macOS Big Sur 11: What’s new in Safari 14

With Safari in macOS Big Sur, Apple puts a priority on speed and privacy. In all, the changes make for a browsing experience that feels more personalized than ever. Here’s an overview of the new features in Safari.

Speed and efficiency

Apple claims that the new Safari is up to 50 percent faster than Google Chrome. The company also says that Safari on a MacBook is less power hungry than other browsers, because the software is optimized for the Mac.

Apple claims that compared to the Chrome and Firefox browsers, Safari provides up to an hour more browsing time, and up to three hours of video streaming time, on a single battery charge.

Start page

Safari’s start page has more customization options. We have the details on how to customize the start page.

Favicons and page preview

Favicons will appear in page tabs, and if you hold your cursor over a tab, you can see a preview of the webpage.

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On-the-fly translation

Safari has tools so you can translate websites in English, Spanish, Chinese, French, German, Russian, or Brazilian Portuguese.

To translate a page, click View, and then select Translation. A menu will appear with the available translations on your Mac. Select the translation you want, and Safari will process the webpage you are looking at and then display the translated page.

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To add a language you don’t see on the list, go the Language & Region system preference, and you can add the language you want in the “Preferred languages” section.

Privacy

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A new Privacy toolbar button can show web trackers and also display a full privacy report that shows a list of blockers trackers from the past 30 days. To see the Privacy Report, click on the Privacy toolbar button (the shield button next to the address box.) In the pop-up that appears, click on the encircled “i” icon in the upper right.

You can also add a Privacy Report to your start page.

If you use the web often, you probably use a lot of passwords to log into sites and services. Safari’s password monitoring checks if passwords have been involved in a data breach and generate new passwords if necessary.

Safari extensions

Apple has put more focus on extensions made by third parties. Developers can get tools to convert Google Chrome extensions into ones for Safari. Users will be able to peruse extensions in the App Store, with descriptions to tell you about each one, and a chart to let you know which ones are popular. And you can designate when an extension works on a website.