As a diehard Firefox user, it has never been competitive with safari when it comes to performance. JavaScriptCore and WebKit are kind of ridiculously fast. If only they were put in a browser that was at all usable.
I'm also seeing significant stuttering on Twitter on Big Sur on Safari 14.0.1. Chrome scrolls smoothly in comparison. Same deal on Reddit.
Then again it was still the case before Big Sur and Safari 14, so I can't call it a regression.
There was something with UBlock or Adblock Plus in the past and if it wasn't UBO I wasn't sure if they were trust worthy. I think one went rogue and one started selling the ability to unblock ads. But, with Safari 14 being able to transform chrome extensions, I hope that some of the popular ones and EFF ones can migrate.
I ended up migrating to Better as it uses Apple's API for this(I think it's a list of things to block), is OSS, and Apple seemed to be helping them with a change of ownership publicly and that lended some trust.
The short answer is that uBlock Origin is what almost all users are likely to want.
uBlock (without Origin in the name) is property of the same owners as AdBlock Plus, and both extensions whitelist ads under their owners' "Acceptable Ads" program, with many of the advertisers paying for that special access.
Have you tried Safari 14? I recently upgraded and they’ve finally fixed the address bar race conditions and swipe back/forward lag which drove me away in previous versions.
14 corrects most of 13’s sins but the extensions are still shit. No add blocker comes close to UBO, no Reddit Enhancement Suite, no BetterTTV. I’m honestly surprised TamperMonkey works but that’s one of a set of full-fat extensions I need.
Sorry to but in but do you perhaps know if they've addressed the issues that made me switch from Safari to Firefox maybe 2 years ago? I listed them here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25132068
I’m very familiar with Safari address bar issues, where sometimes Safari just fails to navigate to a URL and you get an audible bell, or just general weirdness when you type too fast, and can say I have yet to experience these same issues in 14. I’m sure there are other problems but Safari has generally improved with every release.
RE: extensions, I run Adguard for Safari and that’s pretty much it; it’s free and it catches most ads. Safari also has built in tracker blocking now, which is nice to have but more or less ignorable.
The nice thing about having Safari be your main browser is that you can reserve Chrome for development, and having a vanilla Chrome browser where content scripts don’t haphazardly log things to the console or block requests is really nice.
Short answer: Safari 14 supports the same standard for extensions that Firefox and Chrome do, with the addition of some security issues the other browsers don't seem to care about, including not implementing certain features to hurt privacy and security.
Many authors have used Apple's utility to convert their extensions for use in Safari.
