Is Apple going to do anything about Safari (on my 2021 16" M1 Pro) hitting 200 points in BrowserBench, while Chrome hits 299? Sure, Safari battery life is great, but the browser is slow, buggy (refreshes the page when I back a page half the time; can't speed up videos without audio distortion; typing into the search bar is laggy and I on a daily basis arrow down to select a previously used URL, hit enter, and then find that Safari moved my selection up or down, almost like it had to sync or something).
I try really hard to love Safari, I really do, but it's just a shitshow outside of battery life.
Also, Brave is consistently 20-30 points below vanilla Chrome on BrowserBench? Any ideas why?
And finally, and this is pretty egregious, but the 1Password browser extension is a 20-30% (yes) performance hit (on the BrowserBench benchmark) on any Chromium based browser that I use, and on Firefox. What the fuck, AgileBits?
I have none of those problems on my M1 MacBook Air using Safari. I know no clue what extensions you're using or voxel based games you're running in browser but safari opens, closes, resizes, and runs websites in a far nicer way and cleaner way. I've never seen a search box stutter.
Chrome basically owns the web outside of Mac though, so perhaps you're using some services that favor it. Or the search bar that sitters is Google's and it's been known to have some Oopsies[1]
1Password, Wipr, Dark Reader, StopTheMadness. That's about it.
As for the affected websites, Lexis Advance, Westlaw, WSJ, NYT, the Economist, Ars Technica, Wired, Hacker News all display this behaviour. It's a Safari problem.
For whatever it's worth to others, in the past few hours I managed to download Orion and while I've got a very small sample size thus far, it's been basically perfect experience thus far. Really gotta wonder how the 2 trillion dollar company's browser team is getting outgunned by the 2 man team or whatever that Orion has.
> typing into the search bar is laggy and I on a daily basis arrow down to select a previously used URL, hit enter, and then find that Safari moved my selection up or down
I had this. It went away when I stopped using the tab groups.
It's a shame because I _liked_ the tab groups, but I like not being annoyed by a stupid search bar bug more.
Safari on my iPhone is basically unusable. Refreshes the page constantly; swipe back a page and it refreshes; scroll down long enough and it refreshes. Then there's Reddit - crashes constantly, literally will not load comments. It does this with and without extensions.
Sounds like you’re on an old phone? I did have RAM issues on the 11 Pro that unloaded every app as soon as I opened the camera, but otherwise tabs did not unload that often.
Reddit is its shitshow and I ended up installing Apollo. This is not Safari’s fault.
Personally I don't use Safari because among my Apple devices there is also a Windows desktop unit and I do enjoy myself browser sync across devices. So Firefox it is... Otherwise I would have switched to Safari when extensions finally became a thing.
Chrome opens and closes slower, resizes slower, opens tabs slower, closes tabs slower, restores a closed tab slower, goes back/forward slower, stutters as it scrolls... and feels non-native in so many ways. Not to mention the constant addition of bloat and privacy invasive features.
Safari is nearly an order of magnitude better IMO on a Mac, it's not even close.
It's definitely down in a large part to plug-ins. Things like Dark Reader I can understand, but I have no idea why 1Password would cause a 30% performance drop on a site that I don't even have a PW for.
My point still stands about going back a page and arrowing up/down the URL bar to select something and having it swap at the last second. Those behaviours are peculiar to Safari and they're really inexplicable from a user perspective. Whether it's related or not, the mobile version of Safari is even worse - going back a page refreshes 95% of the time, when it shouldn't given the amount of RAM iPhones have had for the past 5+ years.
The Chromium stuttering on M1 Macs is definitely a problem and I wish Google would get to fixing it.
I try really hard to love Safari, I really do, but it's just a shitshow outside of battery life.
Also, Brave is consistently 20-30 points below vanilla Chrome on BrowserBench? Any ideas why?
And finally, and this is pretty egregious, but the 1Password browser extension is a 20-30% (yes) performance hit (on the BrowserBench benchmark) on any Chromium based browser that I use, and on Firefox. What the fuck, AgileBits?
See for yourself: https://browserbench.org/Speedometer2.0/