Safari Is Better Than Chrome, Actually
Mac users tend to ignore Safari, and I understand that: at first glance, it doesn’t seem powerful enough, and anyone coming from Windows probably has a long-standing habit of installing Chrome.
But this is a mistake. Everyone who has a Mac should at least give Safari a chance for a couple of weeks because it’s very good in my opinion. I’m just a guy who spends too much time on the Internet. I’m wrong about a lot of things, and I’m certainly not trying to say that any Mac user using Chrome or Arc is objectively wrong. I just prefer Safari.
Safari Reading Mode – Perfection
The modern web is a nightmare to browse. Too many websites, including the ones you may be reading right now, clutter your reading experience with ads, pop-ups, extra ads, sidebars, and advertisements. Safari’s Reading View removes all of this, showing you just what you want: the article on the current page. Even better: the entire website remains open in the background, meaning that from the site’s perspective, you’re not even blocking ads.
Many browsers offer a reading mode , but Safari, in my experience, offers the best one. It consistently does a better job of retrieving entire articles, and all it takes is one click or keyboard shortcut. Even better: you can set the default reading mode for any website. Just open any particularly annoying page, click “Safari” in the menu bar at the top of the screen, then click ” Settings for ,” which is right under “Settings.” Select the “Use Reader” checkbox if available, and this mode will start by default whenever you open articles on this website. I can’t tell you how many previously unreadable websites have become useful again after opening this feature.
Google Chrome doesn’t actually offer a reading mode—at least not one that you can’t use without accessing the hidden Settings page. Arc offers one of these as a beta tool, but in my experience it doesn’t work that well. Neither app offers settings to use the default reading mode for certain websites. For me, this is the main reason I prefer Safari.
Improved privacy features
One way to think about tech companies and how they plan to treat you is to look at their incentives. Apple is, at its core, a hardware company. Sure, the company sells services, but for the most part, Apple makes money when you buy a phone or computer. Meanwhile, Google is an advertising company whose revenue model is based on collecting information about users. Mastering Chrome helps them in this mission. (Ark is not making any money at the moment – more on that later.)
So, do I trust Apple? Not really. But the company has publicly positioned Safari as a more privacy-focused alternative to Google Chrome, and I think it’s in its best interest to make that happen. The browser blocks cross-site tracking by default and may hide your IP address from trackers altogether. Privacy changes like these have real-world consequences: they ‘ll cost Facebook $10 billion in 2022, so it should at least work a little.
Meanwhile, Chrome is going in a different direction. This summer, the browser is releasing an extension update called Manifest V3. The Electronic Frontier Foundation calls privacy extensions, including ad blockers, ” deceitful and threatening ,” quoting Daley Barnett’s post on the matter:
(The update) will limit the capabilities of web extensions, especially those designed to monitor, modify, and compute along with your browser’s interaction with the websites you visit. Under the new specifications, such extensions (such as some privacy-protecting tracker blockers) will have significantly limited capabilities. Google’s attempts to limit this access are troubling, especially considering that Google has installed trackers on 75% of the top one million websites.
No big tech company can be trusted when it comes to privacy, but the incentives are clear. Apple wants to be seen as a privacy-conscious company, while Google is happy to use its control of the most popular browser on the market to make privacy-enhancing extensions less useful.
Ark is just a little weird to be honest.
At this point, many people might suggest that I try Arc instead. And I have: this has been my daily driver for almost a year. I liked it, but now I’m using Safari again. Honestly, I know it’s unsatisfying, but it’s mostly about the atmosphere. I’m not arguing that Arc is better than Chrome – it is. And I really wanted to like Arc because I liked some of the features – the command bar in particular – which is something I wish all browsers offered.
But ultimately, at a certain point, using Arc began to feel like a chore. First, it’s buggy, but that’s to be expected from a beta product. I’m not one to leave a lot of tabs open at once, so all the tab management features always seemed like overkill to me. I still haven’t figured out how to open two windows at the same time, even after making changes that should have made it easier. And I don’t care about all the AI features that have been added recently.
Mostly, though, I believe that tools shouldn’t get in my way, and Arc really, really wants to remind me that they’re there. Every week there is not only an update, but also a hard to avoid blog post sent to the user that describes what’s in the new update. And frankly, as someone who has been online for a long time, I just don’t understand how this company makes money long term. Its privacy policy seems pretty good, and the company is pretty vocal about not planning on selling data, but I just don’t trust a company that has raised $68 million in venture capital —and that currently has no revenue—is going to respect user privacy at long term. It seems inevitable that at some point the company will be forced to sell the company, and the enchitification cycle will begin. (I hope I’m wrong.)
This doesn’t mean Apple is perfect at this. I’m just saying that I understand how the company makes money – by selling hardware – and I’m not worried about market forces that will ultimately make Safari suck. It could happen, but it doesn’t seem inevitable.
None of this is hardware or a list of reasons why I think you shouldn’t use Arc – a lot of people actually like it! And I realize this sounds a bit like a rant. All I know is that returning to Safari after almost a year of using Arc felt like a relief.
Don’t miss out on Safari
Again, most of this is just the ramblings of someone who spends too much time on the Internet and too much time switching between browsers. However, I keep coming back to Safari because it works well and doesn’t get in my way. There are downsides, too: for example, the extension ecosystem isn’t as robust, and some poorly designed sites don’t work at all in Safari. For the most part, however, Safari is a tool that gets the job done effectively. I like it better than other browsers, and if you give it a chance, you can too.