I use Safari as my daily driver and I'm still routinely shocked at just how terrible certain aspects of the experience is compared to Chrome. For example, the UI seems to completely block for most of the website loading process, rather than streaming as Chrome does. Also, rather than restore the previous state when I swipe to go back, it has to reload the page from scratch. Little things like this continue to annoy me day by day, the primary reason I don't switch to Chrome is because it just doesn't integrate with macOS at all.
Also, rather than restore the previous state when I swipe to go back, it has to reload the page from scratch
I've encountered cases when both behaviours would've been desired (either use the cached version, or the latest version), so I think that's neither a point in favour nor against.
Well, Safari caches resources, it just doesn't seem to cache the actual runtime state of the page like Chrome does (look for bfcache). The bfcache article claims Safari and Firefox do it too, but I have both in front of me and no they don't (or it's not good enough).
I think real caching is superior because you can manually reload if you actually needed that, but you can't go in the other direction.
I've never used safari but to be fair to Firefox: I haven't experienced either on desktop. When I go back, the page loads instantly. I haven't checked the network tab but I'm assuming it's not doing a new request.
Something Safari does is show a stale version of the webpage while the updated version is loading. I notice because none of my pointer movements take effect until the page finishes loading again. I'm not sure if Firefox does this too.
