Safari does respect you, it's a pretty well-behaved browser. Pre-chromium Edge was similar in many ways (and had zero bloat), I'm still sad it got killed. Much like UWP OneNote, it had great design, proper scroll integration with touch input and used native UI components. Not anymore.
It does not respect my desire to change the search engine to something other than the very few on this list. I have to use an extension which redirect all calls to this engine to my engine of choice.
But man, looking at the competition… I tried using Edge on windows for a while, and every. Single. Time I install any windows update whatsoever, it resets my search engine to Bing. It says something like “your search engine may have been inadvertently changed, so we changed it to Bing for your protection” or something horrible. (I use Kagi, installed from an extension.)
It’s very obvious to me that the only reason Edge exists at all is so MS can steer everyone towards Bing. It solves a Microsoft problem, not a user problem (it’s not even their code base, they just de-googled chrome, added a different theme to it and use it to force Bing on you.)
Safari may require an extension but at least it doesn’t repeatedly change the search engine back the moment you turn around.
Pleas re-read the discussion, you’ll notice that there is a search engine choice, and the problem is that the list is pre-defined and is fixed by an extension - something that Google is continuously working on restricting. It has DuckDuckGo so it’s good enough. Most importantly, it works better than Firefox and is not Chromium-based.
