Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Easily the worst web browser in the world. The new sidebar in macOS Safari 15 and iPadOS 15 Safari has totally and utterly torpedoed the entire flow. The experience of opening and closing it and dipping in and out of bookmark folders is like trying to navigate a bombed runway. Barefoot. Quite how a muti-trillion dollar tech company managed to do this without noticing or caring is beyond words. It’s actually a miracle. Annoying enough to make me seriously question if Apple are a business I will continue to support. The keyboard in text entry fields on iPad is also a total comedy of errors and has been since at least iOS 13, but that’s probably a separate issue. If they don‘t revert back to the previous sidebar I’m done with them.

The Story So Far
 
Last edited:
*Rolls up sleeves*

Howdy Jen, welcome. You must be new to the internet ?

A few that come to mind, all macOS Safari:
  • Pages stalling halfway while loading / unable to click / sometimes happens with google results or pages just remain white with no content.
  • -Compact view is nice, the concept, but please keep refining it, it's not entirely there yet, there is a lot of info compressed in the tab box which sometimes conflict, tab title text gets cut every now & then, this has been present since Safari 15 day 1.
View attachment 1956626
  • Searching via the tab url box sometimes takes forever.
  • Sidebar, location always resets upon closing/ opening it, the UX has worsen.
  • "Tab groups" feature, deliver something polished please. You can't even navigate through them without the sidebar eating 1/5th of your screen open.
  • In experimental features, you have around 100 items listed with no possibility to select or deselect them all, just reset to default. Is this "list" format the best you can provide for such feature?
  • Dev tools inspector freeze easily, when adding properties to the CSS panel, many times they get duplicated out of nowhere, fuzzy behaviors. No react extensions tool compatibility in 2022.
  • The extensions ecosystem is anemic, blame devs?
  • Add a color picker to the inspector with multiple color formats (hex & rgba at least).
  • Add an option for font styles information upon text inspection popover.
  • PDF viewer could provide thumbnail page number scrolling for like, you know, PDFs with tons of pages?
  • Provide more granular privacy controls & a built in adblocker, or stop blowing privacy smoke all over the place?
  • Multimedia playback is a Russian roulette with every update. When you navigate away from the playing tab, the video quality decreases, ever thought about navigating the internet while playing full screen video in another monitor?
  • Improve Widevine support please.
  • A web browser today needs to be unbundled from the OS so updating can de done efficiently while keeping a professional evolution pace.
  • Provide the possibility to erase cookies & cache on a scheduled way, as with history.
  • Sites like outlook or atlassian, they seem to redirect a lot and open up new tabs when all you want is just to reload or sign back in from the same pinned tab.
  • The overall performance is so clunky compared to other browsers within your own OS, why is your own "native" browser outperformed by Chromium forks? e.g. back / forward (swipe) functionality works faster on almost every other browser, try it yourself.
  • Is it too hard to maintain responsive view up to date with the latest devices? While at it, please include some form of user input for dimensions, because once you resize with the frame's handles it is a pain to get back to a specific value (if achievable at all). Considering you are selling 4k & 5k desktops & screen, why would you remove the 4K dimension in the last version?
View attachment 1956578
  • -When using the inspector vertically, give the option to make DOM panel full width and move CSS panel to the bottom, for the love of god, it's basic UX.
Brave: View attachment 1956573 Safari:View attachment 1956579

90% of these were already submitted, over and over.

So Jen, thank you, if you ever come across these and decide to act. I'd love for Safari to be the best browser, do you and your team?


Right, if it were for users loving this in its current state, we would still be using butterfly keyboards, lightning connected pencils & a charging port in our rears.


Maybe they could put twitter aside and stop ignoring the received feedback :)
Finally some useful feedback in this thread rather than just vague complaints about the UI. This is specifically about developer complaints about webkit, not just general rants.
 
Chromium is the dominant web engine on the world wide web and websites are going to be designed/optimized for Chromium not Webkit. So browsers who do not use Chromium engine are going to have a sub par experiance since the websites are not designed for the alternative browsers web engines causing issues like pages not loading correctly.
If this was a desktop only issue, you'd have reasonable point.

However, you conveniently ignore that web kit is the dominant web engine on smart phones, which outnumber desktops by a factor of more than 10-to-1.
 
To be fair I think a few major long-standing problems have been fixed recently without much fanfare so users like myself may not have realised they'd been fixed.

Because of her post I checked in Disney+ , which never worked, and now it no longer seems to have the continual refresh problem.
The website icons in Bookmarks are now all loading properly too it seems - before the wrong icons or no icons appeared
I checked my bank site - that seems to load OK now. I used to have to use Chrome.
I get the "this site is using too much energy so were not loading it" message much less often now (but think I saw it yesterday)

Those were multi-year problems which forced me to use Chrome and Firefox again.
As a poster above said there are still plenty of problems eg Bookmarks does not remember last state, but minor in comparison to a website being unusable
 
  • Like
Reactions: iozkucuk
Finally some useful feedback in this thread rather than just vague complaints about the UI. This is specifically about developer complaints about webkit, not just general rants.
Yea but the title isn’t written in that way, and we all know most people only read titles and first few lines of the article.
 
Ah yes I forgot about the tab favicon lottery. First Apple removed our ability to disable them, and then they broke them. I play a game now when loading a website to guess which other website’s icon will be used to represent its tab. Total calamity of a browser. I know it’s melodrama to some, but when Safari commands 95% of your iPad’s screen time, all these issues are enough to ruin the entire ownership experience.
 
  • Like
Reactions: nvmls and Shirasaki
Because you live in the Apple bubble where Apple does no wrong, I like Apple a lot but I can ca them out of safari and iCloud needing to revamped after with the outages that keeping happening on iCloud, because it just works, right ?

Why do I live in an apple bubble where apple does no wrong, because I haven't had any problems with their browser? I genuinely have had no issues. Not saying they don't exist but it feels overblown.
 
I hate it when a company with virtually unlimited resources pleads with its clients to help them fix their software. I’ll help, but my QA fee is $150 per hour.
Good to know your hatred will be ready and waiting if they ever choose to.
 
  • Haha
Reactions: Stevez67
If there is a "New IE"; it is definitely Chrome.

Safari is light, fast, and privacy focused. It was a little scary when they threatened that horrible new interface; but they happily stepped back from the brink.
I love it – to me, it's more philosophically reflective of what I think the web should "feel like," – but I'm glad it wound up as one of two choices for people who weren't up for such a near-overhaul.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Stevez67
Safari feels old and clunky and doesn’t work right on every computer I use it on, whether new or old.

Firefox works fantastic for me, and makes my old computers feel new again when web browsing.
Safari is my day-to-day, and Firefox is my secondary browser when I need one. I think they're both at least above the level of "very good," which I think is great. More above that level would be even better.
 
Safari is/was my main browser for years. I don't know what they did to the app, but I had to start using Firefox again because so many pages do not work. Content not being loaded, buttons won't respond, pages stay blank.
One answer: iCloud Private Relay
 
Did you ever use uBO for an extended period of time?

It doesn't seem like it.
Nobody who did would even bring up AdGuard, as it's such an inadequate substitute
I may have used several years ago, thus I don't know what it did better for me than AdGuard does right now.
Maybe I will take a look at it later, as I am trying Vivaldi right now.
 
  • Like
Reactions: turbineseaplane
Restore the old RSS reader. The older version had the article feed stretching almost across the width of the Safari window. Article titles were in larger type and the size of each article listed in the feed could be changed via a little slider on the right side of the window. The new version had everything crammed into a thin column on the left side of the window. Article titles are truncated and the type can't be made much larger.

Bring back narrow tabs. Wide tabs don't look like tabs, and they also are "buried" at the base of the top of the window, right above the webpage display. Tabs used to be at the top of the window, where they were easily navigated to and served as a visual anchor.

Safari also needs much more robust support for addons. A large reason that people go to other browsers isn't because they think it's too slow (does anyone sit there with a stopwatch and time their browsers...?), it's because they can customize it.
 
  • Like
Reactions: turbineseaplane
If anyone on their team asks for feedback, they should do it with humility instead of that tone and then rebuking people for bringing up old stuff. Very off putting and increases the resentment.

In any case, one example is that they need to work with their cloud team and fix the cloud tabs sync issue once and for all. Yeah, that's bringing up old bugs that THEY STILL HAVE NOT FIXED.

Or are the people the real bugs?
To her point though, this comment also sounds like self imposed narrative…. the cloud tab sync has worked in safari for a while. I rely on it daily.
They tech preview/nightly build doesn’t sync however. And tab groups are not objects I can drag between safari and tech preview. But I doubt that was your point
 
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.