I hope this will allow me to finally ditch Chrome on Mac. On Windows I changed to Firefox when Quantum was released but on my old Macbook Air it has been too slow to use as my main browser.
I am not a huge fan of Safari, but it seems so much more optimised for macOS that it has become my default regardless. I mean an hour extra battery life is really nice.
Over the last 5 years I've been slowly shifting into the Apple ecosystem. It started with a 2015 Macbook Pro which I immediately installed Chrome on because what the hell even was Safari? Chrome was basically the only browser in my universe. Then I switched to Firefox but I had so many issues with it. It was slow and buggy and made my laptop chugg along for some reason. Quantum was a good step forward, though.
But now I own three Apple devices and have fully made the switch to Safari. I'm so locked into the Apple eco system now though but it has made my life many times easier using the browser that's designed by the hardware manufacturer of all my devices.
After being a long time Linux/Android/Chrome user I got dragged into the Apple ecosystem as I received a used iPhone 6 as a student back in the day.
For my daily life, this has been a blessing. A lot of the complaints about Apple that people have (and I used to have as an avid Android user) are absolutely valid. MacBook Pros are hardly "Pro", missing ports are simply annoying, weird multi-display handling and breaking butterfly keyboards... all that is true to some extent.
BUT... at risk of sounding like marketing shill, in general my workflow and private usage of my Apple devices is a wonderful fresh breeze. 99.8% of the time things just work and I don't have to install third party drivers and adjust my fan speed to a Fibonacci percentage so that Ubuntu's WiFi works after waking the laptop from sleep.
Hell, a large portion of the added cost (at worse specs) compared to Dell or ThinkPad is completely worth it in order to have an amazing trackpad which is still miles ahead of any other device.
Maybe I should finally give Safari a serious go as well. I always avoided it due to its image of a less feature-rich browser.
I probably sound like a shill too but while there are definitely many valid complaints, I still feel like being in the ecosystem makes my life a lot easier. I don't have to do any hacky workarounds. My favorite one that I discovered last year was sharing WiFi passwords. I was at my buddies house and asked for his WiFi password but we both have iPhones and it automatically asked him to share the WiFi password with me. It was a beautiful experience.
I went through exactly the same steps. Safari finally showing Favicons in the tab bar gave me the final push. This is probably the case for a bunch of "power users" I'd guess.
One issue is that if you login to some sites (e.g. Gmail) in a private window and then close it, some processes keep running forever. They seem to use lot of memory and a bit of cpu. Terminating the entire browser is the only way to kill them.
The main issue with safari, for me at least, is extensions. I use vim-like shortcuts on chrome/firefox and I feel awfully slow without them. Safari has very few extensions, and the few that exist don't really work well.
Try Wipr, it's super simple and minimal and it works very well, but it costs $2.
If you want something free with more customization options (and open source) there's Adguard
With how good reader view is on both Safari and Firefox, I tend to rely on the ad-blocker less and simply use reader view when the page is finished rendering.