For this entry, I’ll just follow what Apple has announced about Safari in the Big Sur preview webpage on their site, while adding a few observations here and there.
Customisable Start Page
This makes me chuckle, as Apple chooses to tout this feature first in their overview of the ‘all-new Safari’, as if it were something dramatically groundbreaking. Safari is actually the last of the major browsers to get this functionality, if I’m not mistaken. Anyway. If you appreciate this feature in other browsers and you were missing it in Safari, it’s going to be there. It offers a decent degree of customisation:
You can show/hide your Favourites, the most frequently visited sites, a Privacy Report (another new feature), Siri suggestions, and items from your Reading List. You can also set a background image if you like — by choosing from a few default pictures, or selecting any image you prefer.
It appears that the Top Sites feature has been absorbed into these changes. If you look in Safari’s Preferences → General tab, the Top Sites shows: option has disappeared, and in View → Customise Toolbar, the button for Top Sites is now the Start Page button.
Improved tab design
Apple says in the blurb: Tab lovers rejoice: An elegant new look means more tabs are visible at once. I don’t know what that means, exactly. If we’re talking about the legibility of website titles in tabs, and measuring how many open tabs you can get before titles become so truncated as to make it hard to recognise which website is which, then I’m not really seeing a noticeable improvement.
But it’s also something rather difficult to measure. On my 15-inch (non-retina) MacBook Pro, I have to open 9 tabs with medium-to-long website titles before pinpointing a website becomes harder. On my 11-inch MacBook Air, I currently have four pinned sites and 7 tabs open, and titles are becoming a bit hard to parse. On the 13-inch retina MacBook Pro with Big Sur beta, I have 8 tabs open in Safari, and I already had to hide the websites’ favicons to be able to read more of each title. (On the other hand, keeping the favicons really helps to quickly pinpoint a website and switch to it).
The blurb on Apple’s website continues: You can hover over any tab to bring up an instant page preview. And when you have several tabs open, Safari makes it easy to find the one you’re looking for with a new space-efficient design.
The page preview is useful, especially when you have a lot of tabs open. It’s another feature other browsers have had before Safari — and I especially like Opera’s implementation: when you hover over a tab, you get a large preview that takes up almost the entire window. It’s a bit like QuickLook for websites.
Again, I don’t know what Apple means with that “new space-efficient design”. I have older Safari versions open in my Macs with High Sierra and El Capitan, and I’m not seeing all this touted space efficiency in Big Sur’s Safari. It’s not worse than before, that’s for sure, and that’s… reassuring.
Translation
Translate entire web pages between seven languages with a single click¹, says Apple in the Big Sur preview page. I couldn’t find this feature, then I read the footnote: “Safari translation will be available in the U.S. and Canada with support for English, Spanish, Simplified Chinese, French, German, Russian, and Brazilian Portuguese.”
I don’t live in the U.S. or Canada, so… Shrug.
Password monitoring
Apple: Safari automatically keeps an eye out for any saved passwords that may have been involved in a data breach. Using advanced cryptographic techniques, Safari periodically checks a derivation of your passwords against an updated list of compromised credentials. If a breach is discovered, Safari helps you upgrade your existing passwords. All this is done without revealing your password information to anyone — including Apple.
Okay, thanks. Next!
Privacy Report
Apple: Safari uses Intelligent Tracking Prevention to identify and prevent trackers from profiling or following you across the web. A new weekly Privacy Report on your start page shows how Safari protects your browsing across all the websites you visit. Or click the Privacy Report button in your Safari toolbar for an instant snapshot of every cross-site tracker Safari is actively blocking, on any website you’re visiting.
It’s something similar to what the Brave browser has been implementing for a while. I’m glad it has come to Safari as well. Here’s the Privacy Report window you get by selecting Safari → Privacy Report:
Performance and power efficiency
I don’t use Google Chrome, so I can’t verify the claims Apple makes in the Big Sur preview page with regard to performance and power efficiency. What I can say is that Safari is fast and snappy, even when loading and rendering complex, resource-heavy websites. It’s a pleasure to use and feels very stable on the current Big Sur beta. I’ve been using it a lot for the past two weeks, and so far I have no issues to report.
As for power efficiency — and this may seem an entirely subjective assessment — I’ll say that Big Sur as a whole feels more power efficient than Catalina. I’ve had Catalina on this test machine for about 8 days before installing the beta of Big Sur. I’ve noticed that I’ve been using this MacBook Pro with Big Sur for much longer sessions than when it was on Catalina, and on average the battery has lasted noticeably longer than under Catalina.
With Catalina, I always felt the MacBook Pro was busy doing something, and there were occasional but annoying lags when switching between apps, navigating Finder windows, etc. Big Sur, even in beta, feels more responsive, everywhere, all the time, and seems to be better at energy saving.
Safari Preferences — UI and changes
Here’s Safari’s Preferences window under the current Big Sur beta:
And here we have the same window under Mac OS High Sierra (and Mojave and Catalina, since nothing has really changed, UI-wise):
Visually, the icons in the older version have more varied designs and are more colourful and immediately recognisable. Those in Big Sur’s Safari have a more homogeneous design, and it’s not bad at all. I have to say, centering all the tabs makes the whole window feel more balanced than on High Sierra. I wish the tab’s active state were a bit more contrasty, but overall this is perhaps the first place where I’m really liking Big Sur’s visual design over what came before.
As for options and features, I checked and compared every tab between Safari in Big Sur and Safari in High Sierra, and very little has changed.
In General, as mentioned above, the Top Sites shows: option has disappeared, since Top Sites has been replaced by Start Page.
In Privacy under High Sierra there was an Apple Pay option: Allow websites to check if Apple Pay is set up:
I don’t know if this option was later removed under Mojave or Catalina, but it’s not present under Big Sur:
In Advanced, the option Internet plug-ins: Stop plug-ins to save power has been removed, probably integrated in the underlying power efficiency improvements of the new Safari:
Advanced tab under High Sierra
Advanced tab under Big Sur beta
And that’s it.
My first impression of Safari under Big Sur is that it’s the Safari we all know and love (or dislike), but with a couple of nice additions and improvements under the bonnet that make it perform even better than before.