8 MACWORLD APRIL 2020
MACUSER FIVE SAFARI ALTERNATIVESbrowser. Some
services, like
YouTube TV, won’t
run on Safari at all.
And some features,
like YouTube’s
support for 4K
video, don’t work
with Safari. So you’ll
need to try another
browser. Here are
five other Mac
browsers worth
trying out.
CHROME
By far the most popular browser in the
world, Google’s Chrome (go.macworld.
com/crxt) is fast and offers a lot of
flexibility through its many powerful
extensions (go.macworld.com/chr0). If
there’s a “standard” for web browsers,
Chrome is it.
On the plus side, you get a powerful
and flexible browser that, due to its
popularity, is likely to be supported by
whatever web app or service you care to
use. If you use your Mac alongside non-
Apple platforms like Android or Windows,
you can sync bookmarks and history
between them with your Google account.
Chrome is available for iPhone and
iPad (go.macworld.com/crio) as well,
though like all browsers on those
platforms, it uses Apple’s own Webkit
rendering engine. Still, you can use it to
take advantage of synced bookmarks and
tight integration with services like Google
Search or Translate.
If there’s a downside, it’s that Chrome
isn’t very privacy-focused. Google wants to
suck up your data and use it to make
better services and personalize ads—if
you want better privacy, you’ll have to run
extensions that block scripts and web
tracking. Chrome is often derided for
being a bit of a resource hog and not as
battery-efficient on MacBooks, too.FIREFOX
Firefox (go.macworld.com/fifx) is one of the
oldest browsers still kicking around, and
has experienced something of aChrome’s advantages are its ubiquity, Google integration, and
extensive library of extensions.