Comment by Arainach
16 hours ago
What metrics or experiences lead you to that conclusion?
I've used basically all of the major operating systems for 30+ years and I cannot stand macOS. I use a Mac as one of my work devices, and off the top of my head:
* Basic things such as window management require third party tools to get things that are table stakes everywhere else. Even with third party tools doing anything with a "full screen" mode is not going to work the way you expect.
* You can't have separate scroll directions for your trackpad and your external mouse.
* External peripherals in general are a disaster. Every time I connect or disconnect from a docking station my windows are left in awkward positions sized larger than my screen and I need to drag them around
* macOS seems to store a different set of monitor orientations based on what USB port I connect my dock to - same dock, same monitors, 2 different layouts I had to configure independently. I don't even know how you could accomplish that if you wanted it - and absolutely no one wants that.
* Multiple monitors is constantly an afterthought, whether it's menus, the dock, layouts, what have you
* The Settings app is impossible to find anything in. You have to search, and that works OK sometimes, but the layout has no rhyme, reason, or comprehensible order
* Safari. Enough said.
I could keep going, but I absolutely do not associate Apple with quality software.
I'm a decade long Safari user. What's your grievance with Safari and what do you find better?
not the op but for me safari has been deteriorating for years:
1. ios performance in scrolling and loading (especially on my ipad pro m2) is unbearably slow, just stutters everywhere when loading a page in the background
2. tap-and-hold to open a link menu is so strange; sometimes it highlights text instead of showing the menu, sometimes it works ok, there is some kind of strange ui timing issue at work
3. on ipad and ios the tab overview display scrolling is absolutely appalling like 4fps level slow... completely unbearable to scroll through tab previews
4. developer tools are abysmal compared to chrome
5. on desktop performance is also extremely slow compared to chrome, its night and day
6. battery usage is so bad on ipad, just leaving some tabs open they run down the battery and chug memory (i know this is more a web thing, but they should at least freeze tabs in the background or make it an option)
7. just strange bugs on ipad, when tapping a text field the keyboard pops up, then suddenly disappears and the pops up again... just a terrible app
etc etc lots of paper cuts, but the performance issues are the biggest for me... i like the tab groups + auto save and icloud sync and built-in spellcheck, but its getting harder and harder to resist the alternatives
The Tab Overview is due to some background tab reload.
I could basically sums up your experience as Safari is appalling at multi tab resource management. And it has been the case for 14+ years and counting.
It wasn't until Safari 18 before I have most of the rendering issues gone on sites I visit. Safari 26 is completely gone. I haven't encountered one since Safari 26.1.
With a lot of features done, I just hope Safari turn its attention to performance and snappiness of the browser. Multi Tabs doesn't work. For people who uses more than 30+ Tabs is when it start getting slow. Safari used to have an option to unload background tab and that usually fix 80% of the problem but it was taken out some years ago.
8. Searching for a word on a page is buried below main options in the share menu. WHY?
3 replies →
Apple nuked all 3rd party extensions unless they go through their bureaucracy.
Code-signing to force updates should be illegal (including iOS versions)
I have many MANY grievances with Safari:
1. Mandating all browsers on iOS/iPadOS to be powered by Safari (excluding in the EU). This doesn't sound bad, but wait until #3 below...
2. Safari's many bugs. Too many bugs. Oh so many bugs. Damn that's a lot of bugs.
- See: https://webventures.rejh.nl/blog/2024/history-of-safari-show...
- Also see the State of CSS developer survey where Safari makes up such a large portion of pain reports that "Safari" is its own category: https://2025.stateofcss.com/en-US/usage/#css_general_pain_po...
- And again in the State of JS developer survey: https://2025.stateofjs.com/en-US/features/#browser_apis_pain...
3. Grievance 1 and 2 compound together. Whenever Safari (or a Safari update) breaks a feature, you cannot inform a user that they can use another browser as a work around (because all browser engines are forced to use Webkit on iOS/iPadOS)
4. Bad dev tools. This has been seeing much needed improvements (e.g. being able to type an entire word in the css pane instead of a new character on each line), but it still feels 7 years behind.
5. No way to report bugs. There is a "bug reporter" at bugs.webkit.org, however each bug is auto-tagged with a link to an internal bug tracker within Apple. This means that those who are trying to fix bugs and those are trying to report bugs have a wall between them. There is no way to have a discussion to try to narrow down what the bug is, why the bug happens in one case but not another, what's really the cause of the issue, or why the bug matters more than whoever is assigned it might realise. When reporting a bug to Apple, it's more useful to talk to an actual wall because it might fall on you giving you an actual response.
6. Performing incorrectly is more important than getting the performing correctly. This one takes some explanation, but it's a little tricky. I'll give three examples then show how they're all the same issue:
Example 1: The cool homepage.
I was working on a website. Two months before launch I decided to spend a month of time juicing up the homepage, then one more month on polish.
On the homepage I decided to use the brand's pre-existing graphics and turning them into a parallax animation (inspired by: https://www.firewatchgame.com/)
It had:
- Regular content on the page
- Parallax layers with simple vector graphics inside them so that when the user scrolled down the page, the user saw a parallax animation of the landscape changing. (e.g. far clouds, far mountains, close clouds, close mountains, hill, foreground, simple bubble particles closer than the regular content on the sides to strengthen the depth of field illusion, etc...)
- Other vector graphics following a motion path animation
- This was done in 2017, so before CSS got scroll driven animation support, or motion-path support. It was also done without JS.
- Everything worked brilliantly, until we discovered that one particular iPhone model rendered an empty blank white page.
- I lost the last month trying pulling the effect apart trying to diagnose the bug (and with Safari's buggy dev tools being no help I had to do it in the dark). I was able to determine when the bug would trigger, and had to tear down my whole homepage and rebuild it with 2 fewer parallax layers before launch and 3 days of polish for the rest of the website before launch.
(you can see the final result at https://myobrace.com, but I really would have liked the extra time for polish, if you're wondering how I achieved the effects without JS and/or scroll-driven animations, I used css's perspective and transform rules to position the elements back in the z-axis then scaled them up so they appeared the correct size with the regular page content so as the page scrolled, the elements further back appeared to scroll at a different speed. I then used SMIL for the motion paths in the SVG elements).
Example 2. The texture
I wanted to add a repeating texture to buttons so they didn't feel so flat without needing a separate network request to download an image.
I tried generating one with SVG but the SVG 1.1 filter effects implementations aren't all hardware accelerated.
I tried generating one with CSS which worked everywhere but Safari.
You can see a texture here where the texture is generated entirely within CSS, and it doesn't work in Safari (but I didn't hide the seams because the result looks like a cool mosaic and I wanted to share the technique): https://codepen.io/spartanatreyu/pen/Yzbmvbr
(if you're curious about the actual texture I used, I hand drew a minimal noise texture in photoshop that could be repeated without showing seams, then base64 encoded it and inlined it within the CSS file so it could be loaded without needing an extra network request. You can see my development version here: https://codepen.io/spartanatreyu/pen/YzoexGg?editors=1100 (the final version is locked behind a login wall in a child-friendly education webapp))
Example 3. Asset downloading
I made a webapp for kiosk machines that downloads 100mb+ of video assets when logging in for the first time. iPads have a kiosk mode so I supported iPadOS' Safari mode so that the iPads could be used in commercial settings as kiosk machines.
When the final assets were added, the iPad machines would randomly crash during the asset downloading process.
With Safari's completely broken debugging experience, I eventually learned that as Safari downloads a video, as soon as it tries to put that downloaded data somewhere, it has to copy it across to the new place it's being stored, and if you're copying more than 3mb, it crashes the browser.
The fix was to download and store each video in 1mb chunks. This slowed down the installation speed by a bit over 300%, but at least Safari didn't crash any more.
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Now back to: "Performing incorrectly is more important than getting the performing correctly."
It turns out Safari on iOS/iPadOS has an invisible time/performance budget. Anytime Safari hits that budget, the browser stops what its doing.
- Drawing texture to screen? How about we stop drawing all textures to the screen, including text. Websites don't need to draw any text right?
- Rendering a texture in CSS? How about you have the color white covering everything else instead.
- Downloading a video that's more than 3mb? How about I crash the browser when the download completes.
Compare this to Firefox and Chrome, as they run out of their budget, they stop starting new work so they old work can finish before starting their next task. The page may take a few milliseconds longer to get to the correct result on slower devices, but the result IS correct.
Even worse:
- Safari has no way of informing the code how close it is to the budget.
- The budget can only be found by trial and error.
- If the iOS/iPadOS device has other apps in the background, the budget is smaller.
- Each device has a different budget, so you have to penalize all Safari devices to the smallest supported budget of the oldest supported device.
- If you hit the budget on the most basic functionality (e.g. a homepage, a button, downloading required assets), then your website / webapp may as well not exist to those Apple users.
To be fair, Safari 18 ( finally ) improved a lot on what what reported in both State of CSS and JS. With 26 even better, it is gotten to the point where I believe hopefully 27 it will be a non-issue most of the time. As long as they continue to grind through everything for the next few years and not stop / pulling out resource on Safari Team.
Agree on the time/performance budget. It is pain stupid. As has been the case for so many years. And yet nothing has been done about it.
Since Catalina (maybe since Yosemite), apple has gone down the path of iOSification of its destkop operating system; dumbing it down and trying to own all use cases. Any professional desktop users have long since been chased away, and whatever professionals apple cannot shake: video and music production, have been so shoehorned in to a stupid naïve vision of what their work should look like, it borders on a joke.
No serious computer user can use a Mac anymore, and this is an unfortunate departure from Steve Jobs' Mac where he expended great effort to ensure the Mac remained a serious desktop OS.
The most egregious example of this stupidity is the dumbing down of the Disk Utility app - an app rarely if ever used by normies, and so dumbed down the pros don't want to use it either. Really leaves you scratching your head what the decisionmaking process there was.
Where Steve Jobs' would draw lines in the sand and ask developers and users not to cross it, chairman cook put NATO wire and basically forced users to do as told (safari extensions got nuked, app store apps don't load older versions of software and there's some weird exclusivity agreement, HFS+ support got dropped and apple refused updates to machines that didn't follow, etc. etc. etc. etc.)
The settings app being hot garbage is apple trying to unify their toy phone OS with the desktop OS.
Safari nuked 3rd party extensions so everything has to go through apple's extensions "store".
Apple treated its core base, the ones who saved Apple from collapse in the 90s, like expendable slave. Worse actually; apple actively chased them away like lepers.
This has led to a systemic core rot in apple's software and ecosystem, one that will take years to rectify.... if apple even chooses to do so.
> * You can't have separate scroll directions for your trackpad and your external mouse.
Scroll Reverser
> You can't have separate scroll directions for your trackpad and your external mouse.
The worst. There are even separate toggles in Settings for mouse and trackpad scrolling direction, but changing one changes the other. It is truly amazing that this has persisted for 15 years.
- Let’s hope they don’t change the way macOS manage windows. All the additions they made to accommodate Windows users are useless. - I don’t have any issue on searching macos settings. Could you provide an example? - safari is a great browser, i use it as main browser since years and i’d never go back I think you could keep going saying things that are not true.
The alt tab implementation on macos is awful.
Add sharing a contact to your current message in iMessage to that list.
for hardware you tried, was it all apple?
My latest Mac OSX wtf was sometimes the terminal window shrinks by 1 or 2 columns every time I wake the computer up from sleep, but only when connected via thunderbolt USB C hub to external monitor. Terrifying to imagine how that must be. By contrast, Linux/BSD desktops don't generally seem to pull this kind of weird mindfuck horror movie shit? Like it either works or it's completely, obviously, totally broken. Not some weird subtle in-between thing.
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