Safari also gains a more selective use of third-party content-blocking apps and extensions, so you can pick and choose which sites you block ads from. Safari accomplishes this using Apple's machine-learning technology to selectively stop tracking, so that you retain your privacy without breaking the internet. It's arguable that targeted ads are better than irrelevant ones, but I'm tired of seeing ads for products that I will never buy because I viewed them on Amazon while researching a story. While the titans of the ad industry may hate this idea - they've said so publicly - I'm delighted by this change. The other major feature of Safari 11 is its new privacy measures, which disable cross-site tracking through cookies. Chrome is supposed to get a similar feature, but not in a stable version of the browser until 2018. Safari didn't false-flag any videos, either, as a YouTube page played a Jimmy Kimmel video without error.

None of these repeat offenders emitted a peep. Testing it out, I turned up my volume and navigated to a series of websites in Safari that usually force me to mute my machine first. This isn't just about Apple's claimed performance gains, though, but the company'sdecision to fight the worst part of a web page: auto-playing audio for videos. On a 2017 MacBook Pro with a Core i7 CPU running a beta of High Sierra (build 17A362a), Safari scored a 258 on the JetStream benchmark, which trounces the 178 from Chrome and the 163 from Firefox. Safari's finally jumped past Chrome as the best browser on the Mac.Īpple claims that updates to the JavaScript engine in Safari make it the world's fastest browser, and our preliminary research proves their claims. This is major for me, as I can more easily share images via the photo browser in apps, and not have to weed them out of the large mass of other images. Speaking of GIFs, Photos now supports them, and automatically organizes them all in a section called Animated.

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