Is Safari becoming unusable as a daily driver?

[koelsh]

My experience with Safari since macOS 11 has been getting worse and worse. It's simply becoming unusable as a daily driver, especially at work, as various sites fail to operate correctly or even at all. I've tried removing all extensions, resetting any experiments, disabling/enabling cross-site tracking, disabling/enabling advertising privacy options and so on with no improvement.

A non-exhaustive list of sites that are broken...

• Monday.com after maybe 10 minutes the process takes up over 1GB of RAM and slows to a crawl at best especially on the same tab. New Tabs don't fare any better.. Other browsers I can use the same tab for hours on end before having to quit them.
• cPanel (for configuring the web server we use at work) refuses to load the page especially when logging in. Other browsers instantly load with no other issues.
• Duda.co (a site builder we use at work) cannot login as the page spikes CPU usage and even the username cannot be typed in.
• others I'll add on as they come to mind

It's a shame as I love Safari's "Export as PDF..." since it does as expected and exports the whole page as a single large PDF.

What's your experience been with it?

 

[velocityg4]

It’s still my favorite browser on the Mac, to download Firefox.

Honestly, I don’t care for it. It would probably be fine.if the addons I use were available. But they aren’t. if they do exist. They don’t behave the same. So, I hardly ever use Safari.

I don’t think I really used it much since 10.2 or 10.3. Whenever the first beta builds of Firefox came out. I mainly used Firefox.

 

[koelsh]

It’s still my favorite browser on the Mac, to download Firefox.

Honestly, I don’t care for it. It would probably be fine.if the addons I use were available. But they aren’t. if they do exist. They don’t behave the same. So, I hardly ever use Safari.

I don’t think I really used it much since 10.2 or 10.3. Whenever the first beta builds of Firefox came out. I mainly used Firefox.

Yea I can feel that. UblockOrigin isn't available on Safari and the alternatives don't work as well. Largely I need something to get rid of the annoyances like "sign in with Google" and "Google recommends Chrome" and "confirm your cookie preferences" and "please please please please please install Edge" and other garbage popups like that.

I'd use Firefox more but it doesn't use the macOS keyboard text replacements like Safari and Edge do and haven't found a way to export the entire page as a single large PDF, it still splits them up.

 

[Sheepish-Lord]

I downloaded a bunch of browsers on my test MBA M2 yesterday (chrome, brave, edge, firefox, safari tech preview). Did a couple basic tests; browser speed, adblocking, looked at privacy settings, then uninstalled each one to see how much crap it left behind. All in their stock configs.

I’ll spare the details unless you want to know specifically but Safari tech preview is actually a much better performer than stable Safari and behaves much differently on websites the stable one struggles with. Give it a shot and see if it performs better for you but I’m actually “maining” it on my main mac.

 

[chevyboy60013]

All I use is safari. Cannot stand Chrome, absolutely do not trust the alphabet company, and used to use Firefox but it seems to be going the way of chrome as well.

 

[5aga]

Firefox is king for me. Safari has weird annoyances that I can't stand. Plus I really like the ability to customize Firefox's appearances.

 

[hoo-man-b-ing]

I haven’t had any of those issues and just spent some time visiting Monday.com and playing around with (including signing in) Duda.co with no issues.

 

[velocityg4]

Yea I can feel that. UblockOrigin isn't available on Safari and the alternatives don't work as well. Largely I need something to get rid of the annoyances like "sign in with Google" and "Google recommends Chrome" and "confirm your cookie preferences" and "please please please please please install Edge" and other garbage popups like that.

I'd use Firefox more but it doesn't use the macOS keyboard text replacements like Safari and Edge do and haven't found a way to export the entire page as a single large PDF, it still splits them up.

Although I haven't tried it myself. You can try the "Print Friendly & PDF" add-on for Firefox. It's got a decent review average. There is also the fairly involved "Print Edit WE" add-on.

Doesn't look like Mozilla has plans for text replace support. One post I came across is because they don't use the Cocoa interface. So, it'll probably never be supported. Although there are add-ons which offer a similar feature. But you'd need to remake your list in the add-on.

 

[koelsh]

I haven’t had any of those issues and just spent some time visiting Monday.com and playing around with (including signing in) Duda.co with no issues.

How long did you stay on Monday.com? For me it's when the same tab has an open board for more than 10 minutes and only compounds over time.

Try their login page at https://www.duda.co/login it spikes CPU to 100+ in Safari and is completely unresponsive.

For both Monday and Duda looking at their home page and "please buy our product" pages likely work completely fine but it's the pages accessed when using the sites as customers. Especially when you have an existing project board on Monday going back several years.

 

[koelsh]

Although I haven't tried it myself. You can try the "Print Friendly & PDF" add-on for Firefox. It's got a decent review average. There is also the fairly involved "Print Edit WE" add-on.

Doesn't look like Mozilla has plans for text replace support. One post I came across is because they don't use the Cocoa interface. So, it'll probably never be supported. Although there are add-ons which offer a similar feature. But you'd need to remake your list in the add-on.

Thanks for the suggestions but neither of those work as they're both still splitting up by pages. While Safari will eventually still cut off the bulk of web page remains a single PDF page.

Also Print Friendly & PDF uses an external service to generate the PDF which will not work with sensitive personal and company information.

I think it requires work deep in the rendering engine so it would be something Mozilla would have to add.

 

[hoo-man-b-ing]

How long did you stay on Monday.com? For me it's when the same tab has an open board for more than 10 minutes and only compounds over time.

Try their login page at https://www.duda.co/login it spikes CPU to 100+ in Safari and is completely unresponsive.

For both Monday and Duda looking at their home page and "please buy our product" pages likely work completely fine but it's the pages accessed when using the sites as customers. Especially when you have an existing project board on Monday going back several years.

15+ minutes on Monday.com and attempted to login he duda.co login page — no issues.

 

[Sheepish-Lord]

Yea I can feel that. UblockOrigin isn't available on Safari and the alternatives don't work as well. Largely I need something to get rid of the annoyances like "sign in with Google" and "Google recommends Chrome" and "confirm your cookie preferences" and "please please please please please install Edge" and other garbage popups like that.

I'd use Firefox more but it doesn't use the macOS keyboard text replacements like Safari and Edge do and haven't found a way to export the entire page as a single large PDF, it still splits them up.

AdGuard web extension (free in app store) is better than Ublock Origin who even uses Adguard filters. Adguard has an annoyance list as well and is one of the leaders in manifest v3 and when Safari first allowed extensions. It’s also available free on iOS and is based on open source.

 

[CasualFanboy]

Always has been.

 

[pshufd]

I've been using Firefox in its various incarnations, since about 2001-2002. It's pretty easy to download any version of Firefox from back then and if something bugs you enough, you can always go back to an earlier release or download the source code and try to fix it yourself. It's also nice that I can use it on Windows or Linux of macOS.

I do sometimes have to run Safari or Chrome or Edge if something won't run on Firefox but that's rare. It's usually related to downloading an operating system installer.

 

[ignatius345]

I use it daily for a ton of stuff and I find it very usable. I keep Chrome around as a backup for Google Docs and the occasional site that misbehaves, but 99% of the time it works perfectly for me.

 

[martens]

Since the latest update (16.1, 18614.2.9.1.12), I will click on a link, and sometimes after that page starts to load, it goes back to the previous page (I guess to finish loading the previous page).

I have only one plugin (Noir currently but it is same with Dark Mode), and it happens on both my M1 MacBook Air and iMac 27" (2020). Have not tried disabling to see if the issue goes away (the plugins insert some CSS to remove white backgrounds). It's annoying, but not enough that I'd start looking for alternatives.

I'm pretty much 100% Safari. I have Edge around in case some web site doesn't load up, but rarely need it for that.