Why I'm ditching Safari and moving to Edge on the M1

[Fomalhaut]

I've completed a one-week comparison of my daily 12-hour / day usage of my M1 Mini, using Safari and Edge browsers exclusively.

The aim was to see how memory usage and total bytes written to the internal SSD varied with each browser.

This typically includes having 40-60 browser tabs open, various chat and video conferencing apps, VSCode, Spotify, and doing a bit of video editing with Davinci Resolve and FCP X.

Using Safari:

% uptime

9:47  up 6 days, 18:18, 14 users, load averages: 1.57 1.64 1.83

...an average of 387GB per day.... (it was closer to 500GB for many of these days)

Swap usage often crept up to over 10GB and over about 5GB seemed to write a lot to disk.

Using Edge Browser with Tab Discard:

% uptime

17:47  up 6 days, 19:24, 10 users, load averages: 1.91 2.20 2.17

..an average of 68GB per day.

Swap usage generally stayed under 6-7GB and seemed to have less effect on disk writes

It seems pretty clear to me that Edge manages memory significantly better and results in far less disk writing, which is a concern for people who are writing >10TB per month to their internal SSD, and potentially shortening the service-life of their Mac.

Is Edge worse that Safari? It depends....

It may be *slightly* slower, but not enough to bother me. On the plus sides it is stable, doesn't report memory issues with web pages, and has access to the vast selection of Chrome browser plug-ins. The fact you can free memory in inactive tabs (actually a feature built-in to Edge without the need the for a plug-in) works very well for my workflow where I like to have a lot of reference pages open, but don't need to use these all the time. Having all my work-in-progress ready to go simply by clicking on the tab, but without the cost of the full memory usage while dormant, is a great feature.

Apple needs to offer this feature to Safari at a minimum. It is clear that Safari is the new memory-hog in town, and may well be slowly killing your (non-replaceable) SSD.

 

[GigabitEthernet]

If battery life was as good on Chromium-based browsers as Safari, I would switch. At this point, I am convinced it is impossible.

 

[Fomalhaut]

If battery life was as good on Chromium-based browsers as Safari, I would switch. At this point, I am convinced it is impossible.

I'm on an M1 Mini, so this is not a consideration for me, but you make a good point!

 

[thingstoponder]

I agree that old tabs should be dumped in from memory on the Mac. Just make it like iOS. There’s no need to keep old tabs you haven’t look at in a week in memory and slow down the computer in the process. When you go to an old tab in iOS it takes, what, 3 seconds to reload? It’s trivial.

 

[leons]

If battery life was as good on Chromium-based browsers as Safari, I would switch. At this point, I am convinced it is impossible.

I'm using Brave intensely, regularly have 50+ tabs open and I'm getting (logged and measured) 17.32 hours/day on a single charge.

 

[Ethosik]

For some reason, when I watched the Apple Event on Tuesday, safari crashed when I received the notice that it was using too much memory. I switched to Edge and it was not a problem.

 

[newadventure]

Edge FTW

 

[telo123]

I actually switched from Safari to Edge and then to Brave, and now back to Safari because of the 14.1 update on macOS 11.3. Man, I missed the iCloud Keychain and the Safari Reading View.

I have noticed a battery improvement as well. Using the relatively same workload I do (15-20 tabs for research articles, Word, Apple Music, Zotero for auto-citation, and FB Messenger), I end the day with 40-50% battery. With any chromium browser I have used, I always ended the day with 20-30%.

I'm forced to have Brave open because my school website is not coded well and always uses 2 GB of RAM after like 5 minutes on Safari. Unsure if its Safari or the website developer's fault for not coding on WebKit properly?

I average about 1.5 GB/hour or 36 GB/day, which isn't bad at all.

I guess battery is not your concern because you're on the Mac mini.

I am shocked about the drive write differences you've posted. Quite a significant difference. Keep using Edge!

 

[Mojo1019]

Just because I was curious i checked my Safari stats. I am not a power user, by the way I work on my Mac every day for 8 hours and I use safari for almost everything. So here are the stats of a normal user:

 

[Fomalhaut]

Just because I was curious i checked my Safari stats. I am not a power user, by the way I work on my Mac every day for 8 hours and I use safari for almost everything. So here are the stats of a normal user:

View attachment 1762387

View attachment 1762389

Thanks for the data point. That's a lot less than my usage After nearly two weeks with heavy Safari use, I would be close to 5TB written based on my history. I have to "baby" Safari by contantly book-marking, closing tabs, or pushing them to the Reading List. Even then, it hangs on to memory...you can see the "closed" tab's web-content still in cache..

 

[Apple_Robert]

Most of the time Safari runs just fine for me. I haven't bothered looking at the numbers. The few times a page doesn't load correctly I use FireFox. I haven't had a SSD write problem.

 

[Nermal]

I use Safari exclusively and I'm at 1.58 TB read and 1 TB written after 37 days. Granted I haven't done much "real work" recently, and I'm on an i9 with 16 GB of RAM, not an M1, but it's still another data point for you.

 

[Fomalhaut]

Most of the time Safari runs just fine for me. I haven't bothered looking at the numbers. The few times a page doesn't load correctly I use FireFox. I haven't had a SSD write problem.

In my experience, the high SSD write volumes are mostly due to high usage of swap memory, caused by application memory usage patterns.

Safari just seems to grab a lot more memory than Edge, and this ends up growing swap usage resulting in more disk writes. I would typically be at 3-6GB swap after opening up my usual apps and browser tabs and working for a few hours. Just checked my memory usage (with Edge tabs open) and I'm still at zero swap after 3 hours work.

Even with the same swap usage shown, e.g. 5GB, I find that I have far less data written to disk, when using Edge. Having it sleep unused tabs is a big part of it, but probably not the only difference.

I'm trying to be sensible about my response to SSD write volumes. We don't know how long these devices will last, but 300-600TB for a 500GB SSD is the norm. Apple may do a bit better, but I doubt it's more than 1000TB guaranteed. I have an arbitrary lifetime expectation of 10 years on my Apple devices (I may have given them away or sold them before then, but I'd hope they keep going for someone else).

At 1000TBW, that's 100TB a year or <2TB per week. I can easily exceed this if I don't "take care" - which basically means the limitations of the machine are dictating how I use it. If the TBW guaranteed is closer to 500TB, then my SSD might be outside the limits in 4 or 5 years - that's not enough in my book. Of course, I understand it won't suddenly stop working...but it's operating outside of its manufacturing specs, which wouldn't be a good feeling for work use...or anything else that matters.

 

[Fomalhaut]

I use Safari exclusively and I'm at 1.58 TB read and 1 TB written after 37 days. Granted I haven't done much "real work" recently, and I'm on an i9 with 16 GB of RAM, not an M1, but it's still another data point for you.

I also have a 32GB i9 MBP16, and I was shocked to see that I had 172TB written in about 15 months.

I am clearly not kind to my machines....

 

[Mojo1019]

I also have a 32GB i9 MBP16, and I was shocked to see that I had 172TB written in about 15 months.

I am clearly not kind to my machines....

Where can i check it? However your use of safari is way heavier than mine.

 

[leons]

Where can i check it? However your use of safari is way heavier than mine.

https://github.com/jamesdbailey/smartTBW/releases/download/v0.1/smartTBW.zip

 

[haralds]

I am hesitant to use anything Chrome-based because I value my privacy.
I suspect the higher Safari swap numbers are due to stringent sandboxing of each tab.

 

[mi7chy]

From what I've seen it's an OS issue. Safari is a separate issue that just exacerbates the OS issue.

 

[telo123]

I am hesitant to use anything Chrome-based because I value my privacy.
I suspect the higher Safari swap numbers are due to stringent sandboxing of each tab.

Yeah and the fact that Safari places closed tabs in cache when you close them and will not clear them until the system deems it necessary or you manually Empty Cache in the Develop menu. If we use less than 30 tabs, it won't be a problem (despite Apple showing that Mac can handle 100 tabs from the Spring event) for majority of users.

I have set up an App keyboard shortcut to Empty Caches in Safari. I use this shortcut when I am closing over 20+ tabs from research.

I dislike how Apple removed Disable Caching from the Develop Menu and the fact that Safari is so integrated in the system that it's hard to disable its caching from the source (even locking Safari's folders in Library does not appear to do anything).

For privacy, try using Brave or Vivaldi. They are based on Chromium engine, yes, but they do not have any of Google's invasiveness. You can also use Ungoogled Chromium. FireFox is a good choice too.

 

[telo123]

From what I've seen it's an OS issue. Safari is a separate issue that just exacerbates the OS issue.

Some have speculated that because of M1's components are tightly integrated/connected with one another, the Mac is going to write to RAM and the SSD more often compared to Intel Macs. The reason for this is that it can bring the best performance possible. If this is how Apple's software and hardware engineers intended it for it work, I do not think we'd have a problem? But then again, there was that 1 M1 Mac that died after 600 TBW. That is only a sample size of 1, so I am not overly concerned about that.

 

[telo123]

I use Safari exclusively and I'm at 1.58 TB read and 1 TB written after 37 days. Granted I haven't done much "real work" recently, and I'm on an i9 with 16 GB of RAM, not an M1, but it's still another data point for you.

Just basic math, 1 TB/37 days = 0.027 TB/day or 27 GB/day or 9.9 TB per year. Intel or M1, that isn't concerning at all.

 

[leons]

I am hesitant to use anything Chrome-based because I value my privacy.
I suspect the higher Safari swap numbers are due to stringent sandboxing of each tab.

Use Brave (it is really wonderful and is optimized for M1).

 

[Think creative]

I want a 14 inch MacBook air with the design language of the iMac (white bezel, colors, but black keyboard) and a iMac 27-32 with more muted colors and a black bezel. That's the dream team right there.

 

[Bubble99]

Yeah and the fact that Safari places closed tabs in cache when you close them and will not clear them until the system deems it necessary or you manually Empty Cache in the Develop menu. If we use less than 30 tabs, it won't be a problem (despite Apple showing that Mac can handle 100 tabs from the Spring event) for majority of users.

I have set up an App keyboard shortcut to Empty Caches in Safari. I use this shortcut when I am closing over 20+ tabs from research.

I dislike how Apple removed Disable Caching from the Develop Menu and the fact that Safari is so integrated in the system that it's hard to disable its caching from the source (even locking Safari's folders in Library does not appear to do anything).

For privacy, try using Brave or Vivaldi. They are based on Chromium engine, yes, but they do not have any of Google's invasiveness. You can also use Ungoogled Chromium. FireFox is a good choice too.

Well I see pros and cons.

Going to a web site and the OS well caches it well saves much of it than you go back to web site it loads faster because you did not clear out cache folder.

Also you may accidentally close a tab.

So dumping every time you close tab may not be best option

 

[telo123]

Well I see pros and cons.

Going to a web site and the OS well caches it well saves much of it than you go back to web site it loads faster because you did not clear out cache folder.

Also you may accidentally close a tab.

So dumping every time you close tab may not be best option

You're right!

I don't do the shortcut every single time per se, just when I close a huge load of tabs (20+) at a single time. If I'm just casually browsing the webpage and consuming media, I only ever have 5-6 tabs open at the same time. I don't do the shortcut in this use case.

My internet speed isn't lacking, so even if caches are emptied, it takes only a second to reload the website. This is not of concern. But I guess it'll benefit those whose internet speeds aren't fast or stable.