lobsters score: 1 · tags: browsers
There are many other facets that people could care about. Every comparison frames it with a subset that makes the author’s browser look good.
Just note that this one doesn’t talk about extensibility or cross-platform support.
(Footnote: I am biased. I work on Firefox. Of course I need to mention things Safari is doing differently :)))
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Generic reply: I fail to see a reason to use Chrome on Mac for daily usage, but I still vastly prefer Zen/Firefox to Safari, for the wide variety of customisation offered.
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The whole reason the modern.ie images were a big deal was because Windows isn’t free to download/use, and you couldn’t (then at least, no clue now) get past the installer without a valid licence key.
There’s nothing stopping anyone with a compatible machine downloading the installer for any version of macOS back to about Lion (10.7, Safari 5.1) from 15 years ago, and running it inside a VM.
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…no? There are reverse-engineered third-party tools for downloading ISOs (like macrecovery), but Apple doesn’t support officially support downloading macOS outside of their custom macOS-only tools. They do offer regular browser-based downloads up to macOS 15… but only in .dmg (again, back to either the catch 22 of need-macos-to-unpack-macos or time to use the hackintosh toys).
And once you do have the installer, macOS still won’t let you get past it either unless you have the right
license keyhardware dongle (motherboard).And yes, there’s OSX-KVM to help you fake that for a VM, but it still spits on the EULA that dictates that you must only use macOS on official Apple hardware. By that claim, Windows is free because there’s hardware out there that comes bundled with OEM licenses!
But even that won’t help you now that macOS 27 doesn’t even run on any of your x86 CPUs anymore anyway.
All of this is completely unserious for a trillion dollar corporation that is asking you to do them a favour for free.
score 2 · canonical
WebKitGTK is now officially maintained in a lockstep with Safari. Epiphany is therefore quite similar to Safari, notably for rendering and JS (through JavaScriptCore, also part of the project). This is nice to be able to test on “Safari” without having an Apple machine.
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I used GNOME Web as my main desktop browser for a few months a while back, and it worked for everything except for lacking WebRTC. I think the only sites that outright refused to work were Outlook (worked after spoofing a Safari UA string) and Chase (they simply refused even with another UA string). Nothing didn’t work because of the browser itself (except for anything requiring the aforementioned WebRTC).
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Mostly. I think media queries are still a problem but maybe this is fixed. On my main machine, I am using a 2x factor.
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Quicker JavaScript performance on advanced web apps
Since when did Apple start caring about web apps. They always had the worst support for PWAs… to that point that things like the Notification API prevent a lot of would-be web apps were forced into iOS-specific apps or very ugly workarounds. Not saying a native app isn’t better, but it’s less work & more compatible to just rely on the browser (cross platform, even outside of the mainstream OSs) & its sandbox. With proprietary services, I pretty much always prefer keeping that experience in the browser’s sandbox (where I have easier access to ad/tracker blocking too). Ironic that Apple was the first to go after Adobe’s Flash (RIP Macromedia) for open web standards.
Seems that one of the bigger pushes here is integration with “Apple Intelligence” to win back users into going deeper into the walled gardens—which is why comparisons to Firefox are missing despite it hitting most of the points but won’t beat Apple at all metrics on their home turf (such as battery).
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Everyone complained when apple said web apps were the way to make apps for the iPhone, and now we have the App Store.
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