Safari 18 Announced

I'll be happy if/when Safari stops randomly picking one of my (many) minimized windows to un-minimize and load content in over existing content (usually in a tab) when passed a URL from an external application when it has no other unminimized window open. I've filed bug reports and Feedback on this FOR YEARS. If a user has purposefully minimized a window, it is not for the application to unminimize it, period, under any condition… that Safari does its choosing seemingly randomly (ie not necessarily the last active window), usually overwriting a tab's content, is even more infuriating. Just open a new window, Safari devs! Once you've opened a window, and it remains open and unminimized, feel free to continue opening tabs in that window for new external URL requests… that is fine. But stop unminimizing windows! Keep your hands off my organizing.

Safari loses the plot on UX and big picture things. I have not used it as a daily driver for years, but this is what I remember:

• Poor Sandboxing: Sites can get Safari in a state that requires an app relaunch or crashes. On other browsers, I'm usually able to close the offending tab and have more stability. Something about the process model seems wrong.

• Runaway JS: JS is cancer. Safari does not stop background tabs from consuming CPU and gobbling memory doing nothing of user value (only nonstop tracking + ads). Tabs should have hard-limits or timeouts / backgrounding. A company that touts so much about power efficiency and sells fanless laptops with 8 GB RAM should ship a browser that can automatically sleep / unload background tabs like Chrome can.

• Misprioritized features: Safari rushes to implement obscure or early draft web-specs, but lags for years shipping easy big-picture wins like lazy-loaded images (Chrome had it for years).

• Poor Dev experience: WKWebView sucks trying to get to feel native (the awkward async interactions, working around flashing on first load, etc.). The extension ecosystem cripples users because gotta pay the troll-toll.

@Hammer The first two happen to me all the time.

Last year I switched from Safari to the world of Firefox and Firefox-derived browsers, in my case LibreWolf. Now that I have access to the wide world of extensions, and the ability to easily write my own extensions without it being a huge pain, I'm not going back. Safari is sorely lacking in flexibility.

Also yes, it's fantastic having uBlock Origin. I know there are decent ad blockers for Safari, but they all pale in comparison.

I miss uBlock Origin too, though I am now managing with Roadblock which makes it possible for me to write aggressive rules and use multiple profiles for whitelisted sites. I also configure private tabs to disable it, giving me an easy way to visit a potential disaster site. It's a shame the extension ecosystem never recovered from Apple's stupid gatekeeping. Ironically this actually means that the way I use Safari today is not unlike how I used to use Internet Explorer. Also like IE, Safari gives you no real control over search engine choice, which does strike me as woefully behind in light of more competition in that space and of course the recent Google AI nonsense.

And yes, Apple's process model is definitely not up to it, certainly not compared to Chrome, which while it might consume more RAM and battery, somehow manages to be pretty much immune to sudden crashes or lockups requiring forced restart of the entire browser. VoiceOver reports that Safari is "not responding" for no apparent reason a lot of the time, but this never happens in Chrome; at worst the page just doesn't render. I've no idea why Apple don't address this low-hanging fruit, unless it's a hard problem architecturally, in which case they should be ashamed of themselves given the transformation of Firefox into a multiprocess browser with Electrolysis and all that.

That forced Passkey setting seems like a support nightmare. Just look at the comments on it - so much confusion on passkeys.

I have yet to add a single passkey, because they are too complicated to figure out, despite being supposedly easier to use.