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What are the best macOS web browsers?

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9 Options Considered

9 Options ConsideredPriceDefault Search EngineDefault Adblocker
Safari
Google–
Vivaldi
Bing–
Mozilla Firefox
Yahoo!Disconnect (Simple OR Strict)
Opera
GoogleAdblocker
Google Chrome
––
Expand spec tableSee Full List

Safari

•••
Add Media iconAdd Video or Image
Bryan
Sergio García
Top Pro

Low resource consumption

•••
Laura Kyle
Top Pro

Works elegantly in OSX

•••
The rendering of the pages and the browser compatibility with OSX works smoothly, when compared to other browsers. Also you get very high battery life with Safari.
Bert Visscher
Dhaval Patel
Top Pro

Clean and minimal UI

•••
Safari has a very clean and minimal UI, smaller than even Chrome on macOS.
Bryan
Sergio García
Top Pro

Loads pages quickly

•••
ResponsiveNinshubur
Top Pro

Saves battery life

•••
Paolo
Laura Kyle
Top Pro

iCloud syncing

•••
Tabs, passwords, bookmarks and, history all sync across devices.
DreamerEupraxia
Top Pro

Sleek design

•••
– No distraction stuff like favicons in tabs, all that borders, bevels and embosses in panels like in other browsers, no ugly shaped tabs. – Neat adress bar. – Good looking start “show all tabs” screen.
DreamerEupraxia
Top Pro

Extremely fast

•••
Dhaval Patel
Top Con

Developer tools not as good as Chrome

•••
The developer tools are getting better but are not as good as Chrome. For instance, you can see Ajax requests being made and responses but you cannot see the headers or info that was sent in that request.
ResponsiveNinshubur
Top Con

Poor selection of extensions

•••
ResponsiveNinshubur
Top Con

Proprietary

•••
See 9 more Pros & ConsSee 9 more Pros & Cons

Vivaldi

•••
Laura Kyle
CaringXquic
Top Pro

Highly customisable

•••
It's very easy to change the appearance (and get rid of the square corners) and how it works. Keyboard shortcuts are simple to modify and use.
Bryan
Top Pro

Lots of power-user functionality that's often omitted from other browsers

•••
Vivaldi includes lots of niche functionality such as the ability to move tabs to any side of the screen, turn images on and off, or render pages with monospace fonts.
Bryan
Top Pro

Can be completely keyboard-driven

•••
All actions required to interact with the browser like navigating webpages and changing settings can be performed using only keyboard, no mouse required.
Laura Kyle
CaringXquic
Top Pro

Access to Chrome extensions

•••
All of the standard Chrome extensions appear to be available.
An_dz
Top Pro

Tab behaviour can be customised

•••
The order you toggle, open, close or clone tabs can be modified to match a workflow that best works for you. For example you can choose tabs to toggle in recent order so you can go back and forth between the last most useful tabs without needing to change their position on the tab bar.
An_dz
Top Pro

Built-in page capture

•••
Vivaldi can grab a picture of the whole webpage or part of it and saves it automatically inside a note or as a file in your disk.
An_dz
Top Pro

WebRTC IP leaking can be disabled

•••
A built-in setting called "Broadcast IP" will stop the IP leaking with WebRTC when disabled.
An_dz
Top Pro

Tab tiling

•••
Tabs can be put in a side-by-side or grid view to make comparisons or read and keep track of multiple pages at the same time. The feature can be toggled on Tab Stacks or by selecting the tabs with Ctrl+clicking.
An_dz
Top Pro

Tab stacks

•••
Tabs can be grouped under a single tab to easily group similar tabs.
An_dz
Top Pro

Notes

•••
A notes panel allows leaving notes about webpages, they can include screenshots for reference. It has tags as well as folders to help manage them.
An_dz
Top Pro

Add websites as web panels for easy access

•••
You can add sites as panels for easy access them. It allows reading two websites side by side with a simple click on the panel button. Useful for social networks, like WhatsApp, Telegram, Facebook & Twitter. Panels can be hidden when not in use.
An_dz
Top Pro

Mouse gestures

•••
Integrated customisable mouse gestures. Allows for navigating the web, switching tabs, closing windows, opening settings and other actions with a flick of the mouse.
An_dz
Top Pro

Non-closable fixed tabs

•••
A setting lets you prevent closing fixed tabs so you don't close anything important by accident.
An_dz
Top Pro

Custom keyboard shortcuts

•••
You can change and add keyboard shortcuts for basically all commands. It also has single key shortcuts to execute actions with one click.
An_dz
Top Con

High RAM usage

•••
As Vivaldi is built over Chromium it has the same bad RAM performance of Google Chrome or any other Chromium browser. As the Vivaldi UI is also technically a webpage it uses slightly more RAM, around 40MB more.
Dhaval Patel
Top Con

UI does not seem native to macOS

•••
The UI seems a bit out of place with the sharp corners and color schemes.
See 14 more Pros & ConsSee 14 more Pros & Cons

Mozilla Firefox

•••
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Laura Kyle
thermoplastics
Sergio García
Top Pro

Open source

•••
Firefox is available as a free download. All Mozilla software is licensed under the Mozilla Public License.
Laura Kyle
Top Pro

Strong HTML5 feature support

•••
Firefox scores strongly on HTML5 feature support.
Kristaps
Arvant
Laura Kyle
Top Pro

Distraction-free reader view

•••
Reader view in Firefox allows users to read an article without any distractions by removing ads, plugins, unrelated elements and other distractive objects, similar to Microsoft Edge's Reading Mode and Safari's reader mode.
Laura Kyle
Top Pro

Ethical and pragmatic company mission

•••
The Mozilla Manifesto outlines the company's mission and principles. Paraphrasing, they want the Internet to be a free and open resource, and to enable individuals to get the best use of that resource. They do this by creating open source software to which anyone may contribute, so long as su...
Laura Kyle
Top Pro

Tagging bookmarks

•••
Firefox is one of the few browsers that you can tag your bookmarks. You can view a list of tags and can search your bookmarks in the address bar with tags.
Vincent Stone
Top Pro

Highly Customizable

•••
The Vimoperator extension is only possible because of the rich, open API of Firefox.
Kristaps
CalmUoke
Top Pro

Use very little resources

•••
Firefox 57 (Quantum) and newer uses less resources than ever. It is proven with benchmark done by AppleInsider.
Kristaps
CalmUoke
Top Pro

Good font rasterization

•••
Font rasterization on Windows is much better than in competitors. Even smaller text is clear and contrast.
CalmUoke
Top Pro

High performance

•••
The Firefox Quantum update (FF57) greatly increases the render speed and general performance of the browser, by taking better advantage of the user's hardware.
Laura Kyle
Top Pro

Syncs between devices

•••
Firefox Sync is an optional feature in Firefox that allows syncing bookmarks, passwords, and add-ons between devices.
Laura Kyle
Top Pro

Automatically updated

•••
Firefox is automatically updated on the platforms where it makes sense.
Laura Kyle
Top Pro

Fast bookmark management

•••
In order to add an open page to the bookmark bar, the tab can be dragged down and is added immediately.
Laura Kyle
Top Con

Slow performance in OS X

•••
Uses a lot of resources and feels slower than the Linux and Windows versions.
Laura Kyle
Top Con

Icons display blurry on HiDPI

•••
Firefox has not yet addressed its scaling issues for HiDPI screens, making the icons blurry.
Laura Kyle
Top Con

Installing some extensions still requires restarting the browser

•••
While some of the developers already allow users to install their extensions without the need to restart the browser, not all of the extensions have been updated to support non-restart installation yet, as some developers have yet to add special code to do so.
ArticulateDeaDia
Top Con

Unstable add-ons

•••
E10s has already caused many extensions to not work properly. Also, in November, only add-ons with WebExtension API can be installed.
See 14 more Pros & ConsSee 14 more Pros & Cons

Opera

•••
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GloriousEopsin
Top Pro

Modern UI

•••
Monika
Belle
GloriousEopsin
Top Pro

Built-in ad block

•••
It's possible to add own filter lists. The internal adblocker is faster than any external.
Ray
SensibleTaweret
Top Pro

Can make videos pop-out in separate view

•••
You can pop-out any video and it will stay on top while you are surfing on other tabs.
ArticulateDeaDia
Top Pro

VPN onboard

•••
Free and fast VPN onboard, includes Germany, Canada, USA, Netherlands, Singapore.
ArticulateDeaDia
Top Pro

Opera Turbo

•••
Opera has a functionality called Turbo which increases browsers speed and reduces data consumption considerably by compressing the data that's found in a web page.
ArticulateDeaDia
Top Pro

Speed Dial

•••
Opera's Speed Dial (new tab page) has the ability to hold as many websites as you want, and you can customize it almost however you want. You can also organize the websites on the Speed Dial into folders.
Belle
GloriousEopsin
Top Con

Resource consumption

•••
When browsing around, Opera is quite efficient. But when loads of tabs open, it feels like Opera is putting a great effort to keep all those tabs like awake or active instead of just the top most one. This can heat up a laptop and drain its battery.
See 5 more ProsSee 5 more Pros

Google Chrome

•••
Add Media iconAdd Video or Image
Laura Kyle
Top Pro

Good HTML5 feature support

•••
Chrome scores highly on HTML5 feature support. It commonly shares the top place with Opera.
Laura Kyle
Top Pro

Can be used to sync data using a Google account

•••
Chrome will sync bookmarks, passwords, history, open tabs and settings for both the browser itself as well as extensions and apps across instances of Chrome both on mobile and desktop.
Laura Kyle
Top Pro

Clean layout

•••
Chrome attempts to be as clutter-free as possible. By default the UI displays tabs, address bar, couple of navigation buttons and a button for settings.
ResponsiveNinshubur
Top Pro

Widest selection of extensions

•••
Laura Kyle
Sergio García
Top Con

High resource consumption

•••
The high performance and speed come at a cost of an abnormally large RAM usage when it comes to Chrome. This isn't a problem with machines with lots of RAM (4GB+) but it's very noticeable with computers that have less RAM than that and can slow it down a lot depending on the number of open...
Laura Kyle
Top Con

Heavily tied to Google's ecosystem

•••
While it's possible to forego logging into Chrome via a Google account, the browser is designed to be used with a Google account in mind. A Google account is required to sync bookmarks, passwords, history, open tabs and settings for both the browser itself as well as extensions and apps across...
An_dz
Top Con

Proprietary

•••
While Chromium is open source, Chrome is closed source.
DreamerEupraxia
Top Con

Allows Google to track essentially everything you visit with your browser

•••
Chrome sends usage data to Google.
See 6 more Pros & ConsSee 6 more Pros & Cons

Brave Browser

•••
Add Media iconAdd Video or Image
StudiousOceanus
Top Pro

Fast page loading

•••
Loads pages fast as compared to other browsers thanks to omitting ads and trackers.
DecorousZaarinTengri
Top Pro

Very good privacy broswer

•••
DecorousZaarinTengri
Top Con

(expected) same high battery usage as Chrome

•••
See 1 more ProSee 1 more Pro

Roccat browser

•••
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WhiteLilac
Top Pro

Preview in tabs

•••
VisiTabs shows you a preview of the site in the tab.
WhiteLilac
Top Pro

Ad-remover is already built in the engine

•••
You do not necessarily need an extra plugin.
Know any negative aspects of this option?
See 1 more ProSee 1 more Pro

Min

•••
Add Media iconAdd Video or Image
Sergio García
Top Pro

Clean UI

•••
thermoplastics
Sergio García
Top Pro

Open source

•••
Broadwell
Top Con

Developer Tools not embedded

•••
When you attempt to Inspect Element, the Developer Tools pane opens in a new window and cannot be embedded to the bottom or the right of the current page.
See 1 more ProSee 1 more Pro

OmniWeb for Mac

•••
Add Media iconAdd Video or Image
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102 Community Recommendations

Sergio García
An_dz
Zak.
Dhaval Patel
Deepankar Chakroborty
Seokho Seo
Stuart Kearney
Ashley Caruso
Douglas Mohan
Pam Pap
Derimagia
+73
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DreamerEupraxia
DreamerEupraxia
Contributor for 15 days
2
Total Rec's
55
Total Karma
Safari
Recommended 15 days ago by DreamerEupraxia
Fast and slim
Pro
 Low resource consumption
Pro
 Loads pages quickly
Pro
 Works elegantly in OSX
Pro
 iCloud syncing
Pro
 Clean and minimal UI
Pro
 Saves battery life
Con
 Poor selection of extensions
Pro
 Extremely fast
Pro
 Sleek design
Comment IconSee full recommendationSee full
CalmUoke
CalmUoke
Contributor for 3 months
2
Total Rec's
40
Total Karma
Mozilla Firefox
Recommended 3 months ago by CalmUoke
it's the fastest one on my old 2010 macbook pro 15"
Pro
 Open source
Pro
 Strong HTML5 feature support
Pro
 Syncs between devices
Pro
 Ethical and pragmatic company mission
Pro
 Distraction-free reader view
Pro
 High performance
Pro
 Use very little resources
Pro
 Good font rasterization
Comment IconSee full recommendationSee full
Currently displaying 2 out of 102 total recommendations.
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