10 Reasons To Make Safari Your Default Browser

The three main browsers for most Mac users are Safari, Chrome and Firefox. Safari should be your main browser for a variety of reasons. But you can also use the others when needed.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let's look at some reasons you should make Safari your default browser on your Mac. 
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So you have three main browser choices on your Mac. Safari, Firefox, and Chrome. Now I have all three and I use all three. But I prefer Safari and it's the main browser I use for regular web surfing. The first reason is because Safari is built for the Mac. It's built into the operating system and it's definitely the most Mac-like of all of the browsers and you don't need to download anything extra. It's already built into your Mac. For most users that's reason enough to make it your default browser. There's no reason to take up space on your drive with another app or download another app or learn another ecosystem like Goggle's for Chrome.
Another reason to stick with Safari is if you're using a MacBook. Most Mac users are using some sort of MacBook and if you're using a MacBook you're concerned about battery life. Safari is the best browser for conserving energy. It just uses less power so your battery will last longer.
Now since Safari is from Apple it works great across all your Apple devices. Notably in Bookmarks. Your Bookmarks will sync across all your different devices. So as you add bookmarks to Safari on your Mac you'll see them on your iPhone, your iPad, your second Mac. So wherever you add bookmarks your bookmarks stay in sync. 
Now Firefox and Chrome could do this as well. But for Chrome you're going to have to log into your Goggle account. This leads me to my next item which is Privacy. Safari and Firefox are clear winners in privacy over Chrome. Goggle's main business is selling ads. So, of course, they want to track you as much as possible in order to get a higher price for their ads. Now it may not be a big deal to you. After all if you're going to see ads on a website anyway it might as well be ads that might pertain to you. But if you're concerned about privacy at all then you probably want to steer clear of Chrome and stick with Safari or Firefox.
Now one of the things Chrome is missing is something called the Reading List. Reading List is a little set of Bookmarks on the left. You can quickly add articles to it and get to those articles later on. This syncs across all your different devices. These can be made available to read off-line as well. Chrome only offers this through an extension but Safari and Firefox have this built-in. 
Another thing that Safari and Firefox have that Chrome doesn't is Reader View. Reader View allows you to get rid of all the extra content on the page, including ads, and go right to basically a really nice version of the article that you can read. Chrome, of course, can't really get rid of this because getting rid of the ads is kind of counter to Goggle's business.
Safari also has a built-in Password Manager that makes it really nice to use. It automatically prompts you when you create new passwords to store them. You could always go to Preferences and then Passwords to go get access to any of your passwords. This syncs between all your Apple devices through iCloud. So you have these passwords then available on your iPhone, iPad, your other Macs.
One feature I really love about Safari is something called iCloud Tabs. This allows me to see the web pages I have open on my other devices. So I can click here on Tabs and I could see what tabs I have open. I have nothing right now. But I could look and see on my MacBook Pro I've got two tabs open. I could jump right to those. It will also list other devices here if I had any on the same iCloud account and they had Safari Tabs open. You could also customize the Tool Bar and add iCloud Tabs right up in there which is definitely something that I do normally so that I could easily access the tabs from one machine to another.
One thing that is usually counted as a plus for Chrome and a minus for Safari I'm going to count the other way. That is Extensions. You can add extensions to Safari and Chrome and Firefox. But Safari is really restrictive on how to add extensions. You have to add them through the Mac App Store which means they have to go through Apple and follow certain rules. Whereas with Chrome and Firefox you can get extensions from anywhere. This is kind of a security and also a privacy issue. You may not expect this but also an energy. One of the reasons that Chrome can eat up a lot of battery life for some people is an extension that simply uses too much power.
In Safari if you go to Preferences you could see your extensions here and you can activate them and turn them on. To add them you could go to Safari, Safari Extensions which takes you to the Mac App Store. Now people complain about Safari extensions, like the Ad Blockers aren't as good as the ones on Chrome. This is simply because of the stricter rules. In fact Chrome is moving towards these stricter rules as well.
Now the last item is speed. Measuring browser speed is really tough because there's so many different factors. One page might load faster on one browser and another page might load faster on another browser. There's the speed of things going on inside the web page like interactive elements and things like that. So you can measure speed in different ways and have each of the three brewers come out ahead depending upon how you measure it. But after surveying tons of articles on browser speed it seems like Safari is either at or near the top every time. If you want to look at the big picture of overall speed of all the things that you do in a web browser I think Safari edges out Chrome and is easily faster than Firefox. 
So those are my ten reasons that Safari should be your default browser. I use Safari as my default browser but I have Chrome and Firefox available in case I need them. Now I know some people say, well there's a certain page that I go to that won't load in Safari. I'm going to urge you to actually recheck that. Because when I ask people about this complaint usually it's from years ago and when they check again they're surprised to find that the web page works fine in all browsers now. But it's really no problem if for some reason the web page restricts itself to Goggle Chrome for instance. You could just have Goggle Chrome available in use for that one website. There's no reason to switch to Chrome for everything just because one website requires it. 
Now I want to mention one thing that people usually cite as the reason to use Firefox or Chrome over Safari. That's developer tools. You can get developer extensions that are really powerful and help if you're developing websites. But actually Safari has most of this built-in. If you go to Safari, Preferences and then to Advanced. Turn on Show Develop in the Menu Bar. Then you've got this here with lots of developer tools. You have a full Inspector. You could do most of the things that you could do in other browsers as well. I find when I'm developing a website I can do just about everything I need here using the built-in tools in Safari without having to resort to going to Firefox or Chrome and using a special extension.
So my advice is use Safari as your default browser on your Mac. If you want a second browser use Firefox because at least you have the same level of privacy controls there and features like Reading List and Reader View. But if you find  that you really need to use Chrome for something have Chrome available but only use it for that one site that you can only go to with Chrome.

Comments: 14 Responses to “10 Reasons To Make Safari Your Default Browser”

Lorenz Rychner

4 years ago

A reason for abandoning Safari: The way it shows activity from Safari on my other devices, sometimes five in total, confusing, not secure if I work with somebody on just the one issue on just the one device, and I find no way of stopping this "sharing". I also cannot set a default for opening windows in private mode - the only two options I get in the Prefs for "Safari opens with" are "All Windows from last session" and All non-private windows from last session". Safari 14.0, Catalina10.15.7.

Lynda Farabee

My "favorites" are listed in bar just below address bar. How do I remove those? Since they replicate "favorites" on start page, I don't see a need for them there, now.

Gary Rosenzweig

Lynda: In Safari, Choose View, Hide Favorites Bar.

nick

Gary, do you know why Safari does not allow video calls in Facebook Messenger? I'm a very occasional user of FB and the only reason I use it is for video calling a friend who only knows how to use Messenger video. I end up using Firefox for this. I'm asking this in case there might be a security risk using FB Messenger in a browser and maybe that's the reason Safari does not support it.

Nick: I'd imagine this is related to extensions. Facebook probably needs to create a proper modern extension for Safari to enable this, and they simply haven't. As far as using Facebook and "security" -- well that's a huge subject!

Barnabas Kerekes

I could not receive "Supertitles" (close captions) with the Metropolitan Opera streaming telecasts. No problem on Firefox. I did not do anything in settings, options, whatever.

Any clue, anyone?

Mark

Chrome really eats memory. Do you have any idea how Safari compares?

Mark: You can compare yourself using Activity Monitor. But it would be hard to do unless both browsers were looking at exactly the same pages and you viewed a lot of different pages to test.

Marj Green

I use 1Password in all 3 browsers. It's too bad that 1Password X is not available on Safari.

Mark: what do you mean it isn’t available in Safari? It definitely is.

Ian Leckie

Another excellent tutorial! I've always used Safari, but I've never really understood how to use iCloud tabs. You've explained it so clearly, and I've now set them up! Thanks so much! BTW, for my second "emergency" browser I use Opera...it works great for me. I've never liked FireFox for some reason, and I won't use Chrome. That's just me! Regards, Ian.

Keith Christian

I would appreciate a future video on all the menu options in the Develop tab of the latest Safari browser. I've not had much luck finding the information on the web, especially lacking on the Apple Support pages. Thank you, Gary.

Keith: That's a big topic, but not sure it is one I would cover. If you aren't a web site developer, then you don't really need these tools. If you are a web site developer, then you probably already know how to use them.

Dinah

Thank you found this very informative and useful.

Comments Closed.

10 Reasons To Make Safari Your Default Browser

Comments: 14 Responses to “10 Reasons To Make Safari Your Default Browser”

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