Hi friends, a bunch of you use Safari and their primary browser since it’s great for battery and privacy, but what about extension support? On a quick look, it has like 20 extensions which might be useful for most users, and a bunch of them are paid!! . Lol, I don’t want to pay for a browser extension I can get for free on another browser.
Is there another app store or place where I can get free extensions?
I use Firefox, which has a multi-container feature (for sandboxing cookies and sessions) for a group of websites, but it eats up a lot of RAM and is slower than chrome. Also slower development cycle.
Extensions I use:
ublock origin (since it helps with adblocks, hiding annoyances on webpages, and custom CSS like hiding sidebars and other crap)
I would hazard a guess that Safari users a) don’t use that many extensions or b) are okay with the cost of 1 or 2. The battery savings might pay off. There are also free extensions that do the same things as paid ones. None of the extensions I need cost anything, partly because I barely use any.
Then again, this is one of many reasons I use Vivaldi instead.
Any particular reason you use Vivaldi instead of Chrome, edge or FF which are much more trusted browsers, trusted in terms of being developed by big companies with a reputation.
TBH, I think Firefox/Brave are much more privacy focussed than Safari. For instance, they block a lot more ads than Safari. Firefox’s multi-container support disables cross-sharing of cookies/data across multiple websites which isn’t something that Safari does. It’s def better than chrome/edge, which is why I was hoping to use extensions to get these features.
Really!! The most extension for me is ublock which strips off unnecessary elements from the page. Like for Verge, see how it removes the super large header which does add any value for me. So much more content in the same area
Better is subjective and really depends on what you want in a browser. Personally I only use Safari on iOS, except when I’m testing out webdev projects in it on macOS. But for some people it might be the best option. I’d advise thinking about your browser criteria before making any switches from a setup you currently seem to be satisfied with.
ThatNerd provided a good list of features. I only want to add that Vivaldi is a trusted company with a longstanding reputation as they came from the original Opera browser developer team and are led by an Opera co-founder.
As for why I’m okay with paying Wipr and 1Blocker to block ads on Safari: I’d be happy to pay uBlock Origin for its ad-blocking on the other browsers I use, were it to charge. I don’t see a price greater than $0 as a ripoff.
My hope is that Safari will change its API restrictions to allow uBlock Origin to work on it, and if they charged for the porting work, that’d be fine. uBlock Origin would work for me as a free community plugin and also as a commercial plugin.
I use Safari for the battery life, and use other browsers for sites that only develop Chromium compatibility and to do some web development.
I use Firefox on Mac almost exclusively. Actually the Nightly build, religiously updating each day.
The reason I do this is because its support for saving HTML 5 Canvas elements as PNGs is much better on Firefox than Safari. (This is a big part of my “day job” workflow.)
I suppose I could write the necessary javascript to make that work on Safari - or maybe there’s an extension for doing it. (I would pay for that, actually.)
Safari claims to be fast, but is it really? Compared to Firefox?
I would switch to Safari if I could. I use it on iPhone and iPad as it is. And maybe handoff is a good reason to use a single browser.
Might be worth checking out the Orion project, which is aimed at building a WebKit-based browser for both macOS and iOS that can use Chrome and Firefox extensions. It’s still in beta, so the developers are still fixing bugs — especially with that particular feature — but what I’ve seen so far is promising.
I mainly use Safari and have Firefox as a backup and to run some extensions that don’t exist on Safari.
I also have Edge installed, just in case I need a chromium-based browser for a specific purpose.
Safari consumes less RAM and Handoff is great, I use it all the time.
Having said that, I’m noticing that more and more sites do not work on Safari and I find myself switching to Firefox to get things done.
I’ve had a few problems with Safari lately but turning off “Hide my IP address”(Mac)/Private Relay (IOS) fixed those.
I wonder how long Firefox will be around? It continues to lose market share (currently 3.9%) and depends on a search deal with Google for almost its entire budget. And the deal with Google will expire in 2023.
Firefox covers 95% of my browser needs on macOS, but a small set of features are lagging behind. My biggest gripe now is I cannot use the Translate feature introduced in Monterey in Firefox.
Firefox 89.0 introduced native macOS contextual menus, but the “Translate” entry is missing from the menu. I always assumed those OS-wide features would work out of the box for free if the app is using native menus, but somehow Firefox didn’t. I made a feature request and hopefully it’ll be implemented.
. Lol, I don’t want to pay for a browser extension I can get for free on another browser.
