I never liked the Safari Browser since I bought my Mac over 5 years ago. My Password Manager and AdGuard never installed the right way. I gave it another try today and I have to admit, I'm impressed with it. It runs faster than Chrome or Firefox. I always had trouble installing LastPass (Free) and AdGuard to Safari. Today everything installed without a hitch and everything working properly. I'll run it for a few weeks and see how it goes. If all goes well I may ditch my main browser Firefox.
Isn't this because Safari got a major upgrade or something? And what about Vivaldi, did you check it out?
I haven't checked that out yet on the Mac. Yes, it's been fast but it had a lot of glitches and things you couldn't do when I tried it out before. It was like Internet Explorer on Windows. AdGuard isn't working out great on some websites with Safari. I'm trying the free version of 1Blocker and it seems to be doing its job nicely of blocking.
I've never thought of it as IE lol. Safari was one of the first browsers (if not the first) to have a bookmarks toolbar. Although I'm not sure why it's never had favicons. It didn't run well on Windows IIRC. I've always preferred WebKit based browsers though, especially on Unix. I use AdBlock Pro now on Safari.
Where? On the bookmarks sidebar? Mine does as long as you've visited the site recently and Safari has the favicon cached. On tabs or in the address bar? You can add it to tabs: Preferences... > Tabs > Show website icons in tabs. In the address bar it shows up when you make it the input focus, but when it doesn't have input focus Safari prefers to show the SSL lock icon and base URL domain. I kinda like Safari. It's on every Mac, I'm familiar with it, and it's fast. A couple of macOS versions ago, Mojave maybe?, Safari I believe Apple changed up the whole browser extensions format. Support for extensions is where Safari sort of trips up. But I don't like adding in too many extensions anyway. The ad-blocker extension methodology apparently is the one that changed the most, although supposedly Apple had some strong efficiency and browser security arguments for the way they changed it. Not sure. I'm not too picky on browsers really... and I like how Safari has the least visual bling to it... at least to me.
Speaking of ad-blockers, does anyone know if running more than one ad-blocker on Safari is good or will they interfere with each other? I found that running 1Blocker (free) doesn't block ads on YouTube but AdGuard does. I'm running both together right now for testing.
I've never known favicons appear on Safari's bookmarking toolbar. You can edit the bookmark title letters/words, but no favicons appear. They can in drop-down folders. As far as I can ascertain Apple modified the process separation in WebKit (possibly not unlike Manifest v3 in Blink) and this limited adblocking filtering. Although some adblockers, like AdBlock Pro take this into account. I find it works well.
Ahh... yeah... the Favorites bar instead of the Bookmarks Sidebar. Yup, think you are right about it; but I don't use it. I don't like anything taking up vertical space other than 1 row for the address bar / top level icons and 1 row for the tabs. But I could see how that might be an annoyance if you did use it. They should let the same option (or similar option) control favicons in the Favorites bar as they do for tabs. As for content blockers, yes they definitely work and pretty well too. But there was some "growing pains" and my understanding is that they aren't as flexible now as they were pre-Catalina. The way its been explained to me is that previously a web page would load and a content blocker would have sort of interactive control over the rendering as the page came in via the WebExtension api... but this meant that Safari would fetch stuff that would end up just getting dropped from rendering by the blocker and the blocker would have access to page content and the various URLs being fetched. Now, as I understand it, content blockers tell Safari what content to block in advance (via regex or something similar) and Safari now won't even bother to fetch the content that will just be dropped from rendering anyway, nor does the extension have access to the actual page content and URLs being fetched. I'm sure I have some details wrong, but its along those lines.
I can live without favicons in the Favourites bar I guess lol. I thought the changes in Safari in regard to adblocking capability started before Catalina, Sierra possibly.
OK I see, let me know what you think about it, it might be better than Safari depending on what you look for in a browser.
