Weird Safari issues, and I should probably replace it. With what?

[Sill]

I'm running a late 2012 27 inch iMac, OS X 10.11.16, Safari 10.0.1.

I've been using Safari since it was released, and I've generally been happy with it. Lately, I've noticed a short list of irritating issues rising to the surface of my user experience:

1. Media heavy pages, especially those with embedded slides and videos, do not load properly, if at all.

Going to Macworld, for instance, and loading one of their all-to-frequent slide shows ("Twenty greatest Mac products of all time", "Ten iOS apps you need or you'll die a horrible death", etc), I get the slide frame and the three modes on the side of the slide, but nothing else. Clicking on the next arrow scrolls the page up till it stops, and thats it. No amount of clicking on any of the navigation controls in the slide frame have any effect. I have to click "open in a new tab" on every single thumbnail to see the slides. Many pages do not load at all.


2. Enlarging thumbnails on a "click to view" type e-commerce page leads to shenanigans.

Due to poor page resources, many of those jpgs open up a hovering image only marginally bigger than the original. I use the trackpad to expand the window so I can see more detail. Releasing my contact with the 'pad so I can then drag the image around gives me a brief glimpse of the enlarged image before the image screws up. The floating, enlarged image shifts down to the lower right corner. No amount of dragging will get the image to move enough for me to see, nor will it stay where I want it.


3. I can no longer view cookies/cache/etc.

I used to be able to open up the Privacy pane, click on Manage Website Data, and delete whatever files I didn't want on my machine. Safari used to have amazing granularity on this control, showing me each individual file. I could regularly harvest the ubiquitous _ut* files that Google hides and burn them out like the disease they are. At some point Apple stopped that, and only allowed me to see cache and cookies. Lately I can't even see that. Clicking on the Manage button gives me a blank window, and I can hear the hard drive spinning away like a dervish. A few minutes later its still doing that. I do not want to leave it on overnight to see what happens.


4. A growing list of sites no longer have persistent login cookies.

Once upon a time I used to be able to sign into a given forum with cookies set on, then after login was completed I would set cookies to off, then delete whatever tracking cookies were installed and I'd be ready to go. I could stay logged in to a given site for years without needing to log in again. As a member of about 40 different forums this is a time saving plus for me. Now, it isn't working. More often than not I have to log in at random, diminishing intervals. I would say that maybe one of the forum-devouring monster companies out there is doing this to ensure users log in and forget to turn off cookies, but its happening even on independent sites.


Conclusion

So, either this all can be fixed, or I can just replace the browser. If anyone has some solutions on how to correct Safari behavior, I'd like to hear it. If anyone has advice on a browser to try, I'd appreciate it. I have a short list of requirements.

- speed would be nice. Safari has gotten slow for me in recent months
- due to security concerns, the browser must not have any Google components. No Chrome, no Blink, no V8, nothing Google.
- high degree of granularity in the cookie control is a plus
- any really original approaches to bookmark management out there?


Browsers I've used so far have been Firefox, Seamonkey, OmniWeb, Dooble, Opera (which I deleted when I found out it was Blink-based). Anything else out there?

 

[chown33]

...
Browsers I've used so far have been Firefox, Seamonkey, OmniWeb, Dooble, Opera (which I deleted when I found out it was Blink-based). Anything else out there?

Here's a big list:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_web_browsers

That page contains several lists, such as the 2nd list for OS support. You can click on column heading arrows to sort by that column. For example, click on the macOS heading's down-arrow to sort all Mac browsers together.

 

[Sill]

Here's a big list:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_web_browsers

That page contains several lists, such as the 2nd list for OS support. You can click on column heading arrows to sort by that column. For example, click on the macOS heading's down-arrow to sort all Mac browsers together.

Thanks for the link, but I found that page months ago, when all the weird stuff started happening. I was looking for something from people who had personal experience with browsers, who could offer their take on the question.

 

[Gregg2]

I've only used Safari and Firefox, and never had issues like you describe when using the up to date versions.

 

[tippytap90]

I've always found Safari to be slower than Chrome with the odd page hang not being uncommon. When I was trialling a few browsers a while back I'm sure I read that Safari was much kinder on battery life though.

 

[Sill]

I've seen that too. Not that big of a deal for my application, since I'm running this on the iMac, but good to know. I did start shopping for an alternate iOS browser just for kicks. Unfortunately most iOS users say Firefox or Chrome, just like on the Mac.

 

[Sill]

Update:

I've found that turning off the Wifi prior to clicking "Manage Website Data..." reduces but doesn't eliminate the time it takes to bring up the cookie/cache info. The odd behavior still continues, as deleting files from the stored data list results in them coming back 5-10 times. I have found the only thing that works it to alternate "delete cache" from the Develop menu with selecting groups of cache files and deleting them. I also find that scrolling the file list from top to bottom between deletes, or from bottom to top, helps. Eventually Safari gives up and permanently deletes the stuff I don't want there.

I found a Firefox fork called Cliqz, which has user privacy as it stated core principle. Who knows if its true or not, but it seems to be a decent enough browser. The only thing that concerns me is that it can be molasses-in-winter slow on startup, or when loading pages.