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Recent improvements to Safari

magiclasso.co

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Re: Recent improvements to Safari

#41

Post by kitsunesoba »

tambourine_man wrote: post #17
tambourine_man wrote: post #15

Derided 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.

It’s also a great Mac app. Open a link in a new tab or window, frontmost or background? What happens by default, what keyboard shortcuts should work in each case? No browser has a better answer to these questions. 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 OS integration aspect is indeed big.

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

Re: Recent improvements to Safari

#42

Post by elcritch »

culi wrote: post #29
happybuy wrote: post #28

Earlier 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…

nice self-promotion. But anyways, what's the story on Safari's support for manifest v2 going forward?

Relax, sure it’s self promotion, but they are the author of the TFA so it’s not like they’re jumping into a random thread.

Re: Recent improvements to Safari

#43

Post by csydas »

bigDinosaur wrote: post #7
can16358p wrote: post #4

I 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…

You can't do proper adblocking (e.g. uBlock Origin) on Safari. That's why I don't really use it except when on battery and out travelling - and even then I'll often avoid using Safari since ads are so awful. Yes, I've tried the Safari adblockers, they suck. As far as I can tell they do marginally more at best than a DNS block. Once you can't use uBlock Origin with Chrome due to the proposed Manifest V3, Firefox will…

To add to the other responses here, I won't deny the lack of uBlock Origin was a painful point for me going all in with safari on Mac; even the previous broken incarnation that had to be manually built and was a bit buggy was still fantastic compared to non-uBlockOrigin alternatives.

A small combination of user scripts for YouTube specific blocking with TamperMonkey and Wipr+KaBlock+1Block seem to work, with only Wipr requiring a purchase.

But I really wish Apple would walk back the position on how ad blocking runs in safari, as uBlock Origin made the argument for Safari much more convenient.

It is good though that a small number of user scripts and extensions get it "close enough"; I mainly miss element zapping/blocking from uBlock Origin at this point.

Re: Recent improvements to Safari

#44

Post by elcritch »

skrowl wrote: post #37
FabHK wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m using Brave for the same reason - compartmentalisation via profiles (“People”). Keep LinkedIn and other data vacuums quarantined, thank you very much.

You should check out containers for Firefox. It does the same thing without having to open multiple windows / instances.

And I find Firefox to be between Safari and Chrome in efficiency. Especially on an M1 Firefox seems to not drain the battery like Chrome.

Re: Recent improvements to Safari

#45

Post by kitsunesoba »

wintermutestwin wrote: post #25
tambourine_man wrote: post #15

Derided 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.

While Safari is no paragon of customizability, Chrome and its derivatives are easily the worst in that regard. At least Safari lets you to customize its toolbar, which is more than Chrome allows.

Re: Recent improvements to Safari

#46

Post by csydas »

squokko wrote: post #23
spudlyo wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've read that uBlock Origin remains difficult to circumvent by anti-adblock techniques employed on sites today, and the sites where ads are blocked by Safari's content blockers simply haven't made the effort yet. I don't have any experience in this area, and would love someone who does to chime in.

Isn't the anti-adblock technique being used today to simply make the content of the site shill for the advertisers? How would that be blockable?

Not exactly; this is a bit of semantics, but "Native Advertising" is different than traditional advertising, and Native Advertising might be _an_ answer to ad-blocking, but it's by no means _the_ answer.

Native Advertising seems to be at this stage fairly tame, but I don't hold any belief that it can't/won't change. If it stays at the level where the most you get is 30 seconds of a YouTube video dedicated to ads and occasional ad-only articles, in my opinion it's fine. It's still annoying, but it's not the immediately disruptive experience that more traditional web advertising are, and with YouTube at least, it seems many of the creators have settled on having predictable timing for their ad segment, either right after their intro or right at the end, and I think this is a healthy way of handling it. It's not interrupting the actual videos typically, the advertisers get their precious views and tracking, and the creators get paid. With native advertising articles, it's fairly fast to recognize that there's no real information in an article and to just skip it; if the authors still get paid and the advertisers are satisfied with the screen time, then so be it, I'm ultimately not too annoyed by such a situation as I don't get interrupted by ads.

I hate advertising in general, but with the above, I would call it acceptable for the time being; I haven't even bothered with the YouTube ad segment skip plugins/scripts for such items.

Re: Recent improvements to Safari

#47

Post by theresistor »

culi wrote: post #38
thewebcount wrote: post #26

Earlier 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.

It's not that websites will now send you notifications. It's that PWAs will now have the option to ask to send you notifications in the same way any other app on your iPhone does. It means people can start developing apps for the web that will basically work on any platform that can run a browser. A huge step forward for the web platform that has so far been stunted by Apple's unwillingness to support these web stand…

I think the post you're replying to reflects a very different view of the utility notifications, which I share.

I almost never approve a notification request. From anything, be it an app or a website. Off the top of my head the only notification sources that I have enabled are messaging apps, and even there I only have them turned on for the couple that I use for my most important communications.

I consider it a nuisance and almost an anti-feature that every random app nags me to give it notification permissions. By the same token, granting that anti-feature to even more things if something I Do. Not. Want.

Re: Recent improvements to Safari

#48

Post by dmitriid »

exodust wrote: post #22

One 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.

Re: Recent improvements to Safari

#50

Post by habitue »

thewebcount wrote: post #26
skybrian wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess, but I will keep blocking them whether they are mobile apps or web apps. Few apps have any business sending notifications.

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.

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