As Cory Doctorow makes clear in "The Internet Con’, whichever browser we use on Apple devices, at root they are all WebKit, which is NOT a full HTML5 implementation. I’m generally happy being in the Apple fortress but it IS a lock in, which can turn into a prison…
Safari maybe 90%
Brave for those times when I want the goggle engine without the Google invasion of privacy
Just wanted to point out that anybody using Safari can get this thanks to the incredibly useful Vinegar.
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I use Safari as the primary browser, Edge for administering our Office365 tenant, and Chrome for the edge cases that don’t work with Safari such as Teams on web browser, or administering our Cisco wireless controllers, or whatever other stupid website won’t work with Safari for some dumb reason…
I use Safari as my primary browser because it is integrated into the Apple system. I do not modify it with a lot of extensions, as most of my applications do not require or help Safari. I know I’m stating that poorly–I’m a straightforward user, not a sophisticated user. MOST of the time Safari gives me everything I need, and I trust its security integrity. Once in a while it will not display a page or certain components of a page. If I absolutely need to get to that full page/site, I then turn to Firefox. I can’t think of an occasion where both Firefox and Safari were unable to open a page I tried to reach, but if that ever does happen, I’m going to assume there’s a reason I shouldn’t try anyway.
I resisted posting below this poll, but it seems to be quite the lively thread with a lot of 1st time and been-a-while posts.
Firefox has been my primary for quite some time. Secondary rotates between iCab, Chrome, Chromium, but almost never Safari. Just a preference.
As has been mentioned, many (if not all) browsers on iOS/iPadOS are essentially using Apple’s WebKit, and are therefore a sort of feature-skin on top of it. I do not mean to diminish them, just something to be aware of. If you have an older iOS you will stop getting security updates once Safari does.
For the desktop versions on macOS, many are using their own engines. Chromium serves a wide array including Chrome itself. Firefox and its forks are another. iCab 6.x and higher uses Apple’s WebKit whereas the older iCab 5.9 was a unique engine.
That being said, iCab continues to have fixes & support for macOS 10.13+ which is fantastic. Older iCab versions remain the “newest” browser for even Classic Mac OS, although they have not been updated in quite some time so you would need to be very careful. iCab has a ton of settings for privacy, security and customization including altering the user-agent identity. I applaud Alexander Clauss’ work and have been a paying customer over the years.
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@marcus.lynch
All the browsers on i(Pad)OS are WebKit-based due to Apple’s rules, but on the Mac each browser can use whatever engine they choose. So Chrome & its siblings, FireFox (and related browsers), iCab, etc. all use a different engine at the core. For more detail, this Wikipedia article is pretty complete, at least for the major engines.
As to the HTML5 compliance, Safari/WebKit does score rather well on the test page at https://html5test.com. Pretty comparable to the other browsers I threw at the site. Note that all the other browser engines are not fully HTML5-compliant either
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I decided to use Brave because of its greater privacy features, but now I find that about 1 in 50 sites don’t function with Brave (presumably because of these privacy features). The most frustrating are airline web sites (Delta, British Airways). The time wasted in using two web browsers, with two sets of remembered passwords, two sets of history that sometimes sync and sometimes don’t, is just insane. So I am considering consolidating to Safari.
You omitted iCab!! When nothing else works, iCab is definitely worth a try.
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That may be a rule for iOS, but definitely not the case on the Mac platform.
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I think it’s Netscape Navigator the predecessor of SeaMonkey you are referring to.
However, SeaMonkey is still in development, the latest version has been released less than 2 weeks ago.
I would have added it to my votes if it had been in the poll.
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For iOS and iPadOS, I primarily use Safari, but Firefox for iOS is also installed.
Firefox on iOS has an option to not download images, which can save you some cellular bandwidth and responsiveness when you are not on WiFi.
Actually, I think my old brain mixed up “Seamonkey predecessor” with “browser I used before Seamonkey” – which was Camino, originally called Chimera. Unfortunately discontinued about 12 years ago.
Firefox. Occasionally safari, chrome for a few google-specific uses (google docs and gdrive) for working with organizations tied to that environment
Thank you for that info. I used to use SeaMonkey until it warned me that my copy was old. But when I tried to update it would tell me I was using the latest version.
Going directly to the web site got me the newest version.
Another iCab user here. A very well supported and very capable browser. Actually my main browser on iPadOS.
I use Safari for almost everything.
Firefox and Edge are my back up browsers.
Thanks. Interestingly I had copied the text directly from the Mozilla page! I guess they don’t update that frequently.
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Safari with DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials extension for blocking ads, trackers, etc. 99% of the time. Firefox for the rare problem webpage or when a page refuses to print/export cleanly in Safari. For those mentioning problems printing to PDF in Safari due to missing images, I have found that scrolling the entire page to force all images to load then invoking the print or export command often captures a complete rendering in the PDF.
Simon, thanks for the heads-up on the Vinegar extension to reign in YouTube ads!
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Ditto plus 8 is subscription only. With it you end up paying way more than you would buying each standalone major upgrade and the cross over point is about 16 - 18 months. Since they release major upgrades 2 -2.5 years apart, you end up paying about 1.5x more than the standalone price. And like you I don’t want my sensitive data in the cloud on their servers.