"Best" Mac browser: Your view

I know “best” is subjective, but as someone who’s entrenched in the Apple ecosystem I always used to use the stock apps: Reminders, Calendar, Mail, Podcasts and, of course, Safari.

But over time I’ve moved away from some of those apps, towards things that work better than the stock apps but also still sync with my other Apple devices (iPhone, iPad, Watch): Things and Todoist (because I can’t decide on one over the other), Fantastical, Mail (still), Overcast… but I tend to hover between browsers.

I mainly use Safari, and try to use profiles to separate personal and work stuff. But over the years I’ve also tried Firefox, I’ve tried Brave and more recently I’ve tried Arc. But I just can’t make my mind up.

So I was curious what your browser of choice is (and also, if you have any other views on the best stock app replacements - including alternatives to the ones I listed above for GTD, calendars, email and podcasts (don’t get me started on the “best” search engine!), I’d be interested to get your opinions.

jagoan ,

Moved to Firefox when adblock stopped working on Safari. The biggest hurdle was moving away from Keychain for password manager. Everything else was a non issue since now iOS allow others as default browser.

Email and calendar I’m on Spark, not ideal, but it works for my workflow.

Notes: Simplenote, better syncing across platforms and free.

Overcast, Spotify for music, quite generic.

friend_of_satan ,

IMHO everybody should have multiple browsers for day to day work. It's been this way for over a decade. Have a default and then have side browsers that have their strengths. For the Apple ecosystem, Safari is still the best default imho. Firefox is my number 2. I try to avoid anything Google related but use brave if I need web usb.

danielfgom ,
@danielfgom@lemmy.world avatar

I run Linux but only and recommend Firefox. Cross device sync is the best I've ever seen, the add ons library is good, you can theme it and it works well for me. Plus there's no chrome bs on there and the privacy defaults are good.

For search I use Google because it's still the best. And the others typically just give you Google results anyway. If you want Google results but without the tracking, in theory, look at Startpage.

jacktherippah ,

I use Orion. It's basically Safari but way better.

jeanofthedead ,

Safari. Firefox borks out on so many websites for me. Safari “just works.”

issue0315 ,

Got an example of a page that does not work in Firefox?

macrocephalic ,

For Mac I use ARC browser. It's a bit different in UI than most browsers but it does some things I really like. It's heavily optimised for keyboard commands, and it has separate "spaces" which you can create and define (e.g. personal, work, etc).

AxiomPraxis ,

Tried it, immediately uninstalled on finding it needed a mandatory account created.

CalcProgrammer1 ,
@CalcProgrammer1@lemmy.ml avatar

I mostly use Linux but have a Mac Mini as a TV PC. I use the same browser everywhere - LibreWolf. It's Firefox but with Mozilla's bullshit adware/sponsored garbage removed and some extra privacy-focused features/default settings. Firefox has become adware itself, with its home page having sponsored garbage and suggested stories from partners. I generally love what Mozilla is doing and we need competition in the browser space, but I don't want Mozilla spamming up my homepage with their "suggestions".

mdhughes ,
@mdhughes@lemmy.ml avatar

Safari's fast, less crashy, highest privacy protections, and uses less memory per tab; I often have hundreds of tabs so that's important. It also has the best inspector, much better than Firebug. Add in StopTheMadness and an adblocker (currently using Ghostery), and it's pretty great.

Degoogled Chromium is useful for sites that don't work in Safari, or as a sandbox I don't mind crashing in development.

I've given up on Firefox, it's too fat and bloated.

jennraeross ,

Arc for sure! It’s chromium based, unfortunately, but has unparalleled tab and workspace management, and is unfairly sleek and nice looking!

Other than that, Firefox is always nice, and Orion is interesting as well.

macrocephalic ,

Arc has really changed the way I expect a desktop browser to work now. It's kind of annoying when I go back to Firefox on my PC now.

abhibeckert , (edited )

Way back in the day, the best browser was OmniWeb. It was truly awesome but quite expensive (I think a license was about $60?). Unfortunately they didn't have the resources to keep up as CSS/JavaScript became more complex. It still worked for the vast majority of websites when they gave up on development, but the writing was on the wall and they weren't selling enough licenses to hire a large team. Also back then the only open source browser was FireFox and it's always been a really complex rendering engine to work with (there's a reason everybody uses Blink or WebKit as the foundation for their browser).

As far as I know, OmniWeb is the only (major) browser that was exclusively designed for the Mac (and NeXT before that). Even Safari historically ran on Windows and the current version borrows quite a lot of UI conventions from the iOS version. OmniWeb was a proper Mac browser. In fact back in the early days of Mac OS X OmniWeb wasn't just the best Mac Browser, it was arguably the best Mac App in general. They'd been working on it for decades when other Mac apps were either brand new or still using Carbon.

They still keep it kinda-sorta-alive as a side project, using WebKit now instead of their proprietary engine, and the latest "test build" of OmniWeb 6 was released just a couple months ago. But the last stable/officially supported version of OmniWeb 5 shipped twelve years ago. It's somewhat dated now, for example the URL bar is the full width of the window and you can't change that - a hold back from the days when even desktop computer screens were only 800 pixels wide or even less. https://omnistaging.omnigroup.com/omniweb/

One of the early developers of OmniWeb (retired a long time ago) once claimed OmniWeb is older than World Wide Web (generally recognised as the first ever web browser) but given the internet didn't exist back then he wasn't able to point to any strong evidence. Wikipedia lists 1995 as the release date for OmniWeb, however he said that date is wrong and it was distributed years earlier (obviously not on the web — there was no other web browser so you had to get it some other way).

These days, I think the best web browser (and therefore also the best Mac browser) is Arc. It's not exclusively a Mac app, but it is written in SwiftUI and the iOS/Windows versions are quite different - Arc respects platform specific UI conventions and different use cases (especially on a phone).

Hers's a link to download it: https://arc.net/gift/70d85b6 (unfortunately you do need to sign up with an email account, since Arc is "software as a service" and (like OmniWeb did) they eventually plan to start charging for certain features. I'm OK with that personally, you do need an account to sync tabs between devices which I see as a must have feature).

dontwakethetrees ,
@dontwakethetrees@lemmy.world avatar

So I had been using Orion for about a year with good results. It’s modified webkit so it feels like Safari but supports Chrome and Firefox plugins and has anti-fingerprinting/privacy measures.

I switched away after the situation a month or so ago with Kagi (same dev) adding Brave to their search and being a general ass to the people that raised concerns.

Currently I am using Librewolf, a privacy focused fork of Firefox, which has preformed really well. The only real issue I have is not being able to auto-fill sms 2FA codes like Safari.

jmd_akbar ,

90% of the times, I use Firefox. 10%, I'll go for Safari...

Actually that might be 99% and 1%, respectively :)

rotmulaaginskyrim ,

I started using Firefox since the beginning of this year, and frankly surprised by how smooth it is. All browsers being fairly similar, I would rather use Firefox.

ruud ,
@ruud@lemmy.world avatar

I like Vivaldi, which is Chromium based. I also like Safari for the speed. Difficult to choose between the two.
The feature that Vivaldi has and Safari hasn't, which I'm missing in Safari, is tab auto-refresh.

Fake4000 ,

At what point do you use tab auto refresh?

I am genuinely curious.

BoisZoi ,
@BoisZoi@lemmy.ml avatar

Websites that aren't updated live themselves; typically news websites and the like.

angelsomething ,

I’ve been using arc for about a year now and love it. It’s not perfect but I got used to having a full screen web window and grouped tabbed.

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