I'm done with Safari on MacOS

That's just bonkers behaviour for It to randomly decide to read an entire post from the beginning if you up and down arrow. How you guys continue to put up with the mac is beyond me...

Hi Paul,
Good for you for doing the sensible logical thing and switching to another free and easily available browser for the mac. OK, so I'm just going to say it. And this is coming from someone who doesn't use a MAC/. Why all the fuss? Why all the posts about Safari not responding etc. etc. Why not just switch to another browser like Chrome and just be done with it? So Safari doesn't work properly. So what? You want to use it because what, just because it's the default browser? This is a totally ridiculous mentality to me. There, I've finally said it. If it doesn't work, use something else which is free and also available for the mac. Installing apps on the mac really can't be that hard. This all comes from someone who used Internet Explorer on Windows for years, then that started going down hill and went away, so then I switched to Firefox, then that went down hill, and now I use Chrome and Brave these days but mostly Brave, and I like Firefox for PDFs. Do I use Microsoft Edge just because it's the default browser? No way! I don't really like Edge. Apple should fix the bugs with Safari, of course they should since it's part of their operating system. But people spending hours battling with Safari and being determined to use it when there are other free options just because it's baked into the OS is just absurd. So what if you've spent a grand on a mac. The mac has an app store and other free alternatives that you can install, so use them.

@Tara. First let me say that I am not an old user on mac, I bought my first in july last year. I am coming from a Iwindows (which is where I am currently writing this anyway) and used with nvda an chrome on windows. I am a very experienced user, etc, etc... Macos is such a disappointment from apple. Litterally since I bought my macbook pro m2 14inch, each 2-3 weeks, I wake up with either of these thoughts: I love macos and voiceover, or, I hate voiceover but still can appreciate macos as an operating system.
About safari, snr was going crazy with me the first day when I set my mac up after 30 minutes I could enjoy my first occurence of this bug which only kept growing as a real problem. Gmail standard view with 100 messages per page? SNR. Any fairly ... *For me at least*, macos 14.2 has brought some real improvements of this bug which shouldn't have been there in the first place. ...
The real problem with chrome boils down to two, which, if you are used to the flaaaaaat and intuitive web browsing experience on windows, are a real pain to overcome for the first 1-2 weeks.
1. On windows you will never think about that, and probably for the majority of you you may be just unaware altogether of the fact that on most if not web browsers, f7 toggles caret browsing where sighted people can use their arrows to navigate in a website. We on windoes don't care about it at all, as nvda, jaws, and probably narrator and the other sr, use a virtual buffer (view) for the screen reader where the full web content is parsed into it. That's why we have the brows and focus mode on nvda and form mode and ... the other name for the jaws equivalent for that. So either on chrome or edge on mac, you must do f7 first. But it's not perfect. You can theoreticly use the regular text command with the arrows, but as you brows for example on this website voiceover and the keyboard (actual caret) will not follow each other. So it's kinda useless except for teams where you can actually read a message with the arrow but strangely shift+cmd+right arrow doesn't work to select til the end of the line... Not the point here. . So, this is somehow of a problem. Also, on chrome, and probably others, navigating large table is not very smooth. Voiceover only go so far to the end of the portion of the table that is visually displaied on the screen so after you have to press page down to see the rest and even then voiceover focus is not always precise, but then it is not in safari either so not really a big deal: experience of a student navigating large table like z-scores, etc.
2. The biggest, probably the most misunderstood problem. I am not a developer so what follows is pure speculation. Voiceover, as broken it is in its current state, somehow manages me to say that it works better with webkit on mac. The problem is that the navigation with chrome, and all the chromium embeded electron app like spotify, discord, vscode, etc, suffer with VO on mac with an exponential multiplication of the sub sub sub leveled element to reach x element. Like on teams, in a chat, you would have something like
heading (the attribute), with the person name. Then you will have a button with if I recall correctly something to access this person's contact card, the message "grouped", the message without the "grouped", if it'sa multiline a space between each line where VO is either silent or would say "grouped", then, end of, whatever the *full message* is, then a toolbar, then an action popup menu.. Basically each element that is not text (generally speaking) will be at minimum doubled, with the usual doubled stuff that VO has on mac.
That's basically it, I welcome other users to expend on my description as you really have to actually feel it for more than a week to fully understand what it is. Interfaces like that of spotify which is an electron container are slow to navigate on mac because of how VO handles other elements than webkit.

Hi,
OK. Thank you for your explanation. From this, I'm getting the message that whatever you do as regards browsing on the Mac, VoiceOver has the potential for significant issues no matter what you do. You could try Brave or Firefox, but from what you describe you could potentially encounter issues there too. Although from Paul's post above about Chrome, he seems to be having more luck. Complex tables are an issue on Windows too, whatever screen reader and browser combination you use. The only way to successfully read a table with a tonne of rows and columns is for the developer to follow WCAG's guidelines for adding headers to columns and rows so you can clearly distinguish what corresponds to what. When these guidelines are implemented correctly, JAWS does a pretty good job of this both in Word and on the web. NVDA doesn't announce columns and rows correctly, at least the last time I tried this was the case. I hope the Vosh screen reader for the mac comes to fruition. I read on here that people were impressed with the beta. Now I understand why switching to another browser on mac might not be so simple.

No. Windows is fine with complex table. Voiceover on mac has difficulty to handle large content whether it's ui, just large plain tables, or anything large you can think of. The icann tld list apparently is too big for it sometimes.It's a self destroyer of a screen reader. Its ios counterpart is so much bbetter. In a 48 rows very simple table if my cursor is on say row 33 if I do shift command right arrow and coppy 1/3 times it will be row 17th's content that will be copied, whether or not cursor tracking is on or off. It's how bad it is.

There are a few reasons to use Safari on MacOS, some historical and some current.

Historical reasons include the fact that until some time ago, support for VoiceOver in both Chrome and Firefox wasn't great, though this might have improved since I haven't tried those browsers for a long time. I believe that one of the reasons for this to be a problem is that there are many undocumented and even undeclared attributes, parameterized attributes, actions, and notifications in Apple's accessibility infrastructure both for clients (screen-readers) and servers (applications) that require reverse engineering VoiceOver to discover.

Other reasons to use Safari are the integration with the rest of the Apple ecosystem, like being able to use Apple Pay from the browser on sites that support it, access to iCloud Keychain, tab synchronization between devices, and web tracking prevention. Some of these issues might have also already been addressed whereas others will certainly be addressed by third-party browsers here in the EU once they start shipping versions with their own engine for iOS.

While accessibility on MacOS is crap compared to Windows in many situations, the facts that the system is always recoverable from the Internet even if I wipe the partition table, that even the firmware has a screen-reader, that there are no hardware driver issues preventing the screen-reader from working during the installation and recovery process, that it runs on my favorite architecture (ARM), that the text caret behaves in a way that is more consistent to me, that it integrates well with the rest of my devices, that it's a POSIX system, that its hardware can be custom built-to-order with US ANSI keyboards, that it has a built-in and ready to use backup service, and that I can actually suspend and resume my computer without worrying about it crashing due to crappy drivers, make the scale pend towards this platform for me.

pS: There hasn't been a Vosh beta yet. So far I've only posted an initial teaser video which no longer reflects the current state of the screen-reader, and am currently trying to reverse engineer VoiceOver to extract undocumented and undeclared notification identifiers. Unfortunately since Vosh also depends on the same Carbon-era accessibility infrastructure as VoiceOver, it means that it does suffer from some of its problems as well.

As somewhere was stated that it's beyond one how you can use macOS:
I use macOS since 2021 and absolutely prefer it over Windows with NVDA and/or JAWS. The user experience is more consistent throughout the whole system. No matter which app you use, navigation is the same everywhere. I use the device for writing articles for a magazine, programming (mostly Python, also a bit PHP stuff in the past, and some Swift here and there).
One thing that's unfortunately not the best is browsing the web with Safari. But it's already been improved since I've started using macOS. Whereas on windows, especially besides browsing, all gets worse and worse.
That's just my opinion and my experience.

I think we are in a little danger of repeating ourselves here, but since when has that put me off?

I think Chrome does have a number of advantages over Safari. It is definitely more stable. I always like the ability to get to all my tabs straight from the menu bar. Honestly, switching tabs in Safari is so pathetic. But both browsers do seem to suffer from a problem where you can't properly interact with the current web page - so jump to heading just won't work and it might get stuck on a background tab or just have some weird problem until you refresh, or jump to the address bar, or make some random sacrifice at the altar of Apple.

I would also like to say that Edge is virtually identical to Chrome except you get the read aloud feature which I love. I find it brilliant for reading longer more technical articles if I'm just wanting to go from top to bottom and not skip anything. The voice is so clearer and just nicer to listen to.

From a quick Google, Brave runs on Chromium so I'm guessing is just the same from a rendering point of view.

The problems I have with Chromium based browsers is that the focus seems to be less consistent than Safari, but let's not pretend that Safari isn't absolutely riddled with focus issues. But in BitBucket, I struggle to get past people's names in Chrome. Or I've had pages that jump back to the top as I'm trying to read them. The problem with reading long-tables is a deal-breaker for a lot of what I do.

But then Safari has so many issues too. For example, if I try to edit a comment in Jira using Safari and it has a list in it, Safari just speaks gobbledegook as I try to move through it. If I step through it letter by letter it will randomly tell me that words are misspelled. Then it will tell me that I am missing characters at the end of the line, only for them to reappear as soon as I have typed them in and saved, and now I have it twice. Whereas in Chrome that doesn't seem to happen. And editing posts in Applevis is, as Paul has suggested, incredibly annoying in Safari. Also it's impossible to navigate a table if some rows have been hidden dynamically. Oh and you can't even move left and right through a text box any more.

So I think if you use VoiceOver on the Mac you should be prepared to have both a WebKit and a Chromium browser and switch between them as and when the gods decide that it's time. Personally I think that Safari is slightly less terrible than Chrome but let's not pretend that either is a good experience. I just think I am more likely to need to ditch Chrome for Safari than the other way round.

I'm under the impression that Firefox on the Mac is a bit of a non-starter, but this is based on trying it a year or two ago and I was less confident with VoiceOver then. I assume it's still not an option and I don't really see anyone on here talking about it.

Regarding Windows, I don't want to fuel yet another Mac vs Windows debate but I would say that the numpad commander on the Mac has so much potential for being an amazing way to navigate web pages - far more so than single key navigation in my mind - that it is utterly infuriating that there are so many bugs getting in the way. Whenever I use Windows - which isn't often and let's face it I don't know what I'm doing - I always end up getting stuck somewhere stupid and instead of navigating by heading I just hear "h h h h" as I pathetically attempt to get back to where I want to go. Having keys entirely devoted to the screen reader and being able to tailor them exactly as I want is a very nice thing.

I'm judging my assumption on the proliferation of negative comments on here from users who could no longer recommend a Mac and have described It's shortcomings in significant detail. Windows is totally accessible with either Jaws/NVDA/narrator, and you'd never encounter anything remotely similar to what Paul outlines in his post. I'm thrilled that you get enjoyment out of the Mac and It's working well for your use case, but It's quite clear that VO needs a radical revamp now. You can't do anywhere like the kind of things on Mac that you can on Windows with either Jaws/NVDA. Windows 11 is fantastic, It would be good if Apple could join the party... Then again, It probably doesn't need to, with other product categories, and the mac will/is being left to rot...

Hi mr grieves,
I think I know why you might be getting stuck on webpages on Windows. I don't want to post off topic stuff about Windows on this thread, but if you create a forum post in the Windows section with questions I'd be happy to help. Getting back to the original post, I had no idea browsing on the Mac in general was so bad whatever browser you use. I thought if you switch to another browser like Chrome or Brave things would be better. It's clear from reading this thread that VoiceOver for the Mac needs a complete overhaul. Browsing the web is surely a fundamental part of using a computer, and if you can't even do that well I don't know what to say.

Do you find ctrl+tab is actually consistent enough to be useful? I hate using it in Safari because it rarely handles the focus correctly so if I really want to know which tab I am looking at I need to cmd+tab back and forth just so I know what it is. I've had problems with Chrome doing something similar. That's why I love the Tab menu in Chrome because it just means I select the one I want and I know I've selected it.

Actually the VO+M menu on the Mac is one of its best features. I've not even bothered to learn keyboard shortcuts for history and bookmarks.

My usecase of teams involves a lot of chats, call and screen sharing. On mac on chrome, with caret browsing enabled, I can read a chat like a regular text in textEdit for example, but for some sellection commands that doesn't work. Voiceover own selection commands are pretty consistent if your cursor is at the right place though.
Sorry if I started a shift in this topic that wasn't my intention :(
@João Santos thanks for actually reminding me of some real positive things that are just unimaginable on windows yet! :) bios / safe mode accessibility are certainly one of them.
Since I've discovered this bug with pages in the worst circumstances this week possible it's been harder for me to tolerate what are critical major bugs from a screen reader perspective...
Anyway. I noticed that, for those concerned here, adp workforce sites aren't bad at all with voiceover actually on either browsers, so that's a good thing given that they act like "apparent" rich web apps. 1password works so well on mac, more stable than on windows.

Hi there,

Applevis is the only site that I've encountered the discrepancy between vo+U and using the F shortcut for form fields. Odd! I will say, though, that it is also difficult to spellcheck in edit fields with Safari. I've not had any issues editing in them, though.

I personally love macOS and Safari. Navigation is quite easy. I usually use trackpad for navigation.

Is it really accessible? If I want to run a different operating system, change boot order or boot from a different device, all that can be done in an accessible way on macs?
With Win11 Arm laptops launching with lot of hipe very soon, I am hoping that may be future users of Arm macs can again bootcamp in to Windows with a decent experience. Apple will need to provide support though.

I've just asked a similar question, see my post under my profile.

Hey Paul,

Will you be doing a blog on the transition from Safari to Chrome? 😀

yes, safari is quite a crappy browser, so I use brave browser instead. works pretty well.

Personally, I've had minimal issues with Safari, except when it comes to managing DSM, the operating system for Synology. I have both Safari and Chrome installed, but I only use Chrome on an occasional basis. Contrary to many in this forum and within my circle of friends, I don't prefer web browsing on Windows. Perhaps it's because I started out on Mac and only got a PC recently, but I must say, I have a strong dislike for Windows.

I started with a mac, and then I partially, went to windows, via use of a vm and... while it has its good things, navigation is just... Clunky compared to the mac, I.e, no jumping between elements, I mean there is but its quite limited, I.e, if a app doesn't have a table, you cant jump to it as with mac, where you can jump from section to section, or you cant mark things as hotspots to go to them quickly like in mac os, or the item chooser which, makes things a breeze to go to. I'm not being bias towards mac, as like with any system, it has its flause, but it just feels way more smoother than windows does. That's not saying windows doesn't have its upsides, it does, but its clunky, imho.
Regarding web sites, i've honestly had tbe opposite experience, safari is quite responsive and smooth to use, and i've found that on mac websites just... work. I.e, for work when I have use a site for work to file support requests, on windows, no matter which screenreader I use, narrator, jaws, NVDA... the description field for the support requests gets completely skipped by the screen reader, and this is regardless of the browser I use, crome or edge. In every other system i've tried, iphone and mac, voiceover does read the text fields to type in tbe description, this is just one example of the pitfall i've found with using windows, and yes, i've encountered pitfalls with mac too, but to me, for constant, day to day use windows has way more, buts, than mac does, all things considered, but both operating systems have their ups and downs, and which you use as your primary... Varies from person to person, afterall, this isn't a one size fits all, sort of thing.
Re, text selection not working, this depends, but if you disable quicknav, you should have a easier time of it, or if you want to read something via character, I forgot the command, but I know there's one, I just switch to character or word in the rotor and read it that way via arrow keys.

So I was using Safari and trying to find something in the Amazon Web Service Console. But every single I tried to get into a table (which only had one row in it) Safari would go into not responding mode and I would have to force quit. I restarted it 3 times and also VO but no joy.

So while I was waiting to see if it would recover (which it didn't) I installed Firefox. The setup process was fine, and I was able to login, switch role, find the service I needed, go into the resource and check. I had a couple of minor frustrations along the way but nothing major. I would say that the AWS console is fairly complicated.

I'm not convinced Firefox is necessarily the answer, but I would say it's not the non-starter I thought it was.

I'm writing this in it now. The only thing that's annoying is that every time I type a word and press space, it says "space" then there's a stupidly long pause and only then does it say the word I've just typed.

But generally it's ok. It had no problem with my big table.

OK maybe I spoke too soon. I just used cmd+tab to switch back to Firefox and then everything went quiet. I couldn't hear anything except the occasional pip for some VO commands like VO+F2. I couldn't switch away or seemingly do anything. This happened for a few minutes and then suddenly it all came back. I then stupidly switched to Firefox again and the same thing happened. I was trying VO+F5 to toggle VoiceOver and I'm not sure if it was doing anything or not. I told Siri to enable VoiceOver and she said it was already enabled. A little while later my wife came in and just as I was asking her about it, it all came back. So whilst she was there I switched back to Firefox and again all went quiet. She was looking at my Mac and as far as she was concerned everything looked like it was working. It was as if the speech had just been turned off. She eventually rebooted for me and now that's the end of my firefox experiment for now.

I can't say for absolute certainty that it was Firefox. It's possible something else was going on with my Mac which was causing Safari to grumble in the first place. But also I'm not touching Firefox again for the time being.

So just be careful if you try it.

I had been using Firefox with AWS and all seemed well. Then I switched to another app. When I switched back to Firefox, which I believe still had an AWS tab open on it, then everything went quiet.

I've had the occasional moment, possibly with Safari, where it has done something similar for maybe a minute at most, then suddenly you hear all sorts of noises as if it has buffered everything up and is suddenly whizzing through it all. I got the impression that in those cases that my user inputs weren't being processed, but I never had a sighted opinion on it. I also don't think it was making any noises at all whilst ir was frozen but I could be wrong.

This was much worse, mainly because of how long it took become verbal again. If It felt like it wasn't so much having a problem processing inputs as being able to speak. When my wife was using it she could access the system fine but I couldn't hear anything even as she was going to the Apple menu and restarting. Some keys made pips - not sure what VO+F2 pipping means. But other things just weren't responding at all.

It's possible that the speech process became overwhelmed when Safari was doing whatever it is that Safari does.
I'm still not sure if Firefox had anything to do with it, just that whenever I switched to it then it started. But it's quite unnerving when everything goes silent so I've not been brave enough to try it again.

I had noticed that there was one time that Firefox was asking me to update my password - I got to the dialog but VO+left/right didn't seem to do anything - it was just totally quiet. But then tab did work fine. It is possible it had some sort of modal on it, but I couldn't find any magic trick to make it work - esc, vo keys, cmd+opt+esc, vo+m, vo+d, cmd+tab etc - I couldn't get anything to respond.

I asked my wife to quit Firefox but she didn't sound confident that she knew what she was doing so I'm not confident that she had. I guess the other possibility is that Firefox just had a big memory leak which conflicted with my Mac's ability to speak but not to process commands.

She did notice some dialogs about accepting ETA invites or something strange but I'm pretty sure this was Maps and not Firefox, and I think it may have been when I was trying to switch apps and asked Siri to Go Home which didn't quite do what I had hoped.

The other thing I noticed was that she could see my screen. I usually have the screen curtain on. I guess it must have responded to right opt+3 which I Have set to toggle it in keyboard commander. I guess it must have worked even though it was silent. I forgot about it until just now and pressed it again only to be told that it was turning screen curtain off, which implies it was already on.

I'd like to give Firefox another go but I slightly lost my confidence. I guess there's always the power button if it goes crazy again.

It's just that CloudFlare and its tables are one of the consistent reasons I switch back to Chrome. And I use CloudFlare by choice, for personal use, chiefly their authoritative DNS service, but also recently their VPN-like CloudFlare for teams and tunnels, and their Warp clients for macOS and iOS.

Oh, and it's great to leave a thread full of complaints about Apple and endorsing alternatives, to come back some time later ... to a thread of complaints about Apple, endorsing alternatives. Great stuff. No grudges on my part, honestly. :)

I don't tend to use reader view much, although I probably should. So, as usual, this comment might not be much help! But a couple of ideas...

You won't like this first option now you are invested in Chrome, but Microsoft Edge has a reader view you can toggle with F9. (As mentioned you can also have it speak to you with those lovely Microsoft natural voices if you want to just listen to an entire page). Edge is Chromium so I think it's virtually the same as Chrome otherwise.

The other option you could look at with Chrome is trying an extension. I remember many years ago using Readability before that sort of thing became integrated in browsers. There may be one that works OK and has a keyboard shortcut. From a 5 second google it looks like these are still a thing.

I think if I ever find that the big table problem in Chrome has been sorted for me then I am likely to jump ship to Edge. Safari has been seriously annoying me this week. I've found a number of places where it seems to get stuck in a loop and I could only get down the page by painstakingly using vo+right instead of jumping through headings. Or reading a line of text and using vo+right only to find it has started the line again.

I wrote a little applescript app called Clipper for doing this. Tie it to a key command, I use right option + c with keyboard commander, and it will pop up the current contents of the clipboard for editing without having to find somewhere to paste it. Not an ideal solution but it works. https://theblindmansworkshop.com/clipper-clipboard-text-editor-for-mac/

I move through Safari tabs with command plus the numbers. It works pretty consistantly and the name of the tab is read.

It is sad to see that after all this time and SNR still exists. Personally, I am so very glad I downgraded back to Monterey. Surprisingly I do not experience much SNR anymore on my tired old MBP, and for those times when I wanna YouTube the night away; there is Duck Duck Go. 🙂

Currently Windows is an overall better UX than MacOS in its current state. 😉😈

Sorry. . . 😇

I thought I would give this a go and don't get the same behaviour. For me it just speaks out the currently focused item and not the tab title. So I still need to switch focus back and forth or use VO+F2 to know what I'm looking at. This is latest Sonoma so behaviour may be different.

Someone else on here recommended using new windows instead of tabs but I am just too used to tabs that they just happen on their own.

I think tabs are some sort of system service thing, like the application menus are. I remember there being some setting I changed in the Mac settings app somewhere that also affected applications like PyCharm. I forget what it was exactly, but in PyCharm it made all the projects available as tabs. That sort of thing is generally a really good idea because it should then be easy to make them accessible everywhere. Or so you would think...

Has anyone else noticed that the History menu bar item has gone really weird in Chrome recently?

So if I VO+M, jump to History and go down through the menu items it seems to be completely missing the list of recently closed tabs and viewed pages like it used to. I just get Home, Back and Forwards option.

However, if I go up through the menu then I get "Show full history Y" and if I keep going, there are a load of pages there I can select. But I can't seem to jump to "the Recently Closed Tabs label" by typing it. It seems I can only reveal these options if I go up not down.

What the hell is this? Are Google doing some weird UI trick that doesn't work properly in VoiceOver? Or, dare I say it, am I just being a total idiot again and not understanding something that everyone else is finding pretty obvious?

Two seconds after I posted this I thought of two things.

Firstly, I checked in Edge and it is the same there. No big surprise as it's virtually the same thing.

Secondly, if you use VO+down to go through the menu instead of just using the down arrow then it does find the missing menu items. I still can't jump to, say, Recently Closed Tabs by typing "R".

Could be a Sonoma thing. I did notice in the most recent update if I use left and right arrows to move between the top menu items without expanding the menus, then it says "Menu Bar" before every one, which is annoying. This doesn't happen if I use VO+left/right instead. I've not noticed this anywhere else though.

So guess I just need to retrain myself again.

Are you on Sonoma 14.5?

I was going to write a sarcastic comment like "you don't get this kind of crazy behaviour in Safari!" but I just couldn't bring myself to say something nice about Safari, even in jest.