When I look back on web browsers I’ve used on macOS over the years, it seems like I find one I like and just stick with it for a long time. When The Browser Company announced that their new Arc browser was out of closed beta this week, I thought I’d download a copy and take a look. David Pierce at The Verge has been raving about it since last year, but I’m stuck in my ways and a lot of the concepts Arc introduces would take some time to really figure out. I ended up spending about 30 confused minutes with it before deciding to look at everything else out there right now too.

I vaguely remember the days of Netscape, then Firefox, then Safari, then Chrome. Internet Explorer was the evil actor in this story, both on Windows and macOS. As someone who has published websites for fun and for work, web standards were always the goal versus anything proprietary and tied to one browser. As market share has shifted, this goal always seemed elusive, as people would build sites optimized for whatever was the most popular. Thankfully for Mac users, most Windows or IE-only technologies have died out over time and “the web” has become more of a neutral platform. And with the rise of mobile, iOS and Android browsers are probably more influential now on standards than any of the others.

For quite a while now, I’ve used mobile Safari on my iPhone and iPad, but Chrome on my iMac and MacBook Pro. Not really sure why I never went back to Safari on macOS, but Chrome seemed to push out Internet Explorer as the new “standard” for web publishing. I don’t really run into many sites that only work on Chrome (which happened a lot with IE-optimized sites), but I just got comfortable with Chrome – both at work and on my personal devices. It also tied in with my Google ID, which I was using for hosted email and my YouTube account.

So what are the things I look for in a good web browser?

• Display websites correctly
• Password management
• Sync bookmarks across devices
• Privacy and tracker controls
• Ad blocking support
• Customizable toolbars and tabs
• Seamless support for WordPress administration
• Speedy, but power and resource efficient

Looking at the current landscape on macOS, some of these features are implemented via browser extensions. In the Chrome world, I was running the following: 1Password, Duck Duck Go Privacy Essentials, Privacy Badger and Google Arts & Culture (a lighthearted extension that just loads a random artwork picture as a background in a new, empty tab). Turns out that there are now Safari versions of the first two, with Privacy Badger promising Safari support soon. I’ve been a (mostly) happy customer of 1Password for a while now, but will be interested to see how system-level password management continues to evolve on Apple platforms (along with passkeys).

Beyond Arc, I downloaded and installed the other new kids (Brave and Vivaldi), along with the current versions of the older kids (Firefox and Microsoft Edge). After following and reading Apple evangelist for Safari and WebKit Jen Simmons on Mastodon, I also wanted to revisit the latest version of Safari (16.6 on Ventura 13.5). I’ll cut right to the chase: Safari 16.6 might be as far as I get in evaluating browsers other than Chrome for the time being. I did end up deleting all traces of Edge from my machine (which was a challenge), but I’ll leave the others installed for more evaluation later.

It had been a fairly long time since I last launched Safari on macOS, so all of my bookmarks were old and there were random extensions installed (including “Open in Ivory” by Tapbots and “Subscribe to Feed” by NetNewsWire). I added 1Password and Duck Duck Go Privacy Essentials, then exported and imported my Chrome bookmarks. Still need to do some cleanup, but overall I like the layout and customization options of the Favorites Bar and how tabs look in the “Separate” tab layout view. Not sure why my version doesn’t have the “Show color in tab bar” toggle in settings, but I’d really like to turn that off (the Compact layout seems to still have it in advanced settings). I tried to find a command line way to change it via a default write, but Google search let me down on that front.

The built-in Safari privacy report button is nice and I’m looking forward to adding back Privacy Badger when that is released. I think that will also help with the layout of ad blocking – I’d prefer that when an ad is blocked, the space is automatically reflowed to make the overall layout more natural (for example, the giant banner ads that the Star Tribune and New York Times like to display at the top of their home pages). Also not a huge fan of the short URLs in the search box, but there is a setting for that and the alternative isn’t much better. It would be nice to have hover tooltips over links too so you quickly see if they are spammy or not. Lastly, sync across devices only partly works for me so far.

So there you have it. I’ll give the built-in Safari a good go for a few weeks and report back. I know Google has had some bad press over their Web Environment Integrity project, but that wasn’t my primary motivator to start reviewing other options to Chrome. It really is something that all of these options exist now, no?

Happy browsing!