dev tools rarely work, just having the console open slows down the entire process by several magnitudes of order, the UI for safari devtools is horrible - I can never find what I am looking for when I need it, there is no public bug tracker for safari proper, web apis for database access are magnitudes slower than both firefox and chrome
That doesn't make it a toy. It makes it a bad choice if you need a browser to be cross-platform, but not everyone has that as a prerequisite.
Safari tends to get sand kicked in its face a lot when people talk about browsers, but it's actually the one I keep finding myself coming back to. I got frustrated recently by Safari's JS performance on certain web sites (ones with badly written JS web chat clients, I think, but never mind) and switched to Firefox 36 for a few weeks. On both machines I used it on it would just... get slower over time, and not a lot of time to boot: about 24-48 hours. And I rarely have more than a dozen tabs open at once, and that's on the high end.
If I was going to knock Safari for anything -- other than the JS issues -- it's that it's got much weaker extension support than Chrome or Firefox. But the only extensions I really use are Instapaper and 1Password. (I'm one of the weirdos who doesn't use Adblock Plus; instead, I've just uninstalled Flash, and if I want to use a web site that absolutely requires it I'll hop into Chrome for that.) I like the way it handles tabs, most versions are pretty stable, and the linked list sidebar -- where it pulls out links from your Twitter feed -- can be surprisingly useful.
Very much agreed. A few months ago, I, very much like the person who wrote the article, gave up on Chrome because of huge memory issues (and more importantly, eating up my Air's battery). I converted to Firefox, but on OSX, it is absolutely abysmal.
Finally tried Safari and have not looked back. It is a breeze to use, and I in particular love the shortcut to read articles later. Memory footprint is much lighter, and even with 10+ tabs, I've noticed it doesn't eat a lot of battery.
Also agreed with your point about the extensions. I have the usual suspects like Adblock and Ghostery installed, along with LastPass, but Safari's extensions leave a lot to be desired.
I absolutely agree that on MacOS, it's a solid option. The OS X version is a very good browser, and not to be dismissed.
The Windows version however was always an also ran, a weird proof-of-concept release more than anything. It was never seriously marketed, it made ludicrous design decisions, wouldn't play ball with the OS, and has since been more or less completely abandoned. You have to go digging just to find it, and it hasn't been updated since Snow Leopard.
