Apple love to preach “the UI gets out of the way of your content” with each new redesign, but how true is that in practice? Let’s compare the total height of the Safari UI with a toolbar, favourites bar and tab bar visible, across the three latest Mac OS design languages – Yosemite, Big Sur and now Tahoe. I’ve added a red line for emphasis.
It sure looks to me like the UI is eating more into my content with each redesign.
Why use Safari on macOS? There are so many alternatives, and basically all of them are better.
Safari is the new Internet Explorer. A lot of Web APIs don’t work on it, or are incomplete. Apple is still trying to push users to use native apps over Web apps, where they can get their 30% on app sales and IAP.
I agree that their browser is broadly speaking pretty bad, but I also happen to think that native apps are generally preferable on account of web tech being a large pile of flaming garbage.
Broken clocks and all I guess
It may be a flaming pile of garbage, and native apps are preferred by users ux-wise, but if your business already has a web app for desktop. Are you really going to spend money developing and maintaining a native app?
The reality is most businesses will want to write and maintain single codebase, and PWA is the lowest common denominator. Apple is making the experience worse for it’s customers by not forcing their users onto Safari.
If your functionality warrants being installed on a mobile device, then you are expected to deliver a certain level of quality for being on that device.
I have zero patience for cheapskate business douchebags who want to have their cake and eat it too, and I will not speak in their defence, not ever.
Safari is actually a pretty decent browser. If you want to not use any google, or google chrome related browsers Safari is the best integrated with the hardware and the system on Mac.
I don’t think I’d ever choose Safari over Firefox, to be honest.
I have because Safari is just better UI wise on iPhone and syncs to macOS’s Safari. I really don’t like any other browser on iOS.
Well you don’t have to. I would, I would choose it over Firefox on Linux too.
Integration with macOS and features like synchronization with iOS/iPhone or generating new iCloud mail addresses.
I always use other browsers in parallel. Sadly they typically fail to adhere to macOS UI conventions or don’t integrate as well across devices.
I use Waterfox (Firefox fork) as a secondary browser because of the more powerful extensions. Other than that usability and OS integration is worse.
Camino used to a be a good Mozilla/gecko browser back in day. Sadly it was abandoned a long time ago.