don’t want to because it would make the App Store less necessary.

Beyond their anti-PWA bullshit, safari is just a worse browser across the board. It's the nre Internet Explorer. Much more on that here

https://infrequently.org/series/browser-choice-must-matter/

Do you mind to address some of the points of the article that claims that Chrome is worse?

Well, first nothing that apple says should be taken at face value, especially when it comes to the web.

But if you're not inclined to educated yourself via the tremendous resource I shared, I suppose you could look at

https://wpt.fyi to see how far behind safari lags in supporting features.

There's also the fact that a proof of concept port of Microsoft edge to IOS significantly outperformed safari.

https://www.theregister.com/software/2026/06/17/apples-webki...

Chrome is also not the only chromium browser. There's also Vivaldi, brave etc, which make up for some of the ad-related shortcomings of Chrome. I happily use Vivaldi.

Partly, sure. Don’t think that’s the whole story. I don’t work at Apple or anything so I don’t know what actually goes on in board meetings but I think any tech person would see there are pros and cons to web apps versus native apps.

There’s a funny history where the original iPhone apps could only be web apps as there was no SDK! See history section at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IOS_SDK

You can watch Steve jobs rave about the future of PWAs here! https://youtu.be/QvQ9JNm_qWc

Apple has systematically ensured PWAs are second-class apps on iOS. They've done just about everything they can to hobble them, including restrictions on memory, storage, notifications, background updates, and which browser can use them (only Safari). It's clear to everyone that this is done to prevent app developers from distributing their software outside the App Store. That's their largest profit centre. Of course they're protecting it.

The irony is that when the iphone was introduced, there was no way to write apps for it and jobs said the way to use third party code was to use a web app and add the link to the home screen (which you can still do, though I doubt many people even know that)

The one thing that keeps me from using Safari is web apps can't update their tab's favicon. That means if you load a site that uses the favicon for notifications you either (a) login when you have a notification and it will now forever seem like you have a notification or (b) login when you don't have a notification and it will forever seem like you don't have any notifications.

Yes, you can clear a cache for a one time update, but that is hardly helpful.

they do update periodically, but they are cached for a really long time.

also annoying when working locally as the favicon persists amongst different projects using the same port on localhost.

This seems like a misuse of favicons. Is there spec for changing the icon that way? Are the icons you expect to change being served with headers that allow caching? Are there more appropriate APIs that could be used like notification API?

Think the the unread count for GMail or the new message notification badge for Slack. It's worked this way in Firefox and Chrome for almost 2 decades. We're past the "you're doing it wrong" timeframe, in my opinion.

Similar page for Chrome, without directly comparing to a specific competing browser: https://www.google.com/chrome/

For those needing uBlock Origin please give wBlock a try. It's also open source but uses native Safari content blocking APIs. It's faster and works and syncs with iPhones through iCloud.

I switched from Firefox on macos and ios about a year ago when things started to get a bit weird with Mozilla. Safari is a highly capable browser, light weight, great performance on both iphone and mac, and is just a really nice experience overall. If I could use it on linux and windows as well, I would.

Does anyonwle think this is so strange coming from Apple? Calling out a specific product by name like that?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switch_(advertising_campaign)

it's the same as their switch from Windows to Mac advertisement from the early 2000s

Although I do not know if they have done anything like this since that until today

By “strange”, do you mean: desperate? Or do you mean unprofessional? Or maybe something else?

strange

adjective

ˈstrānj

stranger; strangest

a : different from what is usual, ordinary, or expected : odd

They do the same for iPhone vs Android: https://www.apple.com/iphone/switch/

And many years ago they had a huge Mac vs Windows campaign! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Get_a_Mac

>They do the same for iPhone vs Android

CTRL+F on the page shows that "Android" is only written once (!) and there is no logo or anything. It's as generic and indirect as it can be.

>And many years ago they had a huge Mac vs Windows campaign!

Exactly, many years ago, and then they stopped, which makes this unusual by definition

They also want to convince you to switch from PC to Mac: https://www.apple.com/mac/mac-does-that/

So, do I get to use Web MIDI and upgrade firmware on my various devices in Safari now?

I made the switch on mobile a while back and adjusted quickly. I really don’t miss chrome there. I did try to switch from Arc to Safari on my laptop and my experience was much less pleasant. There’s just a ton of clunky ux on safari. I’ll give it a try again but once I made the mistake of dismissing the permissions popup that appears for every video call and it just never came back (subsequent meetings). I’m sure it’s in my settings somewhere but this felt crazy. I’m required to click approve to use my camera on every video call but if I hit ‘esc’ once then I’ll never be reprompted? That makes no sense.

AFAIK on iOS all browsers are safari anyway. Apple doesn’t allow you to use anything but safari’s engine (WebKit) for browsers so chrome, Firefox, etc all run WebKit on that platform. Might as well use safari as it’s better integrated. And it supports uBlock origin (lite). With that and NextDNS, I have no ads anywhere. For the YouTube app, I use proton’s Albania vpn and no ads there either.

Now on desktop, use Firefox and uBlock origin.

It works quite well on iOS, I am satisfied. - ublock lite blocks most of the ads, the rest get filtered through an Adguard Profile(no app install needed).

- Not sure if possible with other browsers but you can install userscript extensions too.

- I have a shortcut that extracts the text of any tab(you can run a simple javascript, document.body.innerText to get) to send to my local llm, this javascript execution is limited to just safari.

On a mac though, I only use it to stream 4k,HDR on Netflix.

Well, I tried... I keep multiple tabs open for daily work. Safari just blanks them out seemingly at will. The tab still has the title of the site in it, but the page is blank, the url bar is blank, no option to refresh. It's just gone, like I opened a brand new tab. Maybe I'll try again in another year.

I find this page super interesting because it's what you'd expect from a B2B SaaS vendor, not from Apple. You'd never see them build an "iPhone vs Samsung" page, for instance.

> You'd never see them build an "iPhone vs Samsung" page, for instance.

You’d be surprised! https://www.apple.com/iphone/switch/

though I guess that's still mainly an iPhone pitch, not them acknowledging a specific competing product.

They call out Android.

Proud Firefox user. Will suffer with it until my grave. This little fox has been giving me the beach ball on Mac ever since last year MacOS update, but I just Ctrl+Alt+Del and start it again....

I abandoned chrome for ff a few yrs ago when the privacy issues became impossible to ignore. I abandoned ff for safari about a year ago when performance problems became unbearable. My biggest annoyance was the lack of devtools until a single web search revealed that safari does in fact have a full featured set of devtools, you just need to turn them on. No complaints.

Reader mode and hide distracting items are phenomenal, use them both daily.

Browser Performance Rankings: https://www.browserating.com/

Do I get it right: Chrome and Safari and many others are all "excellent"?

In their methodology "excellent" means 40+ speedometer score.

Reminds me of the days of Microsoft trying to convince us IE was better than FF...

I will switch to Safari immediately once they expand the number of languages supported by auto-translate. The current selection is very limited, and almost clownish for 2026.

I've used Safari since I switched to Mac in 2009. It's always been fast and smooth, and the integration - like password sync and SMS 2FA keys - works great.

Only available on Apple devices, so I’ll stick with Firefox.

They also want to convince you to switch to Mac: https://www.apple.com/mac/mac-does-that/

And to iPhone: https://www.apple.com/iphone/switch/

[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50072286

Chrome and Firefox have a decent developer experience, and their caniuse score > Safari.

I'm not sure that developers are the target audience the article is trying to reach.

Haha yeah fair enough.

I can't count on two hands the amount of times I 'solved' technical issues for friends and family by having them do a certain process (like a booking) on chrome instead of safari.

The headline is so funny. "please please please please, I beg you stay on safari, I swear we better than chrome please please please we really want your data"

You seem did not scroll till the pricacy part of the page

> we really want your data

this is a projection

https://chrome.google.com, look they say they protect your privacy too

Safari is so slow. I would never switch.

Everyone should avoid Google Chrome, and as such this campaign is welcome. But my major gripe with Safari is:

1. It is not multi-platform. A browser that isn't available for Windows, Linux, xBSD is not a browser I would use or recommend to others.

2. I don't want "Intelligent Tracking Prevention" or some limited Apple curated lists of content blockers - uBlock Origin should be fully functional in it.

3. No requirement of an "App Store" to install browser extensions.

4. No built-in AI bullshit. Rather make certain browser APIs open so that any other AI tools can use and manipulate it as the user wants.

5. Fully open source (in Safari, only Webkit is open source).

It did used to be available for Windows: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safari_(web_browser)#Windows

And Internet Explorer used to be available for Unix: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_for_UNIX

Funny story, but someone I know claims responsibility for killing Safari on Windows.

If you remember, those were the days when Windows software were kind of "bland" looking and Apple OS and software was "Shiny" with their brushed aluminium looks and glassy UI widgets (see screenshot here - https://jimmyg.org/blog/2007/safari-3-beta-for-windows.html ). So when Apple released Safari on Windows, it was more or less a clone of their Mac version with the "Aqua" skin. It really stood out in the Windows world and thus did become popular, briefly, in the Windows world due to this. Unfortunately because it was clone of the Mac version, it also retained the same UI quirks particular to Mac software like not having proper right-clicks (where Windows users expected) and some other UI interactions aspects that were different to Windows. Now, my friend who was using Safari because he loved the Mac-look of Safari, felt frustrated that it didn't conform to the expected Windows UI interactions norms. So he wrote a strongly worded email to Apple Support where in he told them that as a Windows user he was frustrated in using the Safari browser and he expected Apple to build software that complied with Windows usability norms. (What he wanted was a Safari with the UI skin of the Mac Safari version, but with UI interactions that conformed to Windows norms). [My friend claims] Steve Jobs' Apple being what they were then, took his complaints seriously and completely re-designed Apple Safari for Windows with native windows UI (Apple Safari 4 and later). But Apple Safari, as a Windows software, without the Mac skin, looked just as bland as any other browser (and it didn't really have any other great features to distinguish it from the other browsers of that time). They thus lost their USP which had attracted their initial userbase, and as it kept shrinking Apple abandoned it. My friend still regrets the tone of the email and not communicating properly about what frustrated him about Safari on Windows ...

Christ, no thanks.

I've tried Safari every time someone raves about it, and every time I've felt vindicated.

Switched to Brave a while ago and everything works as it should (i.e. I don't think about my web browser).

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