Safari is the only browser I use.
I’m not.
and
Windows 10 does monitor it’s users. It calls home a lot. There have been some high profile cases of governments complaining. France and recently the Netherlands have raised concerns about their citizens data being harvested. The Chinese government demanded all tracking to be removed from Windows 10 in China and Microsoft complied. There are industries that can not use Windows 10 due to compliance issues. Some of the telemetry settings can be turned off, particularly for Enterprise SKUs of Windows. But not for the Great Unwashed Masses.
And it was even worse when the OS launched - after eight hours later, the researcher here found that the idle Windows 10 box had tried over 5,500 connections to 93 different IP addresses, out of which almost 4,000 were made to 51 different IP addresses belonging to Microsoft. After leaving the machine for 30 hours, Windows 10 expanded that connection to 113 non-private IP addresses, potentially allowing hackers to intercept this data:
The people at PrivacyTools are blunt and explain: “Don’t use Windows 10 - It’s a privacy nightmare”
So, not giving them the benefit of the doubt for their OS, I’m not going to assume that there’s no Chrome-like tracking inside Edge, until proven otherwise.
I use Safari for pretty much any site that I need to sign into, as it’s my default browser. I use Brave for playing and reading on the internet.
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Opera. I want to use the Notion extension which is currently unavailable for Safari. Opera is much easier on the battery than Chrome and is snappy as anything.
Other extensions I learned to love: 1passwordX, Grammarly, Pocket and the native Devonthink plugin, most of which are also on Safari.
I guess that I will reconsider moving back to Safari when Notion has the extension ready. On mobile it is far more convenient, being the default option.
Chrome - Two reasons 1) I spend most of my working day cross platform between MacOS and Windows, and desktop OS sync is more important than the MacOS/iOS sync I’d get from Safari, 2) I use a number of extensions that either don’t or can’t exist in Safari.
At work I usually have Safari open as well as an easy way to be signed in to some online services via a second account without having to constantly switch.
At home, I have Safari as my “media” browser, making use of PIP and keyboard controls.
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FYI I just noticed that SweetP Productions (which makes an excellent web cookie-killer app) has a free Safari extension in the Mac App Store which with a click lets you block all images on sites (with a whitelist to bypass). I just installed it and it works as promised.
I’ve been using Vivaldi since it was in early alpha. Some reasons I love it are:
- Focus on customizability and user control. The amount of settings is enormous
- The url field and tab bare are more compact than in any other browser I’ve tested. This gives me more screen real estate to work with on my 13" MBP.
- Multiple tabs can be viewed side-by-side. This saves me the pain from dragging a tab to create a new window, resize it and the original window to see information side-by-side and then restoring everything to the original state.
- Automatic grouping of similar tabs allows me to easily group Google Documents and similar where the numer of tabs can be large.
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Very interesting blog post from my VPN service:
Brave all the way! It is the best for privacy and based on Chromium so all Chrome extensions work.
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I switched back to Safari from Chrome a few months ago and especially on my MacBook air because of impact of battery life. I now use Safari as my main browser and Brave when I need to. I deleted Chrome. Thanks.
I recently tried Chrome, and then Brave again but they was both using crazy amounts of RAM and CPU usage kept spiking, affecting the rest of my workflow. I don’t open that many tabs either, just enough to have my reference materials while working open (and I close them all every day).
I switched back to Safari and have seen my computer return to its usual snappy self. I like some of the features in Chrome and how they play with Google services, but I do not use Google Docs or Sheets, I prefer Excel and Ulysses (my work collaborate in OneDrive so I do not need the Google services). Therefore, I have no compelling reason to sacrifice performance and find Safari is much better integrated with the rest of MacOS.
Per my recent post I have defaulted to a lot of the G-Suit apps including Google Chat, Meet, Gmail, et al. Consequently, I have moved from Safari as my default to Brave. I still need to test Brave with Google Meet (video and audio) but assuming it works, I’ll stick with Brave. I would prefer to use Safari but Safari does not work as consistently and smoothly with Google apps as Chrome and Brave do.
That said, does anyone know when Brave will re-activate sync? It is frustrating not being able to sync bookmarks between my MBP and iOS devices.
They said last month they’re re-enabling it “soon” and said three weeks ago
Brave Sync is our #1 product feature priority.
In previous weeks, we’ve had entire teams flown out just for the new Brave Sync feature rewrite. It is very important to Brave users; therefore, it’s very important to us.
The new Brave Sync will feature many more data types (e.g., in addition to bookmarks, it can also sync history, passwords, etc.). It will also be completely private, as expected.
In the meantime, the current version of Brave Sync has been hidden/disabled in Brave, which is an acknowledgement of the current issues with Brave Sync.
Thanks. I’ll have to default to Chrome until this is fixed. Syncing is critical to me as I switched back and forth between devices throughout the day.
I simplified everything: just Safari and uninstalled every other browser. If it doesn’t work in Safari, I don’t care.
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An option that not only is insufficient for customers of some websites (especially some banks), but which results in less power and flexibility and even reduced security/privacy (given the right extensions), as discussed previously.
Brave user here 
It has been my primary browser since several months ago. I like its built-in ad-blocker and loading speed. Besides, the idea of “You choose what ads to watch and earn rewards” interests me a lot.
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I recently switched back to Safari from Firefox.
I was on Firefox mainly for privacy features/add-ons, but I could get a close-enough level of protection with Safari, the browser that I find nicer to use.
| Firefox |  |
Safari |
|---|---|---|
| uBlock Origin | Wipr | |
| Enhanced Tracking Protection | ||
| Privacy Badger | ||
| Multi-Account / Facebook Containers | Intelligent Tracking Protection |
On a non-privacy-related note, a huge shout out to Dark Reader, which offers a massive quality-of-life improvement, and is available for Safari.
With respect to privacy I use Privacy Possum, an offshoot of Privacy Badger from a onetime dev of Privacy Possum who thought it needed to do more (and which is called ‘Privacy Possum on steroids’), PixelBlock to kill tracking cookies in Gmail, and DecentralEyes which puts on your local machine data that otherwise would have been polled from a Content Delivery Network (like Google Hosted Library, which could then build a profile of you across the web).
To my knowledge Safari has no equivalent for any of this.
