Best browser for older OS

TidBITS Talk
#1

Still on Sierra and I’ve been having issues with Safari the past 6 months or so.

Chase rarely loads on the first try, I get a blue screen with a spinning circle in the middle. Usually closing the window and opening again works, but this morning I had to do it 4 times.

Newegg doesn’t load product pages. the home page and searches work fine, but clicking on anything brings me to a blank page. If I refresh it, I can see the page for a flash and then it’s gone again. Pages work fine in Chrome. This happened in November but I can’t remember the last time I ordered from them.

Hammer Nutrition - clicking the plus sign to increase product quantity in the cart doesn’t refresh the cart. Manually entering the quantity doesn’t refresh the cart. Refreshing the page shows the changes. I last ordered from them in December and things were working ok then.

There are others, but it’s only Wednesday and those are the ones I hit this week so far.

I’ve heard about Brave being a good browser. I have a lot of passwords saved in Safari though, is there a way to bring them over?

Open to any other suggestions. Cannot upgrade to HS until I get Office figured out so please don’t go down that path.

Thanks!
Diane

#2

I don’t think anything about Sierra (including Safari) has been updated for quite a long time, so I’m not surprised if it is incompatible with some web pages.

The latest version of Firefox is still compatible with Sierra. I’ve found a few minor UI bugs (on Sierra, not when running the same version on Catalina) where screens with forms don’t always update when you click on controls, but it works.

If Firefox is not to your liking, you might want to try Microsoft Edge. It’s based on the same Chromium engine that Chrome uses, but with all the Google-proprietary stuff removed (and some Microsoft-proprietary stuff added, I’m sure).

I use the latest Firefox as my primary browser on all my computers (including my 2011 MacBook Air running Safari). I keep Edge installed on them all as a backup for cases where Firefox and Safari don’t work. (I won’t install Chrome because I don’t trust Google.)

#3

Thanks David. I’m pretty leery of using a MS product besides my old versions of Excel/Word. I had to install Chrome to do a bank back-end for a client, otherwise I wouldn’t be using that either.

Firefox I do use, but I use it for private browsing only. I haven’t had any issues in it to date, but I’m not doing anything with passwords really, either.

Diane

#4

Maybe you can try Brave. It’s neither Google nor MS. Its focus is on privacy and security. It’s also built on the strongest engine that’s not Safari. If I didn’t enjoy Safari (and my work didn’t require FF) that’s what I’d be looking at.

#5

Do you reboot periodically? I’m non-negotiably staying on Sierra as my primary system and most sites still work fine in Safari; . Reader mode can help. But eventually some sites will start refusing to load properly or at all. When I get annoyed enough I reboot and all is well for the next week or two. Sometimes it’s enough to relaunch Safari, but a reboot works better and is needed to keep Time Machine on the job anyway. Sometimes a particular tab will go nuts too, even for a quite simple page, and if I copy the link to a new window it will be fine.

Banks and other secure sites may balk at older browser versions for reasonable security issues, but if so, they should tell you that rather than failing to work.

Safari uses the Keychain for passwords, so any browser that uses Keychain should be able to use them, though you’ll have to authorize them for that browser. Firefox and Brave don’t use Keychain, and you’d have to enter them all again. There’s no easy way to export from Keychain to anywhere else.

Brave will work for El Capitan up. It’s on my list to try out, but I haven’t even installed it yet. If it’s interface is at all like Chrome, I’ll open it, cringe, and immediately quit.

Greatly missing Omniweb…

#6

I also enjoy Safari and the fact that Keychain syncs across to my phone! But I’m really getting frustrated with it lately. I guess it’s one of the downfalls of being in the Apple eco-system, that you can’t always update individual programs once they stop updating the OS :-/

Diane

#7

Funny, I hadn’t thought about rebooting to see if it would help. I do on occasion (and just had this weekend). I will give it a try next time it happens. I wouldn’t think reader mode would work for a sales site but I never tried that either.

You know what else? I installed Adblock sometime since fall because ads finally pushed me over the deep end. I’ll have to make sure Chase etc are whitelisted in there, though I usually get warnings if there are problems.

I’ve been getting a weird issue with my bank as well and they deny all knowledge of it. On occasion I get stuck on what looks like the mobile version, if I log in a few days later it’s usually ok. I still suspect they are doing revamping work in the background but I guess time will tell with that.

That is sad about Brave and Keychain. I can’t tell you how happy I was when passwords started syncing across devices!

Thanks!
Diane

#8

I switched to Brave. It does sync across devices, including bookmarks. I only have to enter a password once, and it saves it, so I figured it was a small price to pay for the faster, more private browsing. It also is 1Password compatible if you use that too. I’d give it a try.

#9

Reboot and turning off AdBlock (it was already off for Newegg) did not cure the Newegg display problem.

Diane

#10

Thanks Tina! I will definitely install it to see how it goes.

Did you need to install it on your iOS device as well? I haven’t even gone down that path yet.

Diane

#11

I installed on MB Air, iPhone, 2 iPads. Syncs seamlessly and you can tell it what to sync - open tabs, bookmarks, passwords, etc. It has built-in ad blocking. I also like the level of control over options … whether you want a particular site to know your location, whether it is ok for Brave to let a link open another app, etc. THe learning curve was easy.

#12

Maybe that’s related to why your Safari is wonky? I always had a hard time trusting blockers like Adblock.

Fortunately, a long time ago fellow TidBITS Talkers pointed me to Ka-Block!. It’s super simple, fire-and-forget, it keeps page loads and Safari use snappy, and it exists for both macOS and iOS Safari. You’ll find it for free in the app store and its source is openly available on GitHub so you can verify its privacy claims. There’s no black/whitelisting or any settings to go through. If you nevertheless want a page to load with ads, just use “Reload Without Content Blockers” (menu View or right-click on reload symbol). Pause the extension if you want several page loads with ads. It’s super non-fancy, but it is just that simple.

http://kablock.com

#13

Great! I will check that out. I shut down AdBlock and rebooted with no change on the Newegg site. I’m kind of new to the ad-blocker thing but I think my sanity requires it these days =:0

Diane

#14

No go on Ka-block, it wants 10.13. I’m beginning to dislike the app store.

Diane

#15

I use the adblocker/tracker blocker Better on both Mac and iOS (though I also use some of 1Blocker’s lists on iOS as well) and that requires 10.11. Not too costly.

If I was using an ad blocker on Firefox or Chrome, though, I’d be using uBlock Origin.

#16

What does Newegg do? I just poked around there, and it shows me things nicely, I can see the specs and reviews, and I can put stuff in the cart with no problems. Since I don’t want to buy anything I can’t test the checkout. Safari 11.1.2 on Sierra.

You might want to try clearing out cookies and databases (helps a lot with tracking, too.). Safari Prefs, Privacy, Manage Website Data… Then select specific cookies and remove them; fortunately the Manage dialog has a search field which helps but may miss some things…

Sometime when you aren’t in the middle of something (yeah, I know…) remove all of them. That will lose site preferences for everything. But don’t stop there. Wait a while, and more things will start appearing in that dialog. Then you get to remove more stuff like cache and local storage. Then wait awhile longer, and it will finally let you remove databases. Which still may not get it all, but at that point you have to do things by hand behind Safari’s back. I don’t do this as often as I should. I bought a cookie manager in a software bundle awhile ago, but I didn’t install it promptly and now I can’t remember what it 's called.

#17

Newegg won’t display any product pages for me. I see the home page, but if I click on anything, it brings it up quickly then goes blank. I can search and get a page full of results but the same result if I click on anything. Basically I can’t buy anything (good for my checking account right?) I can cut and paste the link into Chrome or Firefox and see everything fine.

I never like clearing things completely in Safari as I depend on my history etc for research. Let me get established in Brave and maybe I’ll give it a try. :wink:

Diane

#18

Weird. I just tested on an El Cap system, and it’s fine there, too, so it’s not an inherent old OS/old Safari problem. Likely corruption somewhere in your Safari data. If you log in as the guest user is it ok?

If newegg is mostly a habit, it might be worth trying alternatives to preserve the rest of your workflow. We used to use newegg all the time, but after the ownership change a few years ago, we started having problems, including being attentive enough that newegg was actually the seller. When we missed paying attention it was hard to rectify things. Maybe they’ve improved again? We’ve pretty much switched to B&H Photo though. So far at least, no ‘marketplace’ nonsense, and the prices are almost always as good as or better than newegg or amazon (for the the things we buy, mostly drives and other computer related stuff), though for those of us on the left coast, ground shipping can take a while. They’re closed from Friday through Saturday sunsets and the jewish holidays (east coast time) but I’ve rarely had anyone be so desperate for an item that they couldn’t wait a bit.

[Peeved that Target, my refuge from amazon ethics (sic) and stupidities, has now started doing the ‘marketplace’ thing…]

#19

Another possibility would be iCab which still has an older version for Sierra. While I haven’t used it lately, in the past it worked well when I needed to access a website which was written for Internet Explorer and iCab was able to utilize with the site by identifying as an IE user agent which no other Mac browser at that time would accomplish correctly. It’s free/shareware.

Also, if you have your Develop menu on in Safari, you could try using a different user agent with Newegg if that site has some quirk which might work with a different agent.