MacOS is not my platform of choice. For this I use Linux. However, when I need to mobilize my day (which basically means going to another room in the house to write), I turn to my MacBook Pro. Or, if I’m editing videos, I stand in front of my iMac and get to it.
On both of these Apple machines, I had been using the built-in Safari browser for years. However, with each passing day, I became more and more frustrated with Safari and eventually had to switch to a different browser by default.
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Let me explain.
Safari is good but…
Safari is a good browser. It has features I like (such as great tab management) and it’s one of the best options for Apple laptops because it’s optimized for MacOS battery life. When I bought my first MacBook Pro (I think it was 2016), every time I tried to use a different browser, I noticed that the battery life dropped significantly. For this reason, I refused to set a non-Apple browser as default.
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Things are much different now and most browsers don’t drain the battery as much as they used to. Of course, this battery drain wasn’t entirely on the shoulders of these third-party browsers. The first MacBook Pro I bought simply had unacceptable battery life. Now it doesn’t matter which browser I use because the battery life on my MacBook Pro (with Apple Silicon) is exceptional.
Beyond what was once a terrible battery drain, there are two problems with Safari that frustrate me immensely.
The first is browser randomness when opening links from other applications. Sometimes the application opens the link in the current window I’m using. Other times, the clicked link will open a new window. And it doesn’t matter that I set Safari to always open links from other apps in a new tab… the browser is just too stubborn.
Of course, Safari has a handy Window Merge feature, which allows you to merge all open windows into one. But I shouldn’t have to do this. If Apple includes a feature to force all links to open in new tabs, it should be honored. Not every browser I’ve used on Linux suffers from this problem, so you’d think Apple could fix it too.
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But that’s not the biggest frustration I regularly experience with Apple Safari.
Every day I visit a site and Safari will inevitably show the message that the site is using too much memory. When this happens, the site reloads more often than not (which makes me lose my place). Although it seems random, it happens too often to be acceptable.
Worse still, there’s nothing we can do about it. You cannot increase the amount of memory Safari uses, and you cannot block the warning. And since many sites are very poorly designed and developed, this behavior is not going to stop.
What I use instead
Combine these two problems and you get a very (and regularly) frustrated user. For this reason, Safari is no longer my default browser on MacOS. In its place is…
Opera.
The new Opera browser does not suffer from the particularities of Safari. Jack Wallen/ZDNET
Why Opera? First of all, Opera became my default browser on Linux (which I use all day). So it makes perfect sense that this is my default on MacOS. Plus, Opera’s tab management is even better than Safari’s, which is a big win in my eyes. It also doesn’t hurt that Opera’s recent redesign makes it much more capable than Safari. It also has a more attractive user interface and all the features I need.
Better yet, it doesn’t force pages to reload because it judges that a site is using too much memory. This means that whatever I’m reading or working on won’t be interrupted by that ridiculous pop-up.
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Apple should be able to do better with Safari. But in the meantime, I can’t continue working with a browser that doesn’t work for me.
If you are a MacOS user, I recommend removing Safari as your default browser and trying Opera. It runs wonderfully on MacOS and doesn’t have those frustrating quirks that inevitably interrupt whatever you’re doing to remind you that it’s not quite up to par.
