I personally prefer safari over all others. Firefox is a distant second for me. However I find safari isn’t great about ads even with Adblock installed. I recently setup pihole so my whole network is adblocked which works well for me. It’s setup to be very aggressive at blocking ads.Firefox is still the most useful for me on MacOS, although something is making it slower with
Firefox 150 on Tahoe 26.4.1. I rebooted again 10 hours ago and with almost new pages/tabs,
just what I opened with, I'm now seeing memory pressure again, and, it is sluggish to move
between windows and tabs. With very low CPU usage. This problem began with Tahoe.
I'm not sure what the underlying issue is. Overall, with my aggressive privacy/anti-ad configuration,
Firefox is on the slower side.
Still, Firefox seems the best for privacy. I like the fact that you can configure disabling obsolete insecure cipher suites, which you can't do on Safari or most other browsers. Some websites disable access because I'm so aggressive with shutting down "dynamic" ads.
I also use DuckDuckGo, which, conveniently, is in the App Store. I like the fact that it doesn't seem to mind infinite windows and tabs. The other things I like about the DuckDuckGo browser are the built-in JPEG-XL and the built-in DuckPlayer for YouTube. What I don't like is the lack of configuration options to, e.g., turn off old cipher suites. Still, DuckDuckGo is pretty good, and pretty fast, and good with ads.
Safari is OK. Fast, but, not the best wrt ads.
Chrome is at the bottom, obviously. The only thing I like about it is that it is fast.
On iOS variants, iPhone and iPad, I'm kind of stuck with Safari mostly, but, I still use DuckDuckGo a lot because it handles lots of tabs better and seems to have better privacy.
Apple should bring back Safari for Windows.I personally prefer safari over all others.
Safari for Windows was atrocious.Apple should bring back Safari for Windows.
It was fine for me. And it was a good way to get more people using safariSafari for Windows was atrocious.
Glad you were asking. Most people don't bother because the stock install of the OS includes a browser and it pretty much just works for them.I just wanted a big thanks for all the responses so far!
The reason I stuck with Safari for so long was simply because I had no reason to switch; however, I've really had my eyes opened up to the differences between all these browsers.
Glad you were asking. Most people don't bother because the stock install of the OS includes a browser and it pretty much just works for them.
It is the same concept as being in a room full of average people who have iPhones. When a call or text comes in, EVERYONE is checking their phones because NO ONE in that room has bothered to change the default tone.
Source?Recent data puts Chrome marketshare on macOS at 45-65%, so when factoring in all other browsers, most don't use Safari.
Source?
Statcounter macOS Browser Share (March 2026) has Safari 54.3% and Chrome 33.1%. That's standard page-view data.
This post is "per user" not weighted by page-views per voter. There is no credible market "per user" data, but some sites that track per visitor like Wikimedia tend to report and even higher Safari market share.
My wife uses Chrome on her Mac, but that's only because she was using Chrome on her PC before I got her that Mac and therefore it's what she's comfortable with. She's not a great data point though because if she had her way we'd all be back using typewriters, manilla folders and file cabinets.I've seen several sources, anywhere between the numbers I've reported, so it's a wash, not going to bother digging up the sources. Either way, Chrome has a big presence on macOS and Safari has been dipping from year to year.
Of the few macOS users I know, they all use Chrome. I use Firefox.
My wife uses Chrome on her Mac, but that's only because she was using Chrome on her PC before I got her that Mac and therefore it's what she's comfortable with. She's not a great data point though because if she had her way we'd all be back using typewriters, manilla folders and file cabinets.
My last job though, it was immediately evident that every person there used the company laptops bone stock. Except for the apps that needed to be installed specifically for the job itself, I could see that I was the only one that used alternatives. When I left in February, that was still the case.
Edit: I should add that it's a hospital, and many of our web apps, interfaces and vendors specifically say to use Chrome.