Safari is not functioning well on many websites

I don't have a definitive answer for you, but the list of sites I use that don't work properly is growing. For some sites it's due to the privacy settings - I visited a site last week which had a warning that the search function wouldn't work in Safari with privacy protections turned on. You can reload sites with reduced privacy restrictions by pressing and holding the reload arrow at the RHS of the address bar and selecting the option to reload with reduced privacy restrictions. This fixes some sites (e.g. Google Maps slow tile loading and erratic map panning).

The other problem is that many organizations don't test with Safari. One of my banks' and my local sports centre's websites don't work on Safari and they both told me they don't test on Safari and that I should use another browser.

I've just about given up with Safari and only use it for stuff I'm likely to need on my iDevices when I'm on the road for synching logins, favourites, history, etc. I use Firefox for most of my daily browsing and don't have any of the problems I see with Safari. Other browsers are, of course, available but I recommend you don't install Chrome because it's the equivalent of Japanese knotweed in terms of invasiveness and difficulty of removing.

Also, some Google centric websites are optimized for use with only their Chrome or Chromium based browser. They have their own reasons for doing that and that is not always for the benefit of the user.

Safari is based on the WebKit standard where any website developer will comply with those standards to reach the most users, including those on iPhone/iPad where the vast majority are using Safari.

If you do have Extensions installed on Safari, you may find that performance will improve without them in addition to interoperability with that site. If you have a specific website that is not working correctly, feel free to provide that link, and those here can test on their devices.

We still don't know any of the websites you are referring to, if we did we could test on our device to at least confirm the same results.

Safari 18 hasn't seen an update in nearly 2 years, since then there has been Safari 26 and Safari 27. I have a Mac still using Safari 18 and also one using Safari 27, so testing would be quite easy, as I am sure others can do as well.

Read If Safari doesn't work as expected on Mac - Apple Support.

Don't omit any steps.

What I have noticed is that playing a Amazon Prime Video or DiscoveryPlus video is that it will play fine for about a 1/4 of video time then just stop. If I try and restart it does nothing, and reloading the page in Safari 27 just brings up a error in Prime saying the video is not available. I tried disabling cross-site tracking but that did not help. Discovery Plus has similar issue where it spools as if it is having network issues. Sometimes it restarts sometimes I have to refresh the page to begin playing again. I have also noticed on Discovery + it has a hard time adjusting quality based on network speed. This is happening on a M4 MacBook Air and a M4 Mac mini both had no problems with Safari 26 on Tahoe. May have to switch to a different browser I guess.

ANolte wrote:

It seems that I find myself using a browser other than Safari as it seems to be not functioning well on may of the sites I access. Why?

Which sites? Can you give some examples? I use Safari exclusively for my personal browsing. It's been a very long time since I've had any issues that required me to open another browser.

I'm beginning to think updating to 27.0 was a mistake.

I don't know what is going on with this text input box (on another website) but I've never seen anything like it. Blanking out parts of or the entire letter makes editing a bit hard. Did not do this with Safari 18.