I find Safari's devtools to be quite annoying, but to each their own. Firefox' dev tools still hold the crown for me.

The lack of cross-platform support is also annoying to the point where I generally don't bother testing on Safari unless I'm absolutely forced to. Until Apple releases a Safari build for Windows and/or Linux, Safari users will just have to rely on Safari's compatibility with cross-platform browsers.

The open source version of WebKit works fine as a user, but behaves differently from any official Safari releases, so as a web developer it's not really usable as a testing tool.

I'll join I saying I also daily Safari for generale usage (with only two extensions installed 1Blocker and Are.na) and I have basically zero issues.

I also do dev work in Firefox + Safari. I use Firefox mainly because I prefer their dev tools to do frontend work. Chrome I almost never use. This insistence that Safari is the new IE is honestly baffling. Yes Safari is not perfect and yes Apple is Apple. Still, Safari is far from being a train wreck.

The reason to use Chrome is better extension support, better/more useful functionalities (translation, favicon bookmarks, Google Lens), better autofill/autologin, and better performance for web apps generally. Another very useful property is being able to sync your Chrome profile on any computer, which comes in very handy when you need to do stuff on computers you do not own. Doing the same with Safari is possible but a hassle.

I have used Safari since it replace Internet Explorer back in the days, then switched to Chrome a few years ago after a beta broke password syncing and AdBlocker Extensions for Safari were paid/not as good.

Like much of Apple's software, it has strengths and looks good but is really lacking in many ways. It also locks you into the walled garden pretty tight, which can be annoying at times.

Apple should go back to releasing a cross-platform version if they want to be taken seriously, in my opinion. In general, their incentive to build software solely for their platform is a double-edged sword because they can't manage to create hardware that can cover every need (especially for 3D/engineering), and it becomes very annoying to rely on it the moment you need to use another OS (either Windows or Linux).

Another example is Apple Notes being decent, but using it in the web browser is basically a joke (might as well not exist).

This is like being in the 2000s and saying "Why would I use anything but IE5, everything works with it"

The market share is what makes those circumstances exceptionally rare. Meanwhile we're having to use safari specific fixes and refrain from using he newest standards just because of safari

I don’t think the common question is “Why not use Chrome instead of Safari?” but “Why use Safari?”

Safari's dev tools are infuriatingly cumbersome in comparison to Chrome. They go out of their way to make even the simplest actions hidden in multiple selects and popup menus. I even made a screencast of it: https://x.com/dmitriid/status/1711701552082079764

As a browser? I agree with you.

Same. Chrome dev tools, especially around JS are just better.

It's mostly that there's no way for third-party tooling to initiate a debugging session, I believe.

It's criminally bad. You can't copy logged variables. You can't inspect worker threads (!?). WASM support is practically non-existant. You can't even do a heap snapshot on demand, something that should be a basic feature.

The timelines view is practically obfuscated with pretty graphs that show some aggregated data and some automatically generated snapshot points where the dev tools decide that are meaningful.

Inspecting the rendering pipeline is impossible. You can't see memory usage, compositing reasons, long frames (you kinda can but it's tricky)...

Not even going into remote debugging for iOS which crashes either the dev tools or Safari on iOS in any non-trivial scenario — the exact ones you need a debugger for.