I'm done with Safari on MacOS

Somehow related, ever since I upgraded to sequoia, both unstable and stable on different partitions, not only I get chrome does not respond at random moments, but the app actually crashes when I go in force quit. It happens mainly in Microsoft teams during class time when I actually use it every second, and today it also happens with chatgpt when it was generating an answer. There are two patterns, either I just get chrome does not respond due to this horrible voiceover issue that makes me feel abused by a company with infinite resources to fix that problem that's been persisting for 5 years or more, or both, first VO bug, then chrome completely crashes so I lose the chat I am in each time I restart chrome and restore pages. Today I had the horrible idea of opening webwork in chrome too, as there are less mathjax context menu focus issue when doing copy as latex from the menu, and I had to reopen both and lost about 1min30s plus the 1min live bug report I submitted to apple when I had some tiny seconds of free time in that math class.
Yeah, apple. Wonder why windows has literally never given me these headaches yet?

This sounds more like a Chrome issue than a macOS issue. Unless I am misunderstanding, it sounds like you guys are having issues navigating certain websites while using Chrome.
That makes me think Google simply needs to update Chrome for macOS 15.x.

Just food for thought. 🤷

Just noticed that the weird bug with the History menu seems to have gone away. I suspect this is after upgrading to Sequoia.

There is increasingly little reason to stick with Safari. The password manager is possibly the only thing.

Not only no more Not Responding, but also ad-free YouTube.

There is a good reason why people continue to post/nag. It is a company's responsibility to ensure that their products are working properly. Simply switching without making a fuss won't solve the problem, and so, the problem remains that of someone else. You can't just keep running to greener postures whenever a problem arises. When problems eventually starts to follow, you will find yourself not having places to run to.

SNR and other VO related issues only exist for a very small percentile of users. I guarantee SNR does not exist in the sighted world at all.

SNR exists for Vo users only, from user feedbacks I also understand that the more powerful your cpu the less bothering this is and on >m3 chips it's even less present, let's remember though that after David Goodwin public complaint last October apple actually only then took it seriously enough to put some serious patches in 14.2 and above which they could have done 5-6 years ago (probably because of hn than applevis in my opinion). I have an m2pro and it happened occasionally though much less than an year ago. I can confidently open my gmail inbox in both chrome and safari now, just to give you an idea.
One caveat, a very short thread here said that the user had bought an m2max only to have snr literally every single minute and him unable to brows completely so he returned his device very soon after. Not sure if it's real or not though.
PS: my chrome updates were broken on both version and after reinstalling since one day chrome hasn't crashed at all on teams or elsewhere, so good news for me.

I was using an Intel iMac from 2017 for a long time and hardly ever got SNR even though my Mac was creaking otherwise at times.

I upgraded to an M2 Pro Max Macbook Pro with 32gb and that's when it really got bad. It was becoming virtually unusable at the time Dave Goodwin's post came out. The subsequent update seemed to have resolved it for a short time, then it got really bad again. It seems to come in waves - sometimes it happens all the time and then it can disappear for a long time.

Right now I haven't had a serious case of SNR for a while. I hadn't had one in later Sonoma builds for a bit, and now I'm on Sequoia I haven't had one. But then it's quite possible that tomorrow I will be flooded with them and it'll start again. Who knows.

The problem is when it does happen, it just kills everything until it sorts itself out. You can usually escape with VO+D to go to the dock, but not always.

So it's really a software optimization problem then, in parallel with my terminal and vim bug? Do we even have any blind user who bought a dtk before the official announcement of apple silicon? Then we just have ourselves to blame.

For a trillion dollar company advertising accessibility I find it personally horrible. Yes 101% agree with your description.

Your hypothesis is valid, if you just check the RAM usage of VoiceOver when the SNR happens you will have an idea. I am not an expert in this field, but VoiceOver seems to eroniously announce that the app not responding when it is doing many things at the same time. For example, when I use Speech Central to read a book, and in the toolbar I search for specific book the app is announced by VO as not responding, although my sighted wife tells me it is just fine. I switch off VO and search for my book then switch VO back on and I get the results just fine.

Okay. So I was fed up with SNR each time my chatgpt thread would grow. Like... chrome, okay it has other problems, but god it's more optimized with VO! This is ridiculous from your end, Apple.

This may have already been answered, but has the text selection been worked out with Chrome on macOS?

Nah and that's what I've been complaining since 1.5+ years with VO and text, it's a vo design issue we can only select one element at a time, line or paragraph, or like in discord everything is messed up so 1 element can be as small as a character (fortunately there we can copy the full message at least). It's not chrome specific but how vo selection as decribed in the doc doesn"t often work on that very doc page.

Hi,
Over the years, I've gone back & forth between Safari, Brave & Chrome.
I'm about to go update my mac to the beta, which just came out today, for MacOS & install Chrome.
I'll report my findings, once I do some testing.

Reading all these posts, and posts like this, remind me of one very important thing.
I do not miss my Mac.

I certainly can understand you! Web is amazing on windows to the point that before getting a mac for me pwa and web2+ apps were utopia of accessibility.
In fact we technically can select in chromium browser and sometimes apps where the dev actually care about electron and web experience due to the inherent nature of caret browsing, something that windows users might have heard but never cared about because how SR works there. You press f7 and you can have more or less the same arrow keys behaviour than on safari for example except for the fact that VO won't exactly follow the cursor. On regular webpage like applevis or chatgpt I noticed that rooting the mouse, vo fn shift 5 and vo shift space place the keyboard on the text that follows the cursor and we can select it almost normally with shift arrows. Note though that on teams you can do that only with the last message as otherwise the js takes over so your best bet generally on mac is to copy the full message and paste it into textedit or pages if you have more formatting, or textedit in rtf (same goes especially for discord). The Always Allow Keyboard Commands To Navigate Websites setting of VO is only effective on safari and has no impact whatsoever.
I miss just one thing on mac that VO doesn't have its own native selection mode of iOS where it can bypass javascript anti clipboard on websites. If this can convince me to buy an ipad just for that then good job apple! :)
HTH. I knew this for quite long in fact but thought important to share it as people might not be aware. It's very important to have a minimum of dev culture as blind with SRs and especially when we switch OS as otherwise... Well good luck! That's why I love applevis so much so we can all share our information together.

I got safari does not respond on a new empty tab when I opened it. :) Restarted VO and in 10 seconds it was gone, macOS 15.3 RC.

You're on an M2 right? I thought SNR was pretty much done with the M-Series Macs?

Chrome has totally gone down the toilet since Sequoia.

Last couple of days I've started to get a load of Chrome Not Respondings. Yesterday I was trying to use the Network inspector in dev tools and had to give up because Chrome kept going into a Not Responding spiral then would restart. And today, as well as it doing the phantom duplication of items it has started to get really unresponsive when going through pull requests in BitBucket. I keep forgetting to start in Safari.

This is really disappointing - in Sonoma, Chrome had begun to feel pretty good. Now it's gone back to being worse than Safari.

@Paul - are you still using Chrome and finding it better than Safari?

Yes! I mean oh no but still yes cool I'm not alone. I use microsoft teams regularly on chrome for specific reasons and it crashes regularly for me too. The good thing I think is that if you see the force quit after a few seconds of vo announcing cnr the app itself actually crashes and I've seen reports on reddit about this although it doesn't seem to be that worst for them. My fear is that this is somehow caused by vo interacting with the accessibility tree or something in which case it probably will never get fixed.

To be honest I almost never use the web inspector - I just wanted to quickly check something, and you know how that usually works out on a Mac.

The one on the pull request was more worrying. On Sonoma, Chrome was working pretty happily here, but now as well as CNR I also end up with repeated text and punctuation meaning you can't really review the code as you don't know what's there and what's being imagined. I also see this when reading stack overflow answers - sometimes it will just repeat lines of code or comments.

On the other hand, Safari is working a little better for me.

But I still maintain that the only way to do anything on the Mac is to be prepared to use two different web browsers and flip flop between them as needed.

I just hate that as soon as you start to get comfortable, the rug gets pulled out from between your feet. I must admit I am in a bit of a rage with it all today.

So one issue everyone is having is text selection with web browsers on the mac. I do not know exactly what the issue is but I can select content on the web just fine. I am using Brave Browser and it works fine. No more SNR, or to be exact BNR.

It sounds like Brave browser is the way to go on macOS these days. My question is are you able to do all of the things required to function within a webpage environment, as you were using Safari?
Seriously asking here. 😇

I mean it's chromium at the end of the day so...

What sort of functions?

Well let's start with the usual suspects:
Are you able to navigate by characters, words, lines, etc. while navigating a webpage? This seems to be a big issue with chrome for example.
Does heading navigation work reliably?
What about when you arrow up-and-down through sentences and paragraphs? Are there any characters words or lines that are skipped? I know this has been reported on Safari.
How about VO focus? Does it handle well with Brave browser?
Are you able to manipulate combo boxes, navigate tables, check or uncheck radio buttons and check boxes?
What about when reading long pieces of text? How does VO do with Brave browser?

Things like that.

Brave is running the Chromium engine so has the same problems as Chrome. The only difference is that, I believe, it attempts to block ads and cookie notices etc. In my case I don't believe any of those are responsible for the new Chrome issues.

I feel quite torn about blocking ads. On the one hand, they can be more annoying to work around with a screen reader. But on the other, if we are accessing a free web site, it feels quite underhand to block their only source of income.

Having said that, I am using it for some things and it's ok.

On another topic, one other annoying thing with Chrome that's started recently - I keep getting errors with my profile that appear out of the blue. I get a load of dialogs I must close (or force quit) to get anywhere. Not sure what that is all about.

I do not want to throw information that might be inaccurate. So I am absolutely doing well with the functions you mentioned on Brave. Bear in mind, however, that I use it with arrow key nav off, and I can navigate by characters, words, sentences and paragraphs just fine. Also bear in mind that I created specific activity for using browsing apps, namely Safari, Chrome, and Brave. In the activity, I set keyboard shortcuts to navigate by words and sentences. That’s when I am not using the arrow keys nav.
HTH

So, why Mac users bring to themselves much of suffering while they can easily switch to Windows and have the bliss of using the web with NVDA and JAWS just fine. When a multibillion company fails to fix a bug with browser for very marginalized minority that tells you a lot. I am including myself in this too!

Brand loyalty can do only so much for you if they keep breaking their own accessibility standards and rules. The worst thing is that objectively chromevox is the little child nobody cares about but bro on the web it's, to be safe, 5x if not 10x better than VO. It sucks a bit in terminal but even then vim is more accessible there than on mac, funnily enough nano last time I tried isn't but people would always install tdsr or another sr anyway plus linux desktop apps so... I honestly think that something is really wrong systemically on the mac side of accessibility. I still use my mac for most tasks but whenever I have to deal with pwa, I'd generally choose windows. And it's bad as pwa are almost everywhere now and apple are clearly behind on that. I get that web is a spagaty disgusting code lots of devs hate, but the reality is that it's everywhere. I still get random crashes on chrome at least 5 times per week, and it's really an app crash which *seems* to start with vo unable to access any info from it.

I am studying Salesforce with my Mac and it works perfectly. At the Blind Institute of Technology we have some demo videos in the introduction course which are done by JAWS and NVDA users. I just pity them because they need to jump between JAWS and NVDA and sometimes even change browsers to get things done. However, my VoiceOver experience is seamless and I don’t need to change browsers either. I just use Safari and it works perfectly.
Now I am learning about reports and dashboards in salesforce and they are good with VoiceOver in Safari. Windows users just have lots of unlabeled buttons there.
I even do demos in Safari using screen sharing and QuickTime.

Really. Objectively personally I've met many sites that are worst on the mac than Windows, but okay why not. But mac has more points of failures in terms of web accessibility, in my opinion.

I'm happy for those who are able to get Mac to actually work to meet their needs. Truly, I am, but there is nothing wrong with having the ability to switch browsers and/or screen readers in order to get a particular job done. After all accommodations are the entire point of accessibility.

I had to switch browsers or screen readers on Windows to access certain sites. It’s not that I couldn’t operate a screen reader. I am certified in both JAWS and NVDA.

On Mac, I may have to switch browsers a little more often, but I never have to switch screen readers.

Both systems have their issues, and it’s all about picking your poison.

I don't think I've noticed it before, but I've noticed Brave is totally obsessed with telling me that every single element I move to is "clickable". The same elements in Chrome or Safari do not speak this. It's annoying to the point of making me switch away.

I wonder why it would do this but other browsers don''t? Maybe it's something to do with the way it removes the cookie consents.

OK that annoying behaviour in Brave where it says clickable after just about every element on a page is now occurring in Chrome after it updated itself.

e.g. go to https://about.google/?fg=1&utm_source=google-GB&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=hp-header and then navigate into the content and read any of it with vo+right. It doesn't seem to do it if the text is actually clickable (eg button or link) or if it has other markup, like a heading. But any random bits of text.

I'm done with Chrome on MacOs.

I've reported this one to google for what good it will do.

If I click a link in an email and Safari isn't open, then it does open but the link does not. I have a feeling that it is probably open in some random tab or window somewhere, but I always need to open it again. It's done that as long as I can remember (admittedly that's not saying much).

If you are going to try another browser, there isn't a huge amount of choice really.

Edge, Brave, Opera, Vivaldi or whatever are all going to have the same problems as Chrome.

DuckDuckGo uses WebKit so is pretty much the same as Safari.

So beyond the big two, the only real other choice is Firefox. I remain unconvinced that it is a real challenger. But it may be worth a go. You still have to be able to tolerate all the clickables though.

I think on Sequoia, Safari is the best bet except in a few situations where I must revert to Chrome. I've said it before, but it is so incredibly frustrating how much worse Chrome has suddenly become in Sequoia. We were so close!

I think Apple just has a certain arrogance that they can break whatever they want and everyone else will just figure things out in their wake. I blame Apple for most of the problems because they seemed to coincide with Sequoia and not a Chrome update. And also clickable is happening in Firefox too.

There is a very strong contrast there between Apple and Microsoft, who go to almost absurd levels to maintain backwards compatibility.

There's definitely a middle-ground where legacy code isn't holding you back, but you are not gung-ho and changing everything all the time.

When I had sight, I was always really excited when the new version of MacOs came out. Sure it would end up being basically the same thing as before, but you could get caught up in the hype all the same. Now I just dread every new release.

Even those that end up sounding really positive on here end up causing more problems than they fix.

Highly recommend Firefox, it works perfect.

It's the worst time to be on firefox if you haven't followed news about privacy and/or open source for the last 2 weeks.
Reports in some threads suggest that the clickable issues might be related to chromium directly in versions older than sequoia like sonoma... Don't remember where these are though.

But the random clickable announcement seems to be gone for me on chrome.