"Best" Mac browser: Your view

Submitted ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨schmurnan@lemmy.world⁩ to ⁨technology@lemmy.world⁩

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.

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Toes@ani.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Fun fact, there’s only 3 real choices.

There’s Firefox, Chromium and Safari.

Every other browser is essentially a skin of one of those.

I would suggest using Firefox or one of its spin off versions.

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- schmurnan@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Yeah I know they’re all based on one of three, but they are all subtly different in what they offer.
  
  So whilst there are three main engines, there are definitely more than three choices.
  
  Bottom of the pile for me is Chrome - I don’t use anything Google knowingly/willingly.
  
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  - Toes@ani.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Personally, I use the ESR version of Firefox so I don’t regularly get unneeded updates.
    
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  - abhibeckert@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Google might be the primary maintainer of Chromium, but they don’t really control it. Literally hundreds of other companies and thousands if individual developers contribute to Chromium every day and if Google did something they don’t like the engine would be forked in a heartbeat.
    
    In fact it has been forked — thousands of times (according to GitHub). It’s just none of those forks have gained much traction. If Google really messes things up, such as if they actually go ahead and remove cookies as they’ve threatened to do for years, then one or two of those forks will gain traction. Likely enough traction that Google themselves would struggle to keep up and could end up killing Blink and basing Chrome off one of the forks.
    
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- abhibeckert@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  With respect, I disagree. Rendering pages quickly and reliably is table stakes and all browsers do a good job of that. It doesn’t really matter at all what rendering engine is under the hood as long as it works well.
  
  What really separates one browser from another is the toolbars and other user interface elements around the webpage. And Blink/WebKit/Gecko don’t provide any of that.
  
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  - Toes@ani.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Sure, let me know if I’m following this train of thought by drawing a parallel.
    
    If we swapped out rendering engine with game engines. It would be best if we kept to a few game engines and focused on the game mechanics and story?
    
    In that spirit, I would agree with you. Much like the examples you provided, its more about who or what controls the full stack of experience. It’s just, quickly thinking about this I’m struggling to find a compelling reason to use a browser beyond the basics. Since the core features I seem to require are satisfied in any browser that isn’t provided by an entity that puts capital interests before the user too harshly. Plus the addition of an adblocker and custom theming.
    
    Ultimately, it just needs to show the webpage safely and precisely how it was intended to be seen, without ads. Through the support of extensions, I suspect that would satisfy any additional requirement someone could desire or imagine without the need to delve much deeper into custom browsers. At least, a browser for general use without a specific purpose. But perhaps I’m misjudging the capacity of those potential extensions in the face of a customized browser?
    
    I suspect, how opera paints a bunch of features down the left side may be hard to replicate on another?
    
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- simplejack@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Sure, Gecko, WebKit and Blink are the 3 big rendering engines, but browser chrome isn’t just a colorful skin. The browser chrome can be have a pretty big impact on experience.
  
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jmd_akbar@aussie.zone ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
90% of the times, I use Firefox. 10%, I’ll go for Safari…

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

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rotmulaaginskyrim@programming.dev ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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.

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Telodzrum@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Safari has the best functionality with regard to the other Apple tools you may be using (password storage, Apple Pay, etc.). Firefox is my go-to though because of the Mozilla foundation. Ungoogled Chromium is the best from a user-privacy and control standpoint.

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- tsonfeir@lemm.ee ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  How does chromium have better privacy than Firefox?
  
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  - Mindhunter@lemmy.today ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Because op does’nt know what he is talking about
    
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  - BananaTrifleViolin@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I’m not sure how much better privacy Chromium has; it is “degoogled” by default but that doesn’t mean it’s necessairly more private.
    
    If you wanted better privacy and control then Librewolf is probably the better option - it is Firefox stripped of the telemetry tools, default google search links (which are minimal in Firefox, just default search engine) and privacy hardened (including HTTPS only & default install of Ublock Origin extension)
    
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  - Telodzrum@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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- schmurnan@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  The Apple integration is probably the main reason I use Safari I think; the likes of Apple Pay, Touch ID/Face ID all just works. I’d love that ability in Firefox and then I’d probably use it exclusively.
  
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- iiGxC@slrpnk.net ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Librewolf or firefox is definitely better than ungoogled chromium lmao
  
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BananaTrifleViolin@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I don’t have a Mac but I can offer you a viewpoint: in general it is better to compartmentalise your data and if you’re using products by the big tech companies (Apple, Google, Microsoft, Meta etc) then to separate date between them as much as possible. In other words, don’t put all your eggs in one basket.

If you’re on a Mac, you’re in Apple’s ecosystem. In some ways they provide better privacy as they’re not as dependent on advertising like Google for example, however they do have advertising buisness and are still mining your data and profiling you as it’s their business to sell you stuff whether that’s more Apple hardware or digital content.

So I personally wouldn’t be using all their various apps without knowing in detail what data is going to them. Web browsers, email and calendars are data gold mines, as are anywhere you shop for content such as App stores, music, video etc.

If I were on Apple, I would be using Firefox so as to wall off as much as my data from Apple as possible. I’d also consider Thunderbird for email & calendar to remove Apple from that data trove. I personally also pay for my email service rather than using anything bundled in (i.e. iCloud) - the reason being you’re not beholden to one provider longterm and can access and migrate your data on other devices (e.g. not Apple in the case of iCloud).

Apple tries to sell itself as a bastion of privacy. It’s not - it’s probably a bit better than some of it’s competitors but it still is involved in user tracking and selling data to advertisers. They made a fanfare about letting users disable advertiser tracking on iPhones but what they didn’t make as much noise about is that they actually built the tracking tools in the first place, and they’ve been building their advertising business as the services side of Apple is big money (it’s app store, it’s content etc)

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- IchNichtenLichten@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Do you have a source on Apple selling user data?
  
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  - abhibeckert@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    As an iOS/Mac app developer — Apple doesn’t “sell” data to me, but they absolutely provide me with user tracking data for free (well, for $99 per year, but that’s effectively free). As far as I know they also provide data to other third parties, such as in the news app/etc. But app developers is the big one.
    
    The data is anonymised, but I assure you it’s very detailed.
    
    Thankfully the tracking is opt-in, but users are forced to make a choice and encouraged to enable tracking and I’d argue they really aren’t being educated properly on what they’re handing over before making a decision. I can’t really blame Apple for that, who wants to spend hours learning how Apple’s tracking methods work? Almost nobody. But it is a fact that Apple does collect a lot of data and they do share that data with third parties.
    
    Personally I have spent hours doing that research and I’m not OK with what they track — I opt out. And while my own software does have some tracking, it’s a lot less detailed than the tracking Apple does. It’s just basic analytics (roughly how many users do I have and what country are they from?) and crash reporting which is (thankfully) rare with my software and therefore useless for any invasive tracking. The vast majority of people using my apps never experience a crash.
    
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- schmurnan@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  And this, my friend, is exactly what I came here for. Very insightful, informative and measured answer. Thank you for taking the time 👍🏻
  
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  - Reverendender@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I am on the Apple ecosystem as well. I use Safari with ad blockers and a few other extensions. If a website gives me problems, I switch to Firefox. I don’t think I have ever been “served” an advertisement for an Apple product from Apple. To my knowledge, they are not using my data for things like that, and if they are, they are being far cleverer about it than I am able to deduce. That said, I am almost completely switched over to Proton Mail, and am slowly moving to the entire Proton Suite. I was in fact getting ready to move all my icloud.com files To Proton Drive so I can stop paying Apple $10 a month for 2TB of cloud storage. I’m still working on the password thing. If anyone knows of an easy way to switch, and can report that it is as effective as the icloud password system, by all means let me know.
    
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- abhibeckert@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  
  don’t put all your eggs in one basket
  
  That’s a good approach - but there’s a better one. If at all possible stick to software that uses standard data formats and is able to interact with other software. For example Lemmy uses Markdown (a standard) and it can interact with other software (on the fediverse).
  
  Unfortunately I don’t know of any (good) web browser that does that. It’s certainly possible for bookmarks/tabs/settings/etc to be synced between browsers, but in general browsers only ever support once off imports, they never actively maintain a shared set of data between browsers.
  
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mdhughes@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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.

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jeanofthedead@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Safari. Firefox borks out on so many websites for me. Safari “just works.”

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- issue0315@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Got an example of a page that does not work in Firefox?
  
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  - jeanofthedead@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    The silliest one is my Plex web admin page. I even had to make a Github issue request about it, and found a bunch of others who had done the same thing.
    
    Several government websites, among others. I should start a list. I’m sure it’s a combo of unlock origin with FF’s privacy protection settings, but I’ve tweaked it so much for the websites that are broken and nothing ever changed. Switched over to Safari and everything loads beautifully.
    
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jennraeross@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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.

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- macrocephalic@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  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.
  
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danielfgom@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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.

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macrocephalic@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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).

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- AxiomPraxis@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Tried it, immediately uninstalled on finding it needed a mandatory account created.
  
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- wilberfan@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Another satisfied Arc Browser user.
  
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CalcProgrammer1@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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”.

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abhibeckert@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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 I don’t think they were profitable at the time.

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.

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. 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 is Arc. It’s not exclusively a Mac app, but it is written in SwiftUI and the iOS/Windows versions are very quite different.

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angelsomething@lemmy.one ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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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friend_of_satan@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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.

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PoliticallyIncorrect@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Maybe Brave?

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- schmurnan@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Tried it, kinda liked it, but then read a lot of shady stuff about them not being as privacy-focused as they’re made out to be.
  
  I might give Arc a go, not sure how good/popular it is though. But I think anything other than Safari will be a compromise because of the Apple Pay/Touch ID/Face ID integration.
  
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  - PoliticallyIncorrect@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Yeah I know about that stuff too, but in my personal POV still with the downsides I believe it’s the best option for me, maybe Firefox/LibreWolf + uBlock?
    
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Mindhunter@lemmy.today ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Firefox or one of its fork you like .

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jagoan@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
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.

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jacktherippah@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I use Orion. It’s basically Safari but way better.

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dontwakethetrees@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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.

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ruud@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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.

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- Fake4000@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  At what point do you use tab auto refresh?
  
  I am genuinely curious.
  
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  - BoisZoi@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Websites that aren’t updated live themselves; typically news websites and the like.
    
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