Monterey: This Is What Happened When I Switched From Chrome To Safari — A 1 Week of Testing Summary
Page Opening & Loading Issues on Safari
At the beginning of my journey with Safari, I encountered that some pages load so long that I almost decided to drop Safari first day because of that single issue. The pages I mean here are mainly: Youtube, Confluence. Didn’t find any solution to that issue as it was coming back regularly every second or third website usage. Also, some pages like cda.pl or twitch.tv didn’t play videos/streamings at all. Actually, once on the Twitch website, my computer hang up and restarted itself without warning.
A few weeks and restarts after running the instructions described below I checked all these websites again and only cda.pl still doesn’t play videos. The rest seems to load and work smoothly. OK, I just found that some videos are working on CDA, so maybe this is an encoding issue?
Another issue I encountered a few times on random pages was the strange behaviour of Safari closing a newly opened website without any visible reason or explanation. This happened several times while opening websites from Google search to new tabs. Giving the website another try usually solved the issue.
Didn’t see any issues with other sites like Discord or Amazon.
No Free Safari Plugin for LastPass
My password manager of choice is LastPass which I’ve been using for about 10 years (or more). Unfortunately, there’s no free Lastpass plugin for Safari, so I decided to just copy/paste any password I would need from my vault to Safari vault. Password autocompletion works well on Safari and I don’t need to type my Lastpass’ master password anymore as I get authenticated just with my finger.
Dark Reader Plugin Not Available
This functionality is quite important to me as I hate being flashed with white light-emitting content and if I cannot solve that quickly then it makes me stay away from the website or the browser. After more than 20 years of gazing into all those monitors, your eyes become vulnerable to such things, eventually.
I didn’t find any browser supporting this functionality natively, so Safari is not an exception here. The Dark Reader plugin I use on Chrome is not available on Safari so I had to research for another one. I found an Eclipse plugin that does a really good job on Safari, has plenty of customization options and yet it is free. Good job!
What Could Solve Some Of These Issues
What Could Help with the above issues was the following instruction I used about a week before the switch back and restarted my MacBook few times since then:
- go to Safari / Preferences / Privacy / Manage Website Data… / Remove All & Done
Safari — General Look & Feel
I really want to use Safari. The general integration with the OS, better memory management, general browser usability and also great Tabs Grouping functionality (better than Chrome’s) are good selling points for me. Yet, after a few weeks, it still remembers my tab groups :)
The Decision
So, I encountered a number of impactful issues at the beginning, but now it seems almost everything works quite well and really fast. Therefore, I think I will give it another try in the upcoming week.
Will see what happens :)
