On the Mac OS X, the default browser is Safari, but there are a lot more browsers available for download, with more features than Safari. The following is a list of the Internet’s best web browser for Mac. Another browser based on Mozilla Gecko, Camino is one of the oldest Mac OS X browsers. Better Than Safari Beyond that, the sheer performance of the Gecko engine really shines. Although a few months ago I didn’t think anything could top Safari 2’s speed on my Mac, to my eyes Camino now has a nice edge in the speed department. Your mileage may vary, but it can’t be argued that Camino does what it does very well and very fast.
A while back, Microsoft Edge was just the default Windows 10 web browser. After ditching the old EdgeHTML engine in favor of Chromium, it has finally started to gain serious traction. And rather surprisingly, Microsoft Edge is now also available on the Mac. But how does it stack against Apple's own native Safari browser for macOS?
Safari runs like a charm on the Mac with great performance and battery life. But being based on the Chromium engine does give Microsoft Edge an advantage coming into unfamiliar territory. Google Chrome uses the same browser engine, so adopting Chromium guarantees Edge greater web compatibility.
I've used Microsoft Edge alongside Safari ever since its arrival on the Mac. Here's my take on how Microsoft Edge fares against Safari on Mac.
User Interface
Microsoft Edge doesn't attempt to do anything special compared to Chromium alternatives such as Opera or Vivaldi. But its user interface just works. The default tabs provide a search bar that you can comfortably type into and quick links to sites that you frequently visit. You do get a rather annoying news feed, but it's something that you can quickly turn off.
The browser features a slightly larger-than-average address bar, which makes performing Omnibox searches a breeze. The nifty profile icon also allows you to manage, create, and use multiple profiles conveniently. At the same time, the Edge menu gives instant access to browser settings, extensions, progressive web apps, and other features.
However, Microsoft Edge does feel rather clunky and rough. Animations and transitions feel jarring, and I've often experienced input lag while navigating the user interface. However, those issues aren't that serious to put a dent in your browsing experience. After a while, you won't even notice.
On the other hand, Safari feels smooth and polished to near perfection. But its tiny tab strip and address bar aren't exactly geared toward great user experience. The fact that you have to use the confusing menu bars whenever you want to configure the browser seems rather dated.
Performance
Latest Safari Browser For Mac
It's almost impossible to beat Safari on the Mac in terms of performance. After all, Apple knows its hardware and software the best. But Microsoft Edge doesn't lag behind with its new Chromium engine. In my experience, Microsoft's browser performs almost on par with Safari.
Furthermore, Microsoft Edge technically has better compatibility withwebsites, once again, due to Chromium engine integration. So if you have trouble accessing asite in Safari, you can almost guarantee that it would load up justfine in Edge.
But what about battery life? Just like any native macOS application, Safari excels in that department.But Chromium has improved its efficiency over the yearson the Mac. So don't expect any rampant battery draining issues withEdge.
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Read MorePrivacy Protection
Safari provides native protection against third-party cookies that monitor your browsing activity across websites. You can also ramp things up with content blocking extensions, which help a lot to thwart even more web trackers while improving page load times.
Microsoft Edge also doesn't disappoint when it comes to preserving your privacy. The browser comes with an integrated content blocking module dubbed Tracking Prevention. It offers three different levels of protection (Basic, Balanced, and Strict), which range from blocking tracking cookies, malicious scripts, to personalized advertisements.
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Click here to see our macos articles pageExtensions Support
Starting with version 13 of Safari for macOS, Apple completely dropped support for legacy extensions, which was a terrible move (at least in my opinion) despite the concerns over privacy. Hence, the current crop of 'supported extensions' is minimal.
Also, most compatible extensions require a fee to work in the first place. As a power user, I now find Safari a hard sell on the Mac.
The new Microsoft Edge, however, offers an impressive and growing library of extensions. Just head over to the Microsoft Edge Add-ons store. You can find a ton of add-ons that can dramatically boost your productivity, enhance your shopping or social media experience, and more.
To make things even better, Microsoft Edge lets you install extensions designed for other Chromium browsers such as Google Chrome.
Data Syncing
While Safari is great at syncing bookmarks and passwords via iCloud to your iPhone and iPad, the browser isn't available outside the Apple ecosystem. Therefore, accessing your data on other platforms is often next to impossible. On Windows, the most you can do is sync your Safari bookmarks to Chrome or Firefox. And yes, better forget Android altogether.
Microsoft Edge for the Mac, on the other hand, is truly cross-platform. You can easily access your browsing data (bookmarks, passwords, extensions, etc.) not just on the iPhone and iPad, but also on Windows and Android. Of course, you must have a Microsoft Account to sync your Edge browsing data, but it's incredibly easy to create one.
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Microsoft Edge is shaping up to be a terrific web browser on the Mac, with unique features such as Collections starting to differentiate it from the myriad Chromium clones out there. It also receives frequent updates and feature revisions, something that Safari sorely lacks.
Both browsers offer solid privacy-related features, so a switchover depends completely on what else you prefer. If you like a user interface that's easy to use, an extensions library that allows for endless possibilities, or the ability to sync your data across multiple platforms, then Microsoft Edge is worth trying out.
For those of you who don't stray out of the Apple ecosystem much, love the performance and battery life in Safari, or its pure stability and reliability, it's just better to stick to the Mac's native web browser.
Next up:Decided to go with Microsoft Edge on your Mac? Check the next link to easily import your browsing data from other browsers to Microsoft Edge on your Mac.
The above article may contain affiliate links which help support Guiding Tech. However, it does not affect our editorial integrity. The content remains unbiased and authentic.Read NextHow to Import Browsing Data to Microsoft Edge ChromiumAlso See#Microsoft Edge #safari
Did You Know
Microsoft Windows 1.0 was first released in November 1985.
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Will we ever be able to live with just one web browser on our Macs? It seems unlikely for a number of reasons.
First and foremost, no one browser works with all sites. What chokes in Safari might render properly in Firefox. And Opera or iCab might handle what fails in the other browsers. Although web standards are more closely adhered to than in the past, we all know the “try it in another browser” routine.
With the arrival of Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger and Safari 2, I thought I could finally settle in with one browser. With version 2, Safari reclaimed the speed advantage that it had lost to Firefox in OS X 10.3.x, and I was hooked on Safari’s new RSS integration.
Firefox
But the occasional site incompatibility and web development work would bring up the need to use an alternate browser. Most of the time, Firefox would fill that need.
Firefox’s Gecko rendering engine is widely compatible, and this open source, standards-based browser is remarkably consistent across all major platforms (Mac, Windows, and Linux). It’s the second most popular browser on the Web and gaining in market share all the time.
The only problem is that Firefox is not very Mac-like, even with the “enhanced Mac OS X support” in version 1.5. In the interest of platform portability, Firefox includes a lot of its own libraries designed compile easily on multiple operating systems.
This means that Firefox doesn’t have the OS X look and feel that Mac-only apps have. Aesthetically, it feels more like a Windows or Linux app ported over to the Mac.
![Better Browser Than Safari For Mac Better Browser Than Safari For Mac](/uploads/1/2/6/6/126667335/505907377.jpg)
Since it doesn’t tap into OS X’s native interface element widgets, it has to load its own. This makes Firefox more resource intensive than other Mac browsers.
Camino
But the Gecko environment is available in a native Mac OS X app, in the form of the wonderful and often-neglected Camino browser. [Camino was updated to version 2.1.2 in March 2012 and is now dormant – yet it is compatible through OS X 10.9 Mavericks.]
I was a big fan of this project (originally known as Chimera) in the pre-Safari days. The original goal was one that the Firefox team took and ran with – to take the browser component out of the large Netscape/Mozilla suites and create a lean, fast, next generation Gecko-based browser.
Before January 2003, Camino was far and away the fastest browser on the Mac. Even after Safari shipped, Camino had more features. Tabbed browsing, for instance, didn’t appear in Safari for a couple of months after its 1.0 release.
With Safari and Firefox providing stiff competition, Camino lay dormant for a long while. But as time went by and a small faction of users began to complain about Firefox’s lack of optimization for the Mac platform, the project came back to life. Not too long ago, I decided to download the latest nightly build of Camino to see how it’s doing these days.
Better Than Firefox
Suffice to say, I was very impressed. This is the Mac browser that Firefox could easily be. In my experience on a 1 GHz PowerBook G4, Camino blows the doors off Firefox 1.5 in rendering speed and overall interface snappiness.
Being built as a native Cocoa app, Camino takes full advantage of being a full-fledged Mac app. Interface elements and widgets look beautiful and familiar. It also demands less of your CPU and RAM than its more popular cousin.
Better Than Safari
Beyond that, the sheer performance of the Gecko engine really shines. Although a few months ago I didn’t think anything could top Safari 2’s speed on my Mac, to my eyes Camino now has a nice edge in the speed department. Your mileage may vary, but it can’t be argued that Camino does what it does very well and very fast.
The development team isn’t content to simply make a Mac-ified Firefox. Some of the best features of Safari have been incorporated, including the ability to reset the app and empty the cache from the Camino menu. There’s also a nice implementation of Safari’s bookmark manager/history browser.
Unique Features
Camino keeps a “Top 10 most visited sites” list in “Show History” that I have found to be really neat. We all have a pretty good idea of what sites we visit most often, but nothing beats actual statistics.
Some features that Camino shares with Firefox that Safari doesn’t have include a more flexible popup blocker. You can specify which sites can allow popups while blocking them at all other sites. Safari simply lets you turn popup blocking on or off.
Missing Features
One Firefox feature sorely missed in Camino is extensions. The multitude of extensions for Firefox and other Mozilla-based browsers provides an amazing amount of browser customization.
Better Browser Than Safari For Mac
However, some of the best of these extensions have been wrapped into CamiTools,* which adds a new pane to Camino’s preferences window. Among its many features, CamiTools takes care of two things I miss most from Firefox’s extensions – ad blocking and adding additional sites to the website search box (in addition to the standard Google search).
Now if someone could port the Web Developer Toolbar to Camino, I’d be in heaven.
If you’d like a change of pace – and perhaps a faster web browsing experience – go and get yourself a recent build of Camino. I’m enjoying it so much I’ve made it my default browser for now and gone back to Net News Wire Lite for my RSS needs.
* Camitools is incompatible with versions of Camino going back to at least 2008, so we have removed the link to it.
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