Holger's Blog

I tried to use Safari for a week now. The new PROFILES feature lured me in. Unfortunately it is still not what I need from a browser and Firefox just keeps ticking almost all of my boxes. What turned me away from Safari again: Once you close a window with a profile, Safari doesn’t remember the tabs you had open. So closing a window means you need to reopen all of them once you want to continue your work. My clients all get a separate profile in my browser, but I tend to leave tabs open for later. That doesn’t work with Safari. In Firefox I use the extension “Simple Tab Groups” and it works nearly perfectly. I can even change between groups in the same window. Sadly, the compartmentalisation doesn’t work quite as well as in Safari. The tab’s context is shared between all tabs. So to separate those as well, I use another extension “Multi-account containers”.

It adds the mental overhead of choosing the right container. But it’s doable.

What drove me to try Safari again was the idea that the profiles would be synced to iOS and iPadOS as well. Since I don’t like to use Firefox mobile because it’s simply a mobile browser with really bad UX, I have to deal with using Safari on mobile and not being able to share browsing sessions between my Mac and my mobile devices.

Maybe there exists a Safari browser extension that reopens closed tabs? Maybe I should create one myself? I don’t know. 🤷‍♂️