This is what antitrust regulation can do at its finest; when we had a draft for DMA, it was clear to everyone that Apple cannot block third party browser engine forever. MS has surrendered to Blink and Mozilla is getting irrelevant. So if Apple insists to drive everyone to the App Store ecosystem instead of the Web then Blink will take over the entire browser engine market sooner or later. Which is really bad for customers. I'm happy to see that Apple's now pivoting into the web ecosystem thus bringing real competition back.
Recent improvements to Safari
81–90 of 147 posts
Re: Recent improvements to Safari
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
As the author of the linked article, there's over 250,000 users of our Safari-exclusive ad blocker[1] with few complaints. It is able to block all ads, trackers and annoyances that users encounter. Including all YouTube ads. Don't disagree that there are some limitations with more contemporary ad blocking approaches but they do the job for most users needs. These approaches will likely continue to evolve and include…
So some honest feedback on Magic Lasso. I just went to give it a try, as the website copy says "Free from the App Store" and "optional Pro subscription", however, I was disappointed that the pro subscription is required to give it a try. It just says "Magic Lasso is disabled" and requires me to start a 1 month free trial. Really feels bait-and-switch. I uninstalled it without subscribing, as my personal feeling on it…
Will update this copy of the website. The subscription requirement only recently changed (in the last few weeks).
Re: Recent improvements to Safari
#83I don't really know about all the details of those metrics but I know one thing: Safari is smooth. Actually it was just perfect in the previous years too for me anyway. It just works and works super-efficient. That's why I use it. The only reason I have Chrome installed is to test my websites with Chrome and use MetaMask. TBH I never understood why people use Chrome on a Mac unless there is a specific extension or si…
I use Chrome on Mac for several reasons:
* I also regularly use Windows and Linux. Chrome is familiar and have synchronized across all of them.
* I need a proxy extension to bypass China’s network restrictions. The extension was not available on Safari (I don’t bother to check now).
* uBlock Origin is more powerful than Safari’s adblockers. For example, uBO can skip the 90 second long advertisement in the front of some Chinese video site.
Re: Recent improvements to Safari
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed! I don’t know why anyone would want that. And even Apple is getting bad with their own notifications. I just got one from Apple Music yesterday about the Super Bowl. WTF? I had to turn off Notifications for that now, too.
> I don’t know why anyone would want that. A calendar app, a messaging app, etc. All sort of apps have reasonable use cases for notifications, and now you can write those apps as persistent web apps on iOS. The user should still have control over notifications of course, and if you're downloading, let's say, a shopping app, no reason to allow notifications, it'll just be ads or whatever. Overall, flexibility is good.
Is it really worth it, when there are so many good native apps instead?
Personally I don’t really see the point.
Re: Recent improvements to Safari
#85Derided by whom? From an end user point of view, Safari is the best browser, hands down, on any platform, by a long shot. 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.
>Safari is the best browser, hands down, on any platform, by a long shot. 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.
All of those things are quite niche.
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.
Re: Recent improvements to Safari
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
Safari 15.4 and later supports manifest versions 2 and 3. [1] Mozilla maintains a list of which keys are compatible across which browsers as well [2] [1] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/safariservices/saf... [2] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/Web...
good to hear, thanks for the resources. Do you know if Apple has made any specific statements or commitments to continuing to support v2 for the foreseeable future?
There were no official statements, but an engineer at Apple working on extensions said that "Apple sees extension APIs as long term support".
https://github.com/w3c/webextensions/issues/298#issuecomment...
Re: Recent improvements to Safari
#87I don't really know about all the details of those metrics but I know one thing: Safari is smooth. Actually it was just perfect in the previous years too for me anyway. It just works and works super-efficient. That's why I use it. The only reason I have Chrome installed is to test my websites with Chrome and use MetaMask. TBH I never understood why people use Chrome on a Mac unless there is a specific extension or si…
I've been using Safari for years now and I still think it's poor in many areas.
URL autocompletion is an absolute joke. Detaching tabs has been browser-crashingly-bad for about a year. Still no way to tell whether the current page has already been bookmarked. Performance is pitiful on large pages (e.g. long PRs on GitHub) to the point typing is takes whole seconds longer. Pointless "apps" for web extensions, which make it unnecessarily complex for non-Apple developers to publish web extensions for Safari.
I only use it because it's not Google’s and because it integrates better than Firefox. If I didn't have an iPhone I would never think of using Safari on Mac.
Re: Recent improvements to Safari
#88I love how Safari fills in OTP codes from SMS messages automatically. I know you’re not supposed to use them but so many services still do.
So your phone is reading a message and then sending your OTP over the network? Sounds safe...
Are you talking about the OTP delivered via unencrypted SMS? Surely Apple knows how to set up a link with a barebones encryption better than SMS’
Re: Recent improvements to Safari
#89One very overdue improvement to iOS Safari I noticed: the humble HTML select element. Since the first iPhone, iOS Safari displayed a clunky wheel selector for HTML selects, requiring more taps than necessary to view and select an option from the list. Finally at some point last year they ditched the wheel, replacing it with a simple list (similar to Android), requiring less interaction to select an item. Only took th…
It wasn't an inefficiency. It was a way to give users nice scrollable lists with large tap targets on tiny mobile screens.
Super nice to scroll a 150-lines-long list of countries by swiping on a 1-inch-tall target on my huge screen.
Even now it's stupid they don't offer keyboard filtering.
Re: Recent improvements to Safari
#90Safari is the new IE6. It's always going to be the weakest / furthest behind major browser.
Anyone who disagrees hasn't tried to develop a website on Chrome and Firefox only to find out Safari still doesn't support regex lookbehind (which means zero javascript will now run). It's only been available in Chrome for 5 years after all, no rush.