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Add to SafariWhen comparing Safari vs w3m, the Slant community recommends Safari for most people. In the question“What are the best browsers not based on Chromium?” Safari is ranked 5th while w3m is ranked 6th. The most important reason people chose Safari is:
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, when compared to [Chrome](http://blog.getbatterybox.com/which-browser-is-the-most-energy-efficient-chrome-vs-safari-vs-firefox/).
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
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, when compared to Chrome.
Pro Extremely fast
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.
Pro iCloud syncing
Tabs, passwords, bookmarks and, history all sync across devices.
Pro Safari uses Webkit, a great open source web engine
Webkit is very light compared to Blink, renders web pages at an incredible speed, great CSS support and is also constantly evolving.
Pro Support for several elements not found in terminal browsers
Although w3m is primarily a text-based web browser which runs inside the terminal, it supports and renders several elements which other terminal-based browsers cannot like images, tables, tabs or frames.
Pro Available as emacs plugin
W3m can also be downloaded as an emacs plugins to be used as a fast web browser that runs inside emacs.
Cons
Con OSX only
Apple dropped Windows support after Safari 5.
Con Does NOT block Ads
Doesn't block ads, unlike browsers like Brave and Vivaldi.
Con Poor support for new web technologies
Safari usually takes its time when it comes to adopting new and useful web technologies meaning that the user gets an inferior experience compared to other modern browsers.
Con Proprietary
While Safari er is currently available gratis (without monetary charge) on Mac OS X, it is currently not libre (meaning that it does not allow users to view the source code used to create, to modify that code, or to redistribute modifications) and is therefore neither free nor open-source software.
Con Outdated Rendering engine
All other browsers and toolkits (Qt/GTK) have shifted to Googles Blink-fork of KHTML/Webkit so Apple is currently the only main contributor left.
Con Terrible support for open source formats like .VP9 or .ogg
Apple does not support open source formats. Instead, they use H.264 and H.265.
Con Even on OSX not the best Experience
Video controls are bad esp. on youtube. Only few browser extensions.
Con Steep learning curve
Being a terminal web browser w3m has a certain learning curve because you need to learn the keystrokes and different commands.
