> I get that you like favicons, but how is the lack of this one very minor feature something you consider a complete roadblock to using the browser as a whole?

For those of us with lots of tabs (e.g. more than a dozen), favicons are the only way to know what is in each tab. With only a letter or two showing, favicons are the only tab content identifier that exists.

This goes double for Safari, which filters out any text in tab names that is shared between two or more tabs.

I normally group my windows by subject instead of having a bunch of completely unrelated tabs in a single window. You can also use Show All Tabs (⌘⇧\) to see all of the tabs in a window in a manner that shows you what each tab is (and also groups some tabs together, I think based on site, but I don't use it often enough to figure out the exact rules of when it groups tabs).

A window for "things opened from hacker news" can quickly get to well over a dozen tabs. :)

There are a lot of reasons to choose Safari over Firefox, which I use most of the time. The visualization for swiping backwards is a little better, syncing tabs or handoff to an iPad or iPhone seems a little smoother than the Firefox version, the rendering may be a little faster, and I like the show all tabs button a lot.

However, my favorites/bookmarks bar is a row of favicons. I feel like The first Macs and Apple IIc did a great job labeling hardware ports with good icons. You could quickly understand what they meant, and worked better than words for the labels. I don't understand why Apple has decided that favicons are such an abomination that using them for tiny buttons in the favorites bar isn't even an option hidden somewhere in a plist.

Really, I just miss having favicons enough, that the advantages of Safari aren't enough to get me using it instead of Firefox.

I do a similar thing for Chrome. It's not so much the missing minor feature, as much as the way the dev/mgmt team works. If Safari refuses to have favicons, then they might think another important thing for you is not important for them. For me, I refuse to use Chrome because they don't want to put an option or allow extensions to remove the X button on the tabs. It's silly, I know. But I want it because I press it accidentally every now and then. I might be missing out on other features etc they have, but I want this small think that they don't want to have. It's about the principal. For me, and for many others, each with their own requirements.