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Chrome is Awful....
- Thread starter Miltz
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trash eighty
macrumors 6502
Safari is a decent browser though i'm using Vivaldi now on my Macs as its what i'm using on my work PC, plus the developer tools are useful. The ones in Safari mess things up.
Vivaldi is a decent browser with its' own cloud sync and all but it has stupid annoying bugs which go unfixed for a long time (even when reported) and sometimes reappear after they are fixed.
Two examples: (1) "Save as" prompt is popping up even when "save to default location without asking" is activated. (2) when new window is opened, search/address field is not in focus (but it is when new tab is opened in existing window).
P. S. I am writing this here in Vivaldi...
Two examples: (1) "Save as" prompt is popping up even when "save to default location without asking" is activated. (2) when new window is opened, search/address field is not in focus (but it is when new tab is opened in existing window).
P. S. I am writing this here in Vivaldi...
OKonnel
macrumors 6502
Every browser has its own features to take advantage of: for example, DuckDuckGo is a good choice for those who prioritize privacy; Chrome sometimes does a better job of saving web pages as PDFs when you want to keep them; Brave is highly customizable and works in some situations where Safari falls short; and so on, and so on.
Getting back to Chrome, it’s worth noting that it’s hated by many expert bloggers who specialize in Macs and programming.
Personally, I hate that if you let it update automatically, it accumulates all previous versions internally and takes up disk space. I’ve never understood or accepted this behavior, so I used to download Chrome from its website every now and then and completely replace the app, overwriting the copy in the Applications folder.
But recently I’ve been using Cask (with Homebrew) and taking advantage of its automatic updates via a LaunchAgent that checks for updates at 9 a.m. and, if necessary, updates Chrome and other apps in the background.
Safari is still the best browser, though. It’s a shame I’m still stuck on version 17 because (after using Sequoia for months…) I downgraded to Sonoma and deliberately stopped macOS at Sonoma 14.3.1 with OCLP 3.0.0 Nightly (June 2025), using some workarounds, removing unnecessary EFI KEXTs for my iMac, and modifying the config.plist (with ProperThree) to ensure that the menu bar icons don’t disappear after sleep.
I could update to version 18, but it bothers me that Safari 18 has WebGL issues (I don't know if this affects all Macs or just some Macs and OCLP). So, for example, if I want to return items on Amazon, the maps showing the courier pickup locations don't open, and so on.
Getting back to Chrome, it’s worth noting that it’s hated by many expert bloggers who specialize in Macs and programming.
Personally, I hate that if you let it update automatically, it accumulates all previous versions internally and takes up disk space. I’ve never understood or accepted this behavior, so I used to download Chrome from its website every now and then and completely replace the app, overwriting the copy in the Applications folder.
But recently I’ve been using Cask (with Homebrew) and taking advantage of its automatic updates via a LaunchAgent that checks for updates at 9 a.m. and, if necessary, updates Chrome and other apps in the background.
Safari is still the best browser, though. It’s a shame I’m still stuck on version 17 because (after using Sequoia for months…) I downgraded to Sonoma and deliberately stopped macOS at Sonoma 14.3.1 with OCLP 3.0.0 Nightly (June 2025), using some workarounds, removing unnecessary EFI KEXTs for my iMac, and modifying the config.plist (with ProperThree) to ensure that the menu bar icons don’t disappear after sleep.
I could update to version 18, but it bothers me that Safari 18 has WebGL issues (I don't know if this affects all Macs or just some Macs and OCLP). So, for example, if I want to return items on Amazon, the maps showing the courier pickup locations don't open, and so on.
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If this is related to any of machines in your signature then yes it looks like at some point Safari starts to suffer from these issues. One of my older machines is MacbookPro 12,1 and on that I found that Ventura was last actually workable system. Safari 17 (on Sonoma) seemed still to be usable but pegged CPU often up to level that started to feel uncomfortable. One possible explanation may be that Safari 16 came out with Monterey and that was last officially supported OS for that machine (Safari 17 came out on Sonoma).
All this means that your experience probably does not apply to newer hardware...
