Safari

Long-term owners

In 25 years absolutely no one has accused Apple of storing your browsing data that's not e2e encrypted

Mar 2026 · comment

What hackers pick instead

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Every quote

The 40 most detailed of 1217 comments. Each links to the original.

1. Apple has introduced multiple anti-tracking technologies into Safari which prevents Google from collecting information from Safari users.

   Recommends · Feb 2026 · in “Apple Platform Security (Jan 2026) [pdf]”

2. Safari, Firefox, and hopefully soon Ladybird are the only alternative browser engines keeping them somewhat honest on that front.

   Recommends · Oct 2026 · in “Apple's new 'Switch to Safari' campaign details why you should ditch Chrome”

3. Apple doesn't collect your browsing data, they build in privacy controls that are pretty much as strong as they can manage

   Recommends · Dec 2025 · in “Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?”

4. if you could use any web browser for 20 minutes before running out of battery vs safari for hours, one is clearly better

   Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “Google confirms 'high-friction' sideloading flow is coming to Android”

5. Apple - aside from PWAs competing with their App Store - has no real incentive to commodify, restrict or surveil the web

   Recommends · Jul 2026 · in “Safari Technology Preview 248 Released”

6. because of the seamless integration with Apple platform features and because it is the most energy efficient browser

   Recommends · Aug 2026 · in “Ask HN: What browser do you use?”

7. Safari is fine, but also many websites (which sometimes you need to use like banking or gov) are not tested on it.

   Mixed · Jul 2026 · in “Google Chrome Installed a 4GB AI Model on Your PC”

8. performance is one of the main focuses of Safari and one of the main distinguishing factors that Apple strives for

   Recommends · Oct 2026 · in “Apple's new 'Switch to Safari' campaign details why you should ditch Chrome”

9. Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP), using on-device machine learning to identify and limit cross-site trackers

   Mixed · Apr 2026 · in “Firefox Has Integrated Brave's Adblock Engine”

10. it doesn't behave very well with Reddit (keeps closing and reopening tabs due to "too much memory" problems.

    Mixed · Jul 2026 · in “Orion Browser by Kagi”

11. I use Safari as my main browser, I open Chrome only when I encounter a web site that doesn't work in Safari.

    Recommends · May 2026 · in “MacBook Neo Deep Dive: Benchmarks, Wafer Economics, and the 8GB Gamble”

12. Seamless integration of Apple devices is one of the biggest advantages of using Apple software like Safari

    Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “New Safari developer tools provide insight into CSS Grid Lanes”

13. Safari and Firefox are the tiny holdouts that prevent web technology from being 100% controlled by Google.

    Recommends · Oct 2026 · in “Apple's new 'Switch to Safari' campaign details why you should ditch Chrome”

14. It's always been fast and smooth, and the integration - like password sync and SMS 2FA keys - works great.

    Recommends · Oct 2026 · in “Apple: Switch to Safari (From Chrome)”

15. Because it cannot run Chromium, Safari on iPhone is the last refuge of the truly open and truly free web.

    Recommends · Jul 2026 · in “The Safari MCP server for web developers”

16. Safari 18 that for the first time in its history didn't have all the annoying rendering difference or lag

    Recommends · Apr 2026 · in “WebKit Features for Safari 26.4”

17. In 25 years absolutely no one has accused Apple of storing your browsing data that's not e2e encrypted

    Recommends · Mar 2026 · in “I'm reluctant to verify my identity or age for any online services”

18. since iOS 26 basic Safari features such as bookmarks and text search have become so buried deep underneath, they are basically unusable at this point

    Criticizes · Mar 2026 · in “Apple's intentional crippling of Mobile Safari continues”

19. Apple forces all browsers on iOS to use Safari , which they have intentionally crippled and refuse to let other browsers use their own engine.

    Criticizes · Mar 2026 · in “Making WebAssembly a first-class language on the Web”

20. The MacOS Safari translation button appears on the left of the omni-bar, until you click it, at which point it instantly moves to the right

    Criticizes · Jan 2026 · in “Google confirms 'high-friction' sideloading flow is coming to Android”

21. Someone should be able to go to their translate app, then their photo galley, and back to Safari without it needing to refresh the context.

    Criticizes · Feb 2026 · in “Smartphone Mkt to Decline 13% in '26, Largest Drop Ever Due to Memory Shortage”

22. Forcing users to use the Safari browser engine when they install Firefox or anything else is not the way to protect anyone from anything.

    Criticizes · Oct 2026 · in “Apple's new 'Switch to Safari' campaign details why you should ditch Chrome”

23. So I have safari and I can’t switch to my email? Both native apps and sometimes I lose the state of safari if I move more than 10s away?

    Criticizes · Feb 2026 · in “Smartphone Mkt to Decline 13% in '26, Largest Drop Ever Due to Memory Shortage”

24. Forcing Safari on iOS and not making it available on the mass market platforms (Android and Windows) makes it a pretty wonky standard.

    Criticizes · Jan 2026 · in “iOS allows alternative browser engines in Japan”

25. safari on desktop does the same thing even with lots of memory available. Whatever they're doing to limit a tabs resources needs to go

    Criticizes · Feb 2026 · in “Smartphone Mkt to Decline 13% in '26, Largest Drop Ever Due to Memory Shortage”

26. Apple forces you to release your EU app with a different browser engine specifically for European users as a completely separate app

    Criticizes · Oct 2026 · in “Apple's new 'Switch to Safari' campaign details why you should ditch Chrome”

27. I 'solved' technical issues for friends and family by having them do a certain process (like a booking) on chrome instead of safari.

    Criticizes · Oct 2026 · in “Apple: Switch to Safari (From Chrome)”

28. I had to "share" this page to use the "Find on Page" feature to search whether anyone had mentioned the share button yet. Bonkers.

    Criticizes · Jan 2026 · in “It's hard to justify Tahoe icons”

29. has a very pleasant reader mode that, while not pure markdown, does capture quite a bit of the experience by standardizing presentation and stripping out distractions

    Recommends · Aug 2026 · in “TIME Is Serving AI Bots a Different Website, with Ads Built In”

30. I'll join I saying I also daily Safari for generale usage (with only two extensions installed 1Blocker and Are.na) and I have basically zero issues.

    Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “New Safari developer tools provide insight into CSS Grid Lanes”

31. Safari isn't trapping website developers in "old standards forever", it is encouraging developers to use safe, private, stable choices.

    Recommends · Mar 2026 · in “Temporal: The 9-Year Journey to Fix Time in JavaScript”

32. I also use it as my main browser, so maybe there are some nicer features in other browser dev tools I haven't been exposed too.

    Mixed · Jan 2026 · in “New Safari developer tools provide insight into CSS Grid Lanes”

33. Ad blockers work fine for me in Safari. They may not have the flexibility of manifest v2 but they are hardly crippled.

    Recommends · Aug 2026 · in “Facebook ads are so hard to block that uBlock Origin stopped filtering them”

34. Ever browse in Safari and notice that you can highlight text in the image almost instantly after loading a page?

    Recommends · Feb 2026 · in “My thousand dollar iPhone can't do math”

35. I generally use Safari for reading, and shrinking the browser's width forces lines of text to not get too long

    Mixed · Mar 2026 · in “Make macOS consistently bad (unironically)”

36. their products like iMessage, Safari and the App Store are artificially segregated from free-market pressures

    Mixed · Nov 2025 · in “The EU made Apple adopt new Wi-Fi standards, and now Android can support AirDrop”

37. I default any video watching longer than a short clip to safari. It is still the best browser for video IME.

    Recommends · Dec 2025 · in “Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo”

38. Simple, easy tools are already there, such as the Clear Browsing Data menu item in Chrome, Edge, and Safari.

    Recommends · Jul 2026 · in “Kill The Cookie Banner”

39. The only reason I moved away was that as a Mac gets older, there comes a point where you can't update the OS

    Mixed · Oct 2026 · in “Apple's new 'Switch to Safari' campaign details why you should ditch Chrome”

40. Apple has put a ton of effort into Safari recently and have shot up to the top of the interop leaderboards.

    Recommends · Dec 2025 · in “Fifty problems with standard web APIs in 2025”