Safari vs. Edge/Chromium - YouTube

[OddMacFan]

I'm running Safari and Edge (latest versions of both) on a 2019 MBP 16. In my opinion, Edge seems slightly faster for general browsing, but the UI (especially settings, contextual menus, print dialog) is horribly ugly due to its non-native UI elements, and I've had some formatting issues when printing from Edge (even via the system dialog, which doesn't show the normal preview). On Safari, I've had occasional quirks where pages would load, briefly flash the contents in the window, and then the window would go blank (all white) and the page never does display so that it's usable.

With respect to YouTube: When I clear all cache and history from both browsers, load youtube.com, and then search for a channel, I almost always get better results in Edge. Most often, the channel itself will pop up as the top hit, whereas on Safari, top hits are usually some videos from the channel or even videos from other channels vaguely matching the search, and have to scroll down the page to find the actual channel.

When I play videos from a particular channel, Edge's standard in-browser window is both larger and will often auto-negotiate a higher resolution (i.e. Auto 720p, Auto 1080p) than Safari--of course, I can change the playback resolution manually in Safari, but it often auto-negotiates lower.

I assume the YouTube behavior is because Google's Chromium works better with Google's YouTube, but is this the bottom line or is there something I can do to get Safari to duplicate this behavior?

 

[russell_314]

That's interesting. I'm no expert so please someone correct me but the search on a web page is being done by the website and not the browser. That would mean Google is giving preference to it's own browser. They've done stuff when it was old Edge to slow down loading of their websites so this would not surprise me at all. It's Google. That's the reason I would never put Chrome on my Mac but I know lot's of people love it.

 

[OddMacFan]

That's interesting. I'm no expert so please someone correct me but the search on a web page is being done by the website and not the browser. That would mean Google is giving preference to it's own browser. They've done stuff when it was old Edge to slow down loading of their websites so this would not surprise me at all. It's Google. That's the reason I would never put Chrome on my Mac but I know lot's of people love it.

I now believe that the standard in-browser video player size issue is related to the size of the browser window. When I expand the windows on both browsers to consume the entire screen (up to the doc), the standard in-browser video player is about the same size (still slightly larger on Edge for some reason, but they're both very close).

I have no idea what's causing different YouTube search results on Safari and Edge.

The resolution issue I suspect is browser-dependent. I've played several videos tonight on both browsers, and all videos played at the same resolution on both browsers. However, when I was running from iPhone hotspot a few days ago, Edge repeatedly defaulted to a higher resolution than Safari. When I manually the Safari player to the higher resolution videos would play at that resolution, so I suspect perhaps lower bandwidth perhaps causes Safari to choose a lower resolution. It would be interesting to know how this negotiation process occurs.

 

[mk313]

With regards to the search results, do you have any of the 'Smart Search; fields selected in Safari preferences. IT sounds like Safari might be using Preload Top Hit in the background or Include Safari Suggestions' that would give you different search results.

With regards to YouTube, I'm not sure on that, but I can say that I get much better video results when using Edge to watch Peacock than I do on Safari.

 

[OddMacFan]

With regards to the search results, do you have any of the 'Smart Search; fields selected in Safari preferences. IT sounds like Safari might be using Preload Top Hit in the background or Include Safari Suggestions' that would give you different search results.

With regards to YouTube, I'm not sure on that, but I can say that I get much better video results when using Edge to watch Peacock than I do on Safari.

I can't compare with Peakcock, but unfortunately it appears that Edge is generally slightly better with video and slightly more compatible with esoteric web site and applications versus Safari. Really a shame, since Safari so close.

The issue with YouTube search results appears to be fixed after I cleared "Enable Quick Website Search" in Preferences -> Search, so your pointer to this area appears to have been correct.

 

[OddMacFan]

I also noticed when comparing Safari vs. Edge on the same videos, while Edge will tend to negotiate higher resolutions and provide slightly higher-quality rendering (though it's close), it appears to use *significantly* more CPU to do so at the same resolution versus Safari. I assume that this would translate into higher battery consumption when running on battery.