I've literally never had someone say Safari is better. Chromium, sure...but Safari? It's like the IE of the browser world these days.

Here you go: Safari is a great browser for users.

The only thing that kept me away all of these years is the lack of extensions and because I’m used to Chrome’s developer tools.

Firefox is the worst browser in literally every way except for the containers. Everything else feels hacked on compared to other browsers. Just compare Firefox’ reader mode to Safari. It’s night and day. Firefox’ feels hacked on.

As a developer I hate Safari, but as a user it’s everything a browser should be. With Translations coming in Big Sur it doesn’t have much to envy Chrome.

That sounds more like the result of a filter bubble than reality. Safari is the default browser on a lot of Macs, but those users don't comment on HN about using it. It would also be useful if you described the properties of Safari that make it "IE" to you, since it's hard to discern what that means otherwise.

Safari is very much like IE. The best part is they don't even allow you to install an alternative to iOS so you end up with people on older ipads who are unable to install an up to date rendering engine.

I use Safari as my general browser, mostly for following links from HN and reddit. The AdBlocking works well enough, and I don't really log into anything from Safari. I also use it for Twitch streaming since it's so much more stable. For those use cases, it is superior to both Chrome and Firefox.

I use Chrome for Google apps. Gmail, GCal, etc.

I use Firefox for work and isolation. So I use containers to keep all my AWS logins/consoles separate, I use it for Github, I use it for my own internal apps and dev (and all the dev tools). If for some reason I need to do Facebook or Insta I do it in FF, and it's isolated into its own container.

Firefox is also my default browser, so if I click a link in another app, it'll open in a container in Firefox.

Battery usage and smoothness of transitions on back button. In those areas Safari is unbeatable, for obvious reasons.

But yes, overall it is such an inferior browser, kept forcefully relevant by the iPhone alone.

I use Firefox on Macbook 13 (2017) mainly because performance is significantly better for me compared to Chrome and even Safari.

Not just you. Firefox is my main browser, but for a growing number of JS-heavy sites I've been using Safari instead. These are not necessarily ad-ridden either, but rather interactive apps (Jira, Whimsical, etc.) were FF is getting super laggy and it's a real distraction. Sad how much faster Chrome and Safari behave on them :/. This is on a new 2020 MBP with plenty of RAM.

I haven't noticed a significant difference between safari and firefox in terms of performance, personally. I never had the browser feel like it's hung up or crash, honestly I don't think I've had a frozen browser window in years. Maybe it's because I run ublock origin and cut the pollution, though.

I use Firefox on Mac, but I don't notice any performance hits. At least not compared to Chrome, or browsers on other operating systems. I don't use Safari so maybe I don't know what I'm missing out on.

What performance issues specifically do you notice?

The two main things I notice:

Some websites basically crash the computer on Firefox but run fine on Safari. Mostly JS heavy sites.

The energy usage of Firefox is way higher than Safari, which in turns makes my fans spin a lot harder. Basically some sites will peg the CPU and hit max fan speed, but the same site just sips energy on Safari.

Video streaming is a prime example of this. I can use twitch on Safari and it uses maybe 30% CPU. Twitch on Firefox uses 150% CPU.

> Video streaming is a prime example of this. I can use twitch on Safari and it uses maybe 30% CPU. Twitch on Firefox uses 150% CPU.

I concur - Firefox consistently uses higher CPU than Safari in my experience too. "Idle page" CPU when nothing is apparently happening but it's draining the battery anyway is higher with Firefox and annoying.

With the exception of LinkedIn, oddly.

Safari uses 105% CPU consistently when a LinkedIn tab is in the foreground.

> Some websites basically crash the computer

What does "crash the computer" mean? Do you get the MacOS equivalent of a BSOD?

Disclaimer: Firefox is my daily driver. There are sites that just make FF spike its CPU usage, I guess through rogue JS, and if you let them run they’ll make macOS stutter (this on a beefy 2016 mbp). Sadly, some of these are big names like new Reddit and new Facebook.

Are you running any adblockers? I haven't experienced this personally on newer and older mac hardware than your rig.

Yes - uBlock Origin and Disconnect.

Everything freezes, I can't use move the mouse. If I wait, sometimes I can hit Cmd-W and get the tab to close eventually, sometimes I literally have to do a hard power off.

That sounds like it could be that you're running out of memory.

Open the Activity Monitor, switch to the Memory tab, and watch the Memory Pressure graph as well as Memory Used. If memory pressure isn't green, or memory used is close to Physical Memory, you're using too much. In that state, the whole MacOS GUI can become rather unresponsive, fitting your description.

I agree with the sibling comment, what you are describing sounds like you are running out of RAM. This happens to me with Firefox on a PC with 64GB of RAM and the cursor gets janky and I have to wait until some poor process gets killed and the PC becomes interactive again and I can restart Firefox.

I haven't experienced this on my 2020 macbook nor my 2012 macbook. Care to link an example of some heavy javascript?

I don't keep track of which sites do it, and it's fairly infrequent, but if I happen across an example I'll let you know.