Hey guys! I tried Safari. I usually use Chrome. It’s slower. Is it me? On YouTube in particular the player is frustrating. I also think the UI’s worse.
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Safari’s slower than Chrome
- Thread starter Ultra AleM
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Safari is the fastest browser on Mac to date. Maybe it's something running in the background or maybe you're running an extension that's lagging in safari?
Since YouTube and Chrome are both Google products, this does not surprise me. I suspect they would optimize their website for their browser. Also the past Google has made changes to the YouTube website that negatively effected performance on browsers other than Chrome. I don’t know if they’re still doing this.
I don't have Chrome on my Mac, but YouTube might be slightly slower in Safari versus Firefox, but since both load almost instantly, it's really hard for me to tell. Neither one seems slow and it loads in a fraction of a second. I don't know a way to time it.
If it's terribly slow, it might be some sort of cache issue. Maybe try clearing the cache of Safari
Yeah this is the only reason I have a chromium browser installed on my Mac, other than the occasional extension. I still refuse to install chrome though lol
I hear some websites. Don't play nice with non-chromium browsers but I've never really had an issue. Maybe I've been lucky.
When it comes to speed, I've never felt like I wish a page would load faster or it was taking too long. Maybe it's because I have a newer Apple silicon Mac, but everything loads up within a fraction of a second. It's not instant where it's just blinks and it's loaded but that could be partially due to my Internet connection. I don't have fiber Internet.
The only other oddity I've noticed between browsers is when I watch YouTube videos in Safari full screen versus Firefox, the Safari has a slightly smaller black border. I don't know why, but Firefox can't completely utilize the entire screen. It's about 3 mm thicker black bar on each side. It's not significant in my opinion, but it is noticeable.
I'm hesitant to put Google Chrome on my Mac just because I've heard so many stories about battery life even when the browser isn't in use because of background processes doing something. I don't think I want Google continuously running whatever background processes on my Mac. I was a big Google Chrome user, but now I've switched the Firefox on both Windows and my Mac. Sadly we've been reduced to three browsers on the Mac, Chrome, Firefox, and Safari. If you're on a Windows PC you only have two browsers to choose from because Safari on Windows was discontinued a long time ago.
This is not true for me based on benchmarking on my 2016 MacBook Pro. Safari and Firefox perform similarly while Edge pulls ahead by 20% using BrowserBench's suite to test.
Some sites, specifically Reddit, puts my Safari to a crawl. Browsing is far more responsive on Edge so I've been using it as my Default.
I completely agree. I’m on a 2012 pro retina, so definitely don’t have the speed of Apple silicon, but it’s still really fast even compared with my 14 pro or iPads. I feel the same way as you about putting chrome on my Mac, even with those issues seemingly fixed. The specific YouTube issue I was referring to was some videos seeming to not be in 4K on safari probably because of VP9 support.
And yeah, the browser situation is fairly sad. It’s wild (but not shocking) how much control google has assumed over the internet as a whole.
On my 2019 macbook air running sonoma, safari pulls ahead in every benchmark in browserbench compared to chromium and firefox. In real world usage tho, safari loads webpages significantly slower compared to firefox and chromium, even when running without any extensions. It's so bad that i am basically forced to use a thrid-party browser, just because it can sometimes take an half a minute for a website to load, compared to what would've taken 5 seconds tops on firefox or chromium (with ublock origin and dark reader enabled.)
I'm sorry but what's wrong with using a "third-party browser"? I, for one, never use Safari because any other browser is simply better (in my view).
There's nothing inherently wrong with it. It's just that other browsers lack some of Apple's ecosystem integration stuff, like if you use safari on an iphone and you can switch tabs back and forth between the devices etc. Also with only 128gb of storage, every mb counts
There's nothing inherently wrong with it. It's just that other browsers lack some of Apple's ecosystem integration stuff, like if you use safari on an iphone and you can switch tabs back and forth between the devices etc. Also with only 128gb of storage, every mb counts
Ok I see. Valid points. I indeed don't use any iOS devices and have more storage.