I've used Safari daily for … must be 20 years now? Every day, for everything, minus the odd exceptionally rare circumstance. And I couldn't tell you what the last one of those was, it was so long ago.
I'm a web developer. I use its devtools constantly.
People ask why do you use Safari and not Chrome and I think the question is backwards. Why, given how lovely Safari is, would you go and download Chrome? It's really ugly and doesn't look like any of the other apps on my Mac.
When I do want other devtools, I vastly prefer Firefox's to Chrome's.
The reason to use Chrome is better extension support, better/more useful functionalities (translation, favicon bookmarks, Google Lens), better autofill/autologin, and better performance for web apps generally. Another very useful property is being able to sync your Chrome profile on any computer, which comes in very handy when you need to do stuff on computers you do not own. Doing the same with Safari is possible but a hassle.
I have used Safari since it replace Internet Explorer back in the days, then switched to Chrome a few years ago after a beta broke password syncing and AdBlocker Extensions for Safari were paid/not as good.
Like much of Apple's software, it has strengths and looks good but is really lacking in many ways. It also locks you into the walled garden pretty tight, which can be annoying at times.
Apple should go back to releasing a cross-platform version if they want to be taken seriously, in my opinion. In general, their incentive to build software solely for their platform is a double-edged sword because they can't manage to create hardware that can cover every need (especially for 3D/engineering), and it becomes very annoying to rely on it the moment you need to use another OS (either Windows or Linux).
Another example is Apple Notes being decent, but using it in the web browser is basically a joke (might as well not exist).
This is like being in the 2000s and saying "Why would I use anything but IE5, everything works with it"
The market share is what makes those circumstances exceptionally rare. Meanwhile we're having to use safari specific fixes and refrain from using he newest standards just because of safari
Safari's dev tools are infuriatingly cumbersome in comparison to Chrome. They go out of their way to make even the simplest actions hidden in multiple selects and popup menus. I even made a screencast of it: https://x.com/dmitriid/status/1711701552082079764
I wish they would fix the bug that has plagued testing against Safari for larger applications since day 1: the silent memory restart. At the very least give an error indicating why the page just refreshed so users/testers can report it, but it would honestly be best to just let a modern desktop browser use the available memory if desired.
It's criminally bad. You can't copy logged variables. You can't inspect worker threads (!?). WASM support is practically non-existant. You can't even do a heap snapshot on demand, something that should be a basic feature.
The timelines view is practically obfuscated with pretty graphs that show some aggregated data and some automatically generated snapshot points where the dev tools decide that are meaningful.
Inspecting the rendering pipeline is impossible. You can't see memory usage, compositing reasons, long frames (you kinda can but it's tricky)...
Not even going into remote debugging for iOS which crashes either the dev tools or Safari on iOS in any non-trivial scenario — the exact ones you need a debugger for.
I've used Safari daily for … must be 20 years now? Every day, for everything, minus the odd exceptionally rare circumstance. And I couldn't tell you what the last one of those was, it was so long ago.
I'm a web developer. I use its devtools constantly.
People ask why do you use Safari and not Chrome and I think the question is backwards. Why, given how lovely Safari is, would you go and download Chrome? It's really ugly and doesn't look like any of the other apps on my Mac.
When I do want other devtools, I vastly prefer Firefox's to Chrome's.
I have used Safari since it replace Internet Explorer back in the days, then switched to Chrome a few years ago after a beta broke password syncing and AdBlocker Extensions for Safari were paid/not as good.
Like much of Apple's software, it has strengths and looks good but is really lacking in many ways. It also locks you into the walled garden pretty tight, which can be annoying at times.
Apple should go back to releasing a cross-platform version if they want to be taken seriously, in my opinion. In general, their incentive to build software solely for their platform is a double-edged sword because they can't manage to create hardware that can cover every need (especially for 3D/engineering), and it becomes very annoying to rely on it the moment you need to use another OS (either Windows or Linux).
Another example is Apple Notes being decent, but using it in the web browser is basically a joke (might as well not exist).
The market share is what makes those circumstances exceptionally rare. Meanwhile we're having to use safari specific fixes and refrain from using he newest standards just because of safari
Safari is not just fine. It's more than fine: https://wpt.fyi/interop-2025?stable
As a browser? I agree with you.
But 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.
The timelines view is practically obfuscated with pretty graphs that show some aggregated data and some automatically generated snapshot points where the dev tools decide that are meaningful.
Inspecting the rendering pipeline is impossible. You can't see memory usage, compositing reasons, long frames (you kinda can but it's tricky)...
Not even going into remote debugging for iOS which crashes either the dev tools or Safari on iOS in any non-trivial scenario — the exact ones you need a debugger for.