"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.
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.
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.
Personally, I use the ESR version of Firefox so I don't regularly get unneeded updates.
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.
If you don't trust Google (I don't), then don't use Chrome. But I wouldn't write off all Chromium based browsers, some of them are awesome. And the main problem it used to have (battery life) isn't an issue anymore. My M1 MacBook Air lasts forever on battery power and I always have a chromium based browser running.
Over 96% of contributions are Google, terrible take.
https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/HEAD/AUTHORS
The vast majority of names on that list are not google employees. And that's nowhere near a complete list. Chromium dates back to kthmlw almost three deacdes ago. The vast majority of the code in Chromium was not written by Google.
The authors file is not the source of who writes it today.
Look at actual commit data, like here https://bkardell.com/blog/2023-Mid-Season-Power-Rankings.html
History is history. Those people won’t magically come back.
Sorry, I wasn’t classing Chrome and Chromium as the same thing. I’m a software developer of 20 years so I understand they’re not the same thing. I guess I just took that opportunity to state that I don’t use Google services/products if I can help it.
In work we’re a Windows house, but I’ve managed to get my hands on an M2 MacBook Pro. For now I’m still using Edge but would like to get my iCloud exemption so I can use some of the apps on my personal MBP for work, and I’m wondering whether I should continue using Edge for work and A. N. Other browser for personal (and mirror this on my iPhone); or whether to use profiles, for example, on Safari and split it that way. I might be limited to what I can download on the work machine, but I’d like to synergies everything as much as I can where possible rather than having two completely different Mac experiences with my iPhone sort of thrown in the middle of both.
Which browser do you prefer? I assume a Chromium-based derivative?
With respect, I disagree. Rendering pages quickly and reliably is table stakes and all modern browsers do a great job of that. It doesn't really matter at all what rendering engine is under the hood as long as it works well.
I'm glad we have three rendering engines, especially since the largest two are backed by companies who don't always do what's right for the web... but three is enough. More than that would honestly be a waste of effort, I prefer the current situation with hundreds of browsers who pool resources and work together on a rendering engine that is shared by other browsers.
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.
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?
Game engines are a lot simpler than a web rendering engine, so I'm not sure it's a good comparison.
Gecko (the FireFox rendering engine) dates back to 1997. And KHTML — the common ancestor shared by Blink/Webkit (Chrome/Safari) is maybe one or two years younger - I wasn't able to find a source. An insane amount of work, by millions of people if you include minor contributes, has gone into those rendering engines.
Creating another one would be an insane amount of work... assuming you want it to be competitive.
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.
90% of the times, I use Firefox. 10%, I'll go for Safari...
Actually that might be 99% and 1%, respectively :)
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.
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.
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.
Librewolf or firefox is definitely better than ungoogled chromium lmao
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.
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)
Do you have a source on Apple selling user data?
I've done iOS/Mac app development — Apple doesn't "sell" data to me, but they absolutely provide me with extensive 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 But app developers is the big one.
The data is anonymised, but I assure you it's very detailed. Detailed enough that some companies probably cross reference it with other tracking and are able to link the data they get from Apple to real people.
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? But it is a fact that Apple does collect a lot of data and they do share it.
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 (and that's only possible because I track crashes).
Thanks for this. I did ask OP for a source on Apple selling user data. It sounds like you're saying that they don't.
There's always a rush to include Apple with the other big tech firms that certainly do harvest and sell user data, I guess some people just love to hate on Apple. I get popups on a fresh install of an Apple OS and on first launching certain apps that asks me outright if I want to send usage data to Apple. It's pretty upfront about this. Like you said, it's anonymized so it can't be used to target me with ads based on my browsing history. They also have the Private Relay feature on MacOS and Hide My Email, they didn't have to do that. There's also something called Advanced Data Protection that I haven't messed around with.
Do you haven't any evidence for this? I doubt that's something Apple would be happy about.
Honestly, I think you're really arguing over the technical definition of "sell".
Yeah but do you know what data is being sent? Most people have no idea (you might, I'm just saying most people). My position is if people don't know what's in the data, then they aren't really agreeing to it with full knowledge.
I've seen the data (from my own apps), and I can see how easy it is to link crash reports to users. Crash reports include a unique device identifier and also loads of information about the device the moment it crashed. It's trivial to compare all of that data to other data the app collects and find out which user the crash report belongs to.
I'm sure it's a violation of the terms of service, but developers violate those all the time and enforcement is almost unheard of. When Apple catches an app breaking the rules, they usually just tell the developer to stop. Damage is already done by then.
Have a listen to this to get an idea how widespread this is: https://subclub.com/episode/app-store-ethics-dark-patterns-and-rule-breakers-steve-p-young-app-masters
And this, my friend, is exactly what I came here for. Very insightful, informative and measured answer. Thank you for taking the time 👍🏻
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.
I have/had a ProtonMail account, and whilst it was great, I believe it was only end-to-end encrypted when sending emails to other people using ProtonMail…? Or at least that was my understanding at the time.
The apps back then weren’t particularly polished, so I ended up migrating everything back to iCloud.
To be honest, I don’t seem to have any issues with iCloud and everything just works. But that’s the problem with Apple, and how they “get” you.
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).
If we ever decide to stop using Lemmy, there's a good chance all of the valuable content we're writing — like this discussion — will live on in whatever other software we decide to switch to instead of Lemmy. Because being Markdown, it's easy to import, and being on the fediverse, it will be easy to transition to a replacement gradually over time with the new software and lemmy both being used at the same time during a potentially years long transition period.
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.
But there's an out — extensions. For example I don't use the password manager built into my browser. I use a browser extension for passwords and my password manager has an extension for all browsers. Obviously as locked down as passwords need to be, I don't want my passwords accessible outside that app/those extensions, but it does have a good import/export feature and I have used it to test other password managers. I should really look for a good extension that manages bookmarks well and syncs them between browsers.
I dunno if that's true. There are some really good browsers on the Mac that I suspect don't run (or don't run well) on whatever operating system you do use. Access to awesome Mac only software is the reason I use a Mac, even though I don't particularly like the company Apple has become (they were a wonderful company 20 years ago in my opinion).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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).
Tried it, immediately uninstalled on finding it needed a mandatory account created.
Another satisfied Arc Browser user.
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.
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.
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 Cocoa apps or else still using Carbon (the compatibility layer between MacOS 9 and MacOS X).
OmniWeb is kinda-sorta-alive as a side project, using WebKit now instead of their proprietary engine, and the latest "test build" 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).
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.
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.
At what point do you use tab auto refresh?
I am genuinely curious.
Websites that aren't updated live themselves; typically news websites and the like.
Safari. Firefox borks out on so many websites for me. Safari “just works.”
Got an example of a page that does not work in Firefox?
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.
I use Orion. It's basically Safari but way better.
Maybe Brave?
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.
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?