This past weekend I tried Safari again when I saw it updated to version 12. I was surprised to see that Apple deactivated my uBlock Origin plugin, saying it would slow the browser down. So now Safari is unusable and filled with ads, and there's nothing Apple provides to replace uBlock Origin. This is a total show-stopper for me.

It’s really just a suggestion to turn off some extensions. Haven’t bothered to figure out what triggers Safari to do that, but you can still run uBlock Origin on Safari 12 and it seems to work fine.

> Haven’t bothered to figure out what triggers Safari to do that

Safari has a new extensions model and will be deprecating the legacy one in a year. Hence the push to migrate to newer extensions.

the new extensions model is ridiculously useless... You need to build your extension in Xcode now, and for anything other than content blocking, the APIs are non existent... for instance, you can't even close tabs!

I made an extremely simple extension using the new model around 2months - before I try migrating an older "actually useful" extension. But theres just no way its possible to migrate.

Apple doesn't care about browser extensions now, it seems they want everyone to move to the new model, so they can collect revenue on sales on ad blockers.

:(

This is wrong - you can inject arbitrary scripts and styles:

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/safariservices/saf...

You didn’t reply to or contradict anything they said. You need Xcode to build extensions and Safari has a super limited API. Executing JS and CSS don’t address either.

He didn’t say limited, he said nonexistent.

More specifically, if you can inject scripts I don’t see why you couldn’t call window.close()

> Apple doesn't care about browser extensions now, it seems they want everyone to move to the new model, so they can collect revenue on sales on ad blockers.

The web is terrible without a serious adblocker and the available alternatives (paid or not) are unable to take away the same amount of junk. People will simply start using another browser.

Apple doesn't provide a replacement extension, but they do vend a replacement API, the content blocking API. There are many extensions that use this.

You can turn it back on. Go to Preferences -> Extensions and check "uBlock Origin". I've been using Safari 12 since it came out and uBlock Origin works with it just fine.

You can get the Adblock Plus app, which using the new API.

This is a tradeoff Apple made valuing privacy and performance over user freedom. The new content blocking API is safer and faster.

I haven't tried uBlock Origin, but I'm running 1Blocker and Ka-Block! and they filter out most of the worst offenders.

You might be thankful it was deactivated - it might have not been legit.

https://github.com/el1t/uBlock-Safari/issues/69

I just use uBlock Origin anyway (basically ignore the message). I don't see a difference in performance with the plugin when I updated to v12 on my mid-2010 MBP (it's slow anyway, so /shrug).

Don’t use uBlock, but content blockers on Safari work really well for me. There is also quite a lot of built in privacy protection already.

same happened with Adguard and this was using non deprecated APIs (uBlock Origin was and is clearly using deprecated APIs). It seems for blocking stuff Apple changed the whole SDK on the browser!

One thing I don't like is having a 30% chance to have to wait 2-4 seconds whenever I swipe to go to the previous page or click the back button.

This. This a thousand times. I get these random slow downs as well with safari. But only every once in a while. What is happening?

Ah so it’s not just me!

I keep trying to use Safari as my main browser. I want to use it so bad.

I keep switching away from it due to lack of favicons and lack of extensions. I don't personally mind paying for a dev license to release an extension, but it definitely takes a toll on the extensions that get released.

Safari shows favicons in tab titles in macOS v10.14 Mojave.

It's a Safari 12 feature, so works on macOS 10.13 too.

And Safari 12 on High Sierra.

And on the topic of this thread, Safari also has the best privacy protections: <https://webkit.org/blog/8311/intelligent-tracking-prevention....

Do you use Internet Explorer on your Windows Box?

For me the biggest reason not to use Safari was that I couldn't paste screen snippets or images from a clipboard (e.g. Web Whatsapp etc). But after your comment I tried and they seem to have implemented it. Maybe even in Safari 12.

Safari doesn't support WebGL2 and probably never will because of Apple's stance on OpenGL. Disqualifies it for me and I've had to tell customers that I can't support it, even if they'd pay for it.

We're moving to WebGPU now, there will be no more WebGL in the future. WebGPU is coming out in late 2019.

It’s on in Safari Technology Preview: https://webkit.org/status/#specification-webgl-2

We have no particular stance against it, though I agree with the other poster that WebGL is more the future.

Ah, that's good to hear. WebGL2 has lot's of useful features, glad to see Safari is going to support them, too.

Because I can't sync history and bookmarks to my Android phone or my Windows gaming PC.

It lacks tree style tabs.

It has the worst UX. It doesn't show favicons on tabs. It has the worst selection of extensions: https://redditenhancementsuite.com/safari/. Everything just seems to be worse than Firefox/Chrome from the developer tools to extension development (you need Xcode).

To use Safari, you pretty much need to decide that performance / battery life are more important than anything else which only describes my needs when I need to milk my battery when it hits 10% with no electric outlet in sight.

Safari 12 can show favicons on tabs now :o)

This is how to enable it: https://lifehacker.com/how-to-enable-safari-favicons-on-mac-...

Sadly not for the favourites bar yet, which is the biggest thing holding me back so far. :( (+ the UI just seems so clunky and old compared to Chrome)

As a counterpoint; I think the Safari UI is the lightest and gets out of my way. I am I the only one who actually likes the lack of favicons? Very minimalist and gets out of the way to let me do my surfing.

I do use Chrome during development though.

It does have some ux benefits too. The "back gesture" works much better than on other browsers. Firefox gives no feedback, and chrome gives very poor feedback.

Safari lets you peek at the previous page, and makes it very obvious that you are about to go back, without any performance hit.

It also comes with reading mode, which chrome doesn't. Even with an ad blocker, many pages are still layed out in ways that can only be summed up as reader hostile.

So for reading and moving between pages, I feel like it beats both ffx and chrome. So I disagree with your "more important than anything else" part, but agree that performance and battery is among its top features, and if you don't care for that, safari does become a hard choice.

We all care about about battery life performance. This comments section is filled with people like me who want to use Safari and give it a serious try every once in a while for that exact reason.

But it needs more than that when my battery already lasts 6+ hours under heavy use and my laptop is plugged in almost all day anyways.

Perhaps you can see how a reading mode that we already had extensions for in other browsers and sexier prev/next gestures damn it with weak praise.

Well, it does show favicons on tabs (with the recent update). I'm not sure what you mean "everything seems to be worse", I haven't found this to be the case. As for extensions, there are indeed fewer Safari extensions than for other browsers. I checked and I regularly use only: 1Password, Ghostery, AdBlock and Harvest.

As I said, it provides the best performance, experience and battery life.

Safari has just added favicon support for pinned tabs.

Also privacy and security, since today's Mojave release.