Yes, Safari Used To Not Be Your Best Choic

 

Yes, Safari Used To Not Be Your Best Choice

I don’t think that’s true today



Back in the dark ages of Microsoft, a lot of people switched to Firefox because, well, because you were probably a fool not to. Later on, Firefox became sluggish and Chrome was the new favorite. This carried over to Macs. Safari wasn’t that great, Chrome was better, all hail Chrome.

The prejudice is still here today.

I broke ranks several years ago when Safari started getting features I liked that Chrome didn’t offer. I think the most attractive bit of dessert was Reader Mode, probably because it stripped out ads without the need of an ad blocker and it neatened up printed output. Those two features of Reader Mode made Safari my daily pal.

Well, except for the damn extensions. I don’t remember if Safari had any extensions back then; if there were any, they weren’t many, and I had no use for whatever was available. Funny enough, that’s still true today, though today I have relegated Chrome to the dust bin and only use Safari.

It was extensions that kept me hooked to Chrome for years. Eventually I realized that nothing I used was really necessary; I could always find another way to do it or dispense with it entirely. That’s when I just stopped using Chrome entirely. Why? Because Google is evil and I want as little to do with them as possible. Also because extensions often get neglected, get buggy, or stop working entirely, so poo on that.

But it’s also because Safari is good. Even Google’s Bard agrees with me on that, mentioning that it’s one of the fastest, it’s highly secure, uses less memory, and less battery. More important to me is its integration with the rest of the system: logins and passwords for sites get filled in, as do text and authentication challenges. You can share tabs and tab groups with Messages and Mail. You can send a pages link or a PDF of the page to Messages, Mail, Notes, pretty much wherever. I can use Apple Pay in Safari. Apple Continuity lets me open a site on my phone and seamlessly switch to my Mac or iPad. Tabs, bookmarks, and history sync across devices.

I said fastest, right? Apple’s latest head to head test has it 50% faster than Chrome. There is a lot more:

I recently mentioned some of this to a Mac user who was pushing Chrome over Safari. He told me that he doesn’t need to login to many other websites, has an extension for Reader Mode, pays for an ad blocker and “hopes Google doesn’t know that much about me.”

Hope springs eternal, but it’s silly here. If you aren’t paying for a product, you are the product.

Safari also works with Apple’s Private Relay, assuming you aren’t so foolishly cheap that you won’t even pay the 99 cents a month that gives you access to that. If your only desire for a VPN is from privacy, not from wanting to fool Netflix into thinking you are from another country, Private Relay is free and secure and Apple is most definitely not tracking your activity.

Yes, some third party VPN’s say they honor your privacy, but even if that’s true, remember that they CAN, and if they are hacked, the hacker can.

This very biased review (note all the product sales pitches sprinkled in) calls Safari vs. Chrome a draw. I can’t say that I agree at all, but you can see what you think.

For me, the choice is clear: Safari.

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