And by far and away the most energy efficient, which is pretty relevant for most Apple devices. It's currently my main browser and has been for a while.
Source: me. It's not a small difference, it's literally hours of battery life – or at least was last time I compared. Why would you be surprised? Note, though, that my browsing habits are very messy – I habitually have a number of windows open, some with many tabs. So if you're a neater sort you may not notice the difference as much. Also I haven't tried the most recent versions of Chrome, but I assume I would have heard something if they'd gotten that much better.
You're an interesting data point then.
It's surprising because chromium has an order of magnitude more developers dedicated to optimizations.
Webkit ~= 200K commits
Blink ~= 800K commits
I wrote my original comment imprecisely and without caveat because I was under the strong impression that it was well-known and uncontroversial. I'm definitely not the only person that has observed this. This is the first result for me for "safari chrome battery life": https://www.howtogeek.com/273606/the-best-web-browsers-for-s...
I don't see why number of commits would be anything but an extremely weak proxy for estimating power consumption, certainly not anything to cause surprise. A very strange thing to say by a self-described "rationalist". "Optimizations" is a very wide term you've used. Unless you are specifically targeting power consumption, it's quite possible to optimize for speed and markedly increase power consumption.
Probably because Safari is IE6 of today. That's pretty much as far from "the best" as it gets.
Even as an user, if I want adblock, it will launch separate application, with separate dock icon. That's so un-Apple, as if they didn't want you to use it.
The problem is mainly that the user interface is in my opinion horrible. Especially for new users (I've helped a few newbies), it's hard to see the tabs and to be aware that the browser created a new one.
From my limited experience using it (while teaching an intern how to do web dev), the Dev Tools are horrible and byzantine for some use cases - seems like while Chrome super charged their Dev Tools after the blink fork, Safari's got stuck in the past.
I find Firefox's Dev Tools far better, except the JS debugging tab, which is behind Chrome's on almost all counts.
