Why I am switching away from Safari

I was exclusively using Safari for a while on my Mac as my default browser, but lately, I am not liking Safari and I have switched to another browser. No, this is the about the tabs debacle, in fact, I was one of those very few people who actually liked the new tabs design.

The biggest issue I had with Safari was with the 1Password extension, as it doesn’t work reliably. The extension doesn’t work like it does on Chrome or Edge, it seems to be in someway linked to the Mac app. Unless the Mac app is open and running, the extension wouldn’t respond. Many times the extension simply doesn’t open when clicking and would not be activated. It was incredibly frustrating because of that.

Another issue I had faced with Safari was with Squarespace. I don’t know if the issue is with Squarespace or Safari, but these two do not work well together. Squarespace is incredibly unresponsive on Safari and stops working after several minutes. Moreover, Safari keeps warning me about the power consumption when I use Squarespace extensively, which is a good indicator to have but immensely annoying if it continues to pop up all the time.

The tab groups feature which was recently added is an abomination in my opinion. The way I want the tab groups feature to work is to allow me to create a tab group of bookmarks and save it. Whenever I click on the tab group, I would want the browser to load those bookmarks as active tabs. But instead of that, Safari saves the last spot the tab was at and overrides the original bookmark in the tab group. Which means I never get to go back to the initial bookmark that I created.

These are some reasons why I have felt frustrated using Safari and why I am moving away. If Apple decides to fix some of these issues on Safari, I would gladly give it another chance. But, there are better web browsers in the market right now, and I would recommend everyone else to move to a different browser as your default.